Engagement with South Korea and the United States

North Korea continued to maintain a belligerent posture throughout 2017, but the 2018 Winter Olympic Games in P’yŏngch’ang (Pyeongchang), South Korea, offered a surprising avenue for dialogue. Athletes from both Koreas marched into the opening ceremonies together under a flag that depicted a silhouette of the Korean peninsula on a field of white. Kim’s sister, Kim Yo-Jong, attended the games, thus becoming the first official representative of North Korea’s ruling family to set foot in the South since the end of the Korean War. Kim Yo-Jong met with South Korean Pres. Moon Jae-In on February 10, 2018, and delivered a handwritten note from her brother that invited Moon to visit him in P’yŏngyang “at the earliest date possible.” In March members of Moon’s administration traveled to P’yŏngyang to meet with Kim Jong-Un for a working dinner. That event paved the way for a historic meeting between Kim and Moon at the “truce village” of P’anmunjŏm on April 27, 2018. It marked the first time in more than a decade that the leaders of the two Koreas had engaged in direct talks, and the pair discussed the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula and the conclusion of an armistice that would officially end the Korean War.

If Kim’s dialogue with the South seemed like a radical departure from the norm, the shift in relations with the U.S. was an even more extreme pivot. Less than a year earlier, Kim and Trump had been exchanging insults and threatening each other with nuclear war, but by May 2018 the two had begun preparing for an unprecedented summit in Singapore. After North Korean officials characterized threatening statements from senior members of the Trump administration as “ignorant and stupid,” Trump cancelled the meeting, only to reverse himself eight days later. On June 12, 2018, for the first time in history, the sitting leaders of the United States and North Korea met face-to-face. The meeting was a triumph for Kim. Not only did he engage the leader of his country’s most powerful adversary as an equal, but Trump promised to end joint U.S.–South Korea military exercises—an announcement that took both Seoul and the Pentagon by surprise. Trump further stated that he wished to end the American military presence in South Korea and pledged to invite Kim to visit him at the White House at a later date.

Talks continued in February 2019, with a summit in Hanoi, Vietnam, that yielded little concrete progress. North Korean negotiators had requested the removal of some or all U.S. economic sanctions (the two sides offered differing accounts of the details) as a prerequisite to additional steps in the denuclearization process, and formal discussions collapsed shortly after they began. Nevertheless, the event was a success for Kim: once again he appeared side-by-side with Trump, an image that held enormous propaganda value for North Korea. Kim also fielded what were believed to have been his first-ever questions from foreign journalists, a novel step for the historically secretive P’yŏngyang regime. The breakdown of the Hanoi talks did not signal an end to the detente, however.On June 30, 2019, Trump met Kim in P’anmunjŏm, in the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea. During that encounter Trump briefly stepped across a concrete marker indicating the border between the two countries and became the first sitting U.S. president to set foot in North Korea.