Latest update April 25th, 2024 12:59 AM
Jun 20, 2018 Editorial
The summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korea’s Kim Jong-Un on Sentosa Island in Singapore on June 12, was historic in that it produced a feeling of goodwill. Singapore’s navy and fighter jets and apache helicopters patrolled the area as President Trump and President Kim Jong-Un eyeballed one another looking for signs of trust or deceit.
The world watched anxiously, hoping that somehow the two unpredictable leaders would find a way to defuse one of the planet’s most dangerous flashpoints. With the cameras of the world trained on them, the stakes were high for both men.
Trump and Kim looked very serious, but displayed an atmosphere of bonhomie and smiled as they shook hands. It was an indelible profile of a tall, blonde demigod and a short, dark tyrant.
The leaders quickly recognized the importance to end the threat of nuclear war and promised to take reciprocal actions to achieve peace, stability and denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.
The Singapore Summit represented the start of a diplomatic process that has taken the world away from the brink of war. The leaders agreed to avoid antagonizing each other and to take legal and institutional steps to lower the military threat posed by both nations and to guarantee peace in the region.
As they sat together, Trump lavished praise on Kim, a stark contrast to his excoriation of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau after the G-7 summit in Quebec. He thanked Kim for taking the first bold step toward a bright new future for his country, denuclearization of the region and, ultimately, peace in the world.
It was unlike when Trump taunted Kim as “Little Rocket Man” and Kim responded by calling him “a mentally deranged U.S. dotard” who seemed to belong to another world. It was almost unthinkable when the two leaders traded insults at each other and issued threats that raised the fears of nuclear war, thus making peace on the Korean Peninsula almost impossible.
Since the end of the Korean War in 1953, U.S-North Korea relations were strained. The summit has changed that as the two leaders tried to build a permanent and durable peace on the Korean Peninsula. The Summit produced a wave of concessions from both leaders, including the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, the halting of U.S. joint military exercises with South Korea and the lifting of U.S. sanctions on North Korea, but only if North Korea abandons its nuclear weapons it considered vital to the survival of the Kim dynasty.
However, only a few details of what was discussed at the summit were made public. Technically, the two countries remained at war because the summit did not change the status of the Korean War, which ended in 1953 with an armistice rather than a formal peace treaty. However, President Trump has vowed to end the longstanding conflict as both leaders seemed to have buried the hatchet that had existed since the end of the war.
As the summit ended, the world awoke to an undeniably reduced specter of nuclear war.
Their joint statement promised complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula and new relations between the two countries without any details about what that might entail or how these lofty goals will be achieved.
Some praised the meeting as an epochal event of great significance and a diplomatic masterstroke of goodwill and genuine attempts to build trust.
However, many experts had clear misgivings that the summit was a staged diplomacy that did not yield much by way of substantive results.
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