Why North Korea wants another chance with Donald Trump

Thomas Schäfer was Germany's ambassador to North Korea in 2007-2010 and 2013-2018.

When I started to work as Germany's ambassador in Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, in the summer of 2007, I was full of hope. Some years before, North Korea had undertaken some economic reform. Negotiations on the North's denuclearization with the United States, China, Russia, Japan and South Korea, known as the six-party talks, were still going on. At my first diplomatic posting in Beijing in the mid-1980s, I had witnessed Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping's economic reform and opening up policy, and was hoping for a similar development in North Korea.

Hope for a more peaceful and open North Korea had also been the reason why Germany had, at the request of South Korea, opened an embassy in Pyongyang in 2001.

Like China in the '80s, the attempts of reform did not go unchallenged among Pyongyang's elites: In September 2007, while North Korea publicly thanked foreign countries for their help in supporting flood victims the month before, its official newspapers also warned against "outside help" and "cooperation." The "imperialists," as the propaganda went, were peddling support