The abrupt end to the US-North Korea meeting in Vietnam has made the relationship very uncertain — but progress is still possible.
President Donald Trump and North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un’s Vietnam summit didn’t go quite as planned.
On Thursday, both leaders walked away from the high-stakes, two-day meeting without a denuclearization deal. Trump told reporters that it was because North Korea wanted “sanctions lifted in their entirety” — a concession the US wasn’t willing to give.
But North Korea’s Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho contradicted Trump’s narrative at a later press conference, insisting North Korea only wanted partial sanctions relief .
The scuttled deal has left a lot of people wondering what actually happened — and where do the US and North Korea go from here?
To answer that, I called David Kim, a former State Department official specializing in East Asia and nonproliferation who’s currently at the Stimson Center, a think tank in Washington, DC. Kim and I spoke before North Korea told its side of the narrative at the press conference, but he said his assessment largely stayed the same — and there’s still plenty we don’t know, and a lot will depend on what the US and North Korea do next.
Our conversation, which has been edited and condensed for clarity, is below.
Trump and Kim left Hanoi without a deal. What do you think happened?
On the US side, it could have been that we asked for too much. On the North Korean side, it could have been that the US wasn’t [willing] to give as much sanction relief as the North Koreans expected.
Some have argued no deal is better than a bad deal. Do you think that’s true?
I think walking away from a bad deal is ultimately a good thing for Trump and for Kim Jong Un. It might have made Kim think twice about crossing Trump — and if what Trump says is true, that Kim wanted maximum sanction relief, it’s a good thing that Trump walked away.
Since this second summit failed, it doesn’t seem like a third one is likely anytime soon. What comes next?
Trump is going to face fire back at home from Democrats. He’ll probably get some kind of kudos from Republicans. It will be a mixed message because [Trump] now needs to be accountable to the public, to Congress, because he touted this for weeks. He made this front and center of his foreign policy.
Kim Jong Un was able to get more credibility on the world stage.
