Trump Meets Kim Jong Un in Singapore: A Dictator Gets Legitimized, the U.S. Gets a Press Release

The Photo Op the Kim Family Had Wanted for Three Generations

For 70 years, every president from Truman to Obama had refused to give a sitting North Korean leader the one thing the Kim dynasty wanted more than anything else: a televised meeting with an American president, on equal footing, in front of equal-sized flags. The refusal was deliberate. American policy held that a head-of-state meeting was a reward, to be withheld until North Korea took concrete, verifiable steps toward denuclearization. Granting the meeting before the concessions would, generations of U.S. diplomats argued, hand Pyongyang a legitimacy windfall while collecting nothing in return.

On June 12, 2018, Donald Trump walked across a red carpet at the Capella Hotel on Sentosa Island, shook Kim Jong Un’s hand for 12 seconds in front of cameras arranged so the two leaders appeared as equals — same height of flag, same height of podium — and gave the Kim family the photograph it had been chasing since the Korean War. The image was beamed onto every screen inside North Korea for weeks. State media used it to argue that the United States had, at last, accepted the DPRK as a nuclear-armed peer.

The Agreement That Agreed to Nothing

The four-paragraph joint statement Trump and Kim signed contained the word “denuclearization” exactly once, embedded in the phrase “the DPRK commits to work toward complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.” That sentence was, almost verbatim, what Kim’s father and grandfather had agreed to in 1992 and again in 1994 and again in 2005. “Of the Korean Peninsula” was a long-standing North Korean phrase that, in Pyongyang’s interpretation, required the withdrawal of U.S. troops from South Korea and the end of the U.S. nuclear umbrella over Japan and South Korea. There was no timeline. There was no definition of denuclearization. There was no verification mechanism. There was no inventory of North Korean nuclear facilities or warheads. There was no mention of the medium-range and intercontinental ballistic missiles that Pyongyang had spent the prior decade developing.

The Arms Control Association, the most respected nonpartisan nonproliferation organization in Washington, concluded that the statement contained “less specificity than the 1992 Joint Declaration.” Mike Pompeo, sent to Pyongyang weeks later to translate the document into concrete commitments, was rebuffed and called a “gangster” by his North Korean counterparts. Nine months after Singapore, U.S. intelligence concluded that North Korea had used the intervening time not to dismantle its program but to expand it.

The Concession Trump Made on Live Television

What North Korea did get was concrete. At a press conference immediately after the summit, with no advance notice to Seoul or to the Pentagon, Trump announced that the United States was unilaterally suspending its joint military exercises with South Korea. He called the exercises “very provocative” and “tremendously expensive” — language indistinguishable from how Kim and the Chinese government had been describing them for years. The Pentagon learned about the suspension from the press conference. South Korea’s government issued a statement saying officials needed to “figure out President Trump’s accurate meaning and intention.” The Freedom Guardian exercise scheduled for August was scrapped; two Marine Corps training programs were scrapped after that.

Adopting an adversary’s framing while bypassing your own military command and your closest regional ally is not an oversight. It is the substance of the concession. North Korea and China had been demanding the end of those exercises for fifteen years. They got it in exchange for a four-paragraph statement that bound Kim to nothing.

”And Then We Fell in Love”

Three months later, at a rally in Wheeling, West Virginia, Trump described the Singapore relationship to his crowd: “And then we fell in love. OK? No, really. He wrote me beautiful letters. And they’re great letters. We fell in love.” The “beautiful letters” — 27 of them, exchanged between April 2018 and August 2019 — were later disclosed to journalist Bob Woodward. They are larded with North Korean flattery, addressed to “Your Excellency,” promising a “deep and special friendship.” In one, Kim describes Trump as a man of “extraordinary intelligence.” Trump told the United Nations General Assembly that the letters were “groundbreaking” and “historic.”

Kim Jong Un, in addition to being a flatterer of American presidents, is the dictator of a state that runs a network of slave-labor camps, that murdered Otto Warmbier — the American student returned to his parents in a coma in 2017 — and that ordered the assassination of Kim’s own half-brother with VX nerve agent in a Kuala Lumpur airport in 2017. None of this featured in Trump’s public account of their friendship. At a second summit in Hanoi in February 2019, Kim walked out when Trump refused his price for partial denuclearization. The “love letters” continued for another six months. The program kept expanding.

The Singapore summit was the model for everything Trump’s foreign policy would become: a televised handshake substituted for diplomacy, a unilateral American concession dressed as a strong negotiation, an adversary’s framing repeated as the president’s own, and a dictator transformed — by virtue of the meeting itself — from a pariah into the president’s personal friend. The Korean Peninsula is more dangerous now than it was on June 11, 2018. The photograph Kim got that day, in which he stands as an equal of an American president, is the asset that endures.