In his first speech before the United Nations, President Donald Trump stood before the hall’s iconic green marble wall and deployed for the first time in person his infamous moniker aimed at North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un.
That the cutting insult has achieved inside joke status between the two leaders exemplifies the extent of the diplomatic détente between the US and North Korea in the year since Trump delivered those jarring threats at the UN and its lightning-fast pace. In that span of time, Trump and Kim turned from exchanging a menacing volley of insults and threats of annihilation to meeting face-to-face in Singapore, showering each other with praise and making broad commitments to ending a decades-old war footing.
North Korea has tested neither a nuclear weapon nor a ballistic missile in 10 months; North Korea has resumed an effort to return the remains of American soldiers from the Korean War to the US; and Kim and South Korean President Moon Jae-in have hit one diplomatic milestone after another in recent months.
“There is no denying that there’s been huge changes in one year,” said Joseph Yun, who served as the US’s special representative for North Korea policy until February. “If someone had told you 12 months ago, ‘Would you take stopping nuclear tests, stopping missile tests, getting some remains of American soldiers back and all that stuff?’ Of course you would take it, in a heartbeat.”
“It was unimaginable then. The most likely outcome September last year was a kind of ‘bloody nose,'” he said, referring to considerations of a preventive US strike.
‘No concrete indications’
The reduced tensions, however, are where the rosy portrait of the Trump administration’s diplomatic endeavor ends.
“As of yet,” Yun said, “there are no concrete indications that Kim Jong Un has genuinely shown signs of being committed to denuclearization.”
Despite multiple promises to do so since Trump and Kim’s June summit, North Korea has yet to take any concrete, verifiable and irreversible steps toward denuclearization — conditions laid out by the US State Department. Instead, North Korea has resisted US requests for a list declaring the extent of its nuclear weapons facilities and weapons and is continuing to enrich nuclear material and build nuclear weapons — it now simply does so quietly, with little public fanfare.
The dichotomy between the rosy public optics and the reality that North Korea is continuing to advance its nuclear weapons program, unabated, has widened the gap between how Trump and his top aides on the matter are approaching the next steps in the United States’ diplomatic endeavor and its odds of success.
Despite the lack of concrete progress, Trump has pressed aides in recent weeks to organize a second summit with Kim, a US official and source familiar with the deliberations said, sticking to the belief that his personal touch can lead the two countries to a breakthrough. He added immediacy to his desire for a second summit on Monday as he arrived at UN headquarters, declaring that he and Kim will hold a second summit “quite soon.”
“It looks like we’ll have a second summit quite soon.
