John Cassidy on the summit between Kim Jong Un, the North Korean dictator, and the South Korean President, Moon Jae-in, in Panmunjom, and its uncertain prospects for nuclear disarmament and peace.
Images matter. In 1938, the world saw Neville Chamberlain shaking hands with Hitler; in 1985, it saw Ronald Reagan sitting fireside with Mikhail Gorbachev; and, in 2003, it saw a statue of Saddam Hussein being toppled in Baghdad. On Friday, remarkable images emerged from Panmunjom, a village on the border of North and South Korea. They showed Moon Jae-in, the President of South Korea, and Kim Jong Un, the North Korean leader, holding hands and smiling broadly, as Kim stepped over the ankle-high wall that officially divides the two countries. It was the first time in sixty-five years that a North Korean leader had entered the South. Still holding hands with Moon, Kim then invited the South Korean President to step into the North for a moment, which he did.
Kim then accompanied Moon to Peace House, a three-story modernist building that was built in 1989. “As I walked over here, I thought, ‘Why was it so difficult to get here? The separating line wasn’t even that high to cross,’ ” he said, with the cameras running. In a guestbook, Kim wrote, “A new history starts now—at the starting point of history and the era of peace.”
Speaking outside the Peace House after their meeting, both leaders pledged to begin discussing a treaty to formally end the Korean War. Later, the two countries issued a formal joint statement, which said that “there will be no more war on the Korean peninsula,” and outlined a series of good-will measures they would take. The joint statement also pointed to the two sides’ “common goal of realizing, through complete denuclearization, a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula.”
Depending on what happens over the next few months and years, the pictures and footage from Panmunjom may not turn out to have the lasting resonance of previous iconic images. Efforts to forge a peace treaty between the two Koreas have stalled before, notably in the early nineteen-nineties, when Kim Il-sung, who was Kim Jong-un’s grandfather, refused to give up his nuclear ambitions. But for now, at least, Friday’s summit has upended some fixed assumptions about the Korean Peninsula and injected even greater uncertainty into the preparations for an upcoming meeting between Kim Jong Un and Donald Trump.
Watching the North Korean leader in such a relaxed mood, it was too easy to forget that he is a brutal authoritarian, whose regime, in the words of Human Rights Watch, generates “fearful obedience by using public executions, arbitrary detention, and forced labor.
