Did Trump succeed where others, for decades, had failed with North Korea? Our correspondent says: no.
Throughout this week, we will be looking back at some of the BBC website’s most-read stories of the year and asking: what happened after the news moved on?
Today, our Seoul correspondent Laura Bicker looks at what, if anything, changed after historic talks between Donald Trump and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un in June.
I’ve lost track of the number of firsts on the Korean peninsula this year.
The most obvious was the first US-North Korean summit in Singapore in June.
Historic was the word most of us used on the day Donald Trump became the first sitting US president to shake the hand of a North Korean leader.
Mr Trump went a bit further. They fell in love, he announced at a political rally.
The summit held so many possibilities. Did Donald Trump succeed where others, for decades, had failed and get North Korea to give up its arms?
The short answer is no.
We were told in a tweet by the president that North Korea no longer posed a nuclear threat. Lately he has said everything with North Korea is « just fine » and that there’s « no hurry » to push for a deal to get rid of the regime’s nuclear weapons.
That’s fine. Problem solved.
Errrm…not quite.
Let’s remind ourselves about the overall objective: North Korea has nuclear weapons which many believe are capable of threatening the United States. Mr Trump made it one of his key foreign policy aims to end the era of « strategic patience » that the Obama administration had favoured with North Korea. His policy was « maximum pressure ». Strict economic sanctions to isolate the regime.
There seems to be a belief in parts of Washington that Kim Jong-un came to Singapore because of those sanctions and Mr Trump’s threat of « fire and fury ».
