It was meant as the sequel to rival the original — another far-flung encounter, laced with backslapping and friendly banter alongside the world’s most ruthless dictator.
Trump was surprised by Kim’s demand, according to a person familiar with the negotiations, believing the young despot had come to the Vietnamese capital prepared to deal. Even though his aides warned him the North Koreans were proving intractable in preliminary talks, Trump — a self-professed deal artist — still felt there was a chance Kim would prove reasonable at the table.
He wasn’t, as Trump learned during a lengthy negotiating session that stretched beyond its allotted time. Speaking through two female interpreters, the two men went back-and-forth for more than two hours, failing even to strike an agreement on what the term „denuclearization“ meant.
Even the promise of dismantling one of North Korea’s major nuclear sites fell short when Trump’s aides warned him that would not match the type of sanctions relief Kim was demanding. Trump told reporters, „They wanted the sanctions lifted in their entirety, and we couldn’t do that,“ though later in the day Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho disputed that, stating North Korea asked only for a partial lifting of sanctions in exchange for the verified dismantling of uranium and plutonium production facilities at Yongbyon.
Whatever the case, Trump walked away — nicely, he said — without much clarity on what might come next in his foreign policy gambit.
He did not abandon the warmth he’s shown toward Kim over the past eight months, even going as far to say he took Kim at his word when he denied knowledge of North Korea’s detention of Otto Warmbier, the American student captured there only to later be returned to his family in a vegetative state. He died soon afterward.
Those remarks aside, there was palpable relief among many analysts and even some of Trump’s own aides, who’d entered the talks fearful the President might agree to dramatic steps in his bid to lure Kim into getting rid of his nuclear weapons — or to distract from the unpleasant scene of his former lawyer describing him as a racist fraudster on Capitol Hill.
According to people familiar with the conversations, Trump told some advisers ahead of the talks he did not want to appear overly thirsty to secure a deal, hoping to prove wrong the myriad analysts who predicted he’d give away the store to secure some type of progress.
He was advised by senior members of his national security team — including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and national security adviser John Bolton — that he should walk away from the talks if they proved unfruitful, according to an official familiar with the summit. He was cautioned in the days and even hours leading up to the talks that North Korean negotiators were unbudging in their demands on sanctions during pre-summit talks led by Stephen Biegun, the administration’s special envoy.
Pompeo, who joined Trump onstage for his concluding news conference, later told reporters as he was flying to Manila that despite eleventh-hour negotiations, it was evident the summit could end without an agreement.
