The Day Denuclearization Died
The first Trump-Kim summit was about North Korea committing to giving up nuclear weapons. The second was about defining what that meant. This time, nuclear weapons didn't even come up.
by Uri Friedman
Jul 02, 2019
4 minutes
His advisers will deny it, but when Donald Trump stepped into North Korea on Sunday, he effectively stepped away from his administration’s stated goal of fully eliminating Kim Jong Un’s nuclear weapons.
There were many remarkable aspects of the U.S. president’s surprise meeting with the North Korean leader at the border, but perhaps the most notable was the absence of the issue that brought Trump and Kim together in the first place one year ago: Pyongyang’s development of a nuclear-weapons arsenal that directly threatens the United States and its allies, and which Trump’s advisers to remove by 2021.
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