Trump-Kim summit 2019: will a softer approach get a firm result on Pyongyang’s denuclearisation?

The US president has struck a less confrontational note ahead of the Hanoi summit, but sceptics say he is maintaining the ‘fiction of disarmament’

China and South Korea are hoping for peace on the peninsula, with the latter holding out for a declaration that would finally end the Korean war

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Donald Trump is using far more carrots than sticks to persuade Kim Jong-un to dismantle his nuclear arsenal. Photo: AP

John Power,Lee Jeong-hoandBhavan Jaipragas

Published: 6:34am, 27 Feb 2019Updated: 9:45am, 27 Feb 2019

United States President Donald Trump’s tweetstorm hours before he departed for Hanoi has offered the clearest picture yet of the tack he will take with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un during the two-day nuclear talks that begin in the Vietnamese capital on Wednesday.

Long gone were the “Little Rocket Man” diatribes of 2017, when Trump first started taking aim at Pyongyang’s nuclear programme.

In their place was an approach that offered far more carrots than sticks in persuading the young North Korean leader to dismantle his nuclear arsenal.

“With complete denuclearisation, North Korea will rapidly become an economic powerhouse,” wrote Trump. “Without it, just more of the same. Chairman Kim will make a wise decision!”

That softly-softly approach will be tightly scrutinised during the talks, albeit in varying degrees by different actors, with the likes of China, South Korea, Trump’s domestic opponents and even hosts Vietnam all having distinct opinions on the way forward for the denuclearisation process.

Trump’s most strident critics say he is guilty of grandstanding and is using the Hanoi summit to distract the public from his domestic political woes – just as he did with his historic meeting with Kim last June in Singapore.

This week’s summit coincides with a public testimony before Congress by Trump’s disgraced former personal lawyer Michael Cohen over investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 US election.

Nuclear non-proliferation analysts meanwhile say they are alarmed by signals the meeting could see the Trump administration offer Pyongyang sanctions relief even if Kim does not commit to long-standing international demands for “complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearisation”.