North Korea Diplomacy in 2018 - A News Roundup

A roundup of some of the best analysis I’ve seen on North Korean diplomacy, the inter-Korea summit and the US-North Korea summit.

June 12, 2018 (Post-Summit Analysis)

• Victor and Sue Mi Terry provide their assessment of the summit. Victor also write an op-ed in the NY Times. Basically, as messy, idiosyncratic, and incomplete as the summit was, we're in the end still in a better place than before.
• My initial reactions were similar to Andrei Lankov's when I read the joint statement: is that it?
• Here's the idiotic propaganda video made by Trump about the choice North Korea can make. Definitely a must show for my students. To bad it fails to mention that the level of openness required to achieve such levels of investment in North Korea would jeopardize Kim's stronghold over his country. 
• Anna Fifield shares her notes, reflecting back a decade earlier when the NY Philharmonic visited North Korea, and the atmosphere of the summit today and whether the prospects for change are for real this time. 
  

May 30, 2018

·        Moon Jae-in's diplomatic acumen and delicately playing middle man in keeping US-NK summit alive.        

·     David Igantius on Trump's break-up letter and what the implications could have been. In retrospect, Trump was giving Kim a taste of his own medicine in walking away from talks. This shouldn't have been a complete surprise given the message coming from Trump days before the letter, and North's shifting tone and no-show to a meeting in Singapore. What's the meaning of this zig-zag approach to the Summit.

May 8, 2018

·        From Van Jackson on what Kim wants from Trump

·        Victor Cha on the success of the inter-Korea summit raising the stakes and expectations for US-North Korea meeting.

·        Anna Fifield on whether South Koreans believe peace talks with North Korea will be different this time

·        Victor Cha and Katrin Katz on The Right Way to Coerce North Korea. They take a pretty hardline stance, which some might criticize as unnecessarily escalating tensions.

·        Chung-in Moon, who advises the Moon Jae-in administration, with a much more optimistic view of the inter-Korea summit and the path to peace.

·        Moving away from diplomacy, Jung Pak, former CIA analyst and now at Brookings, offers a great profile of Kim Jong Un in her piece, The Education of Kim Jong Un