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North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and US President Donald Trump shake hands at the House of Freedom in Panmunjom on June 30. (Kim Jung-hyo

The unpredictable “celebrity diplomacy” approach of US President Donald Trump has led to Panmunjom summits between the leaders of North Korea and South Korea and to the scene of the North Korean and US leaders crossing the JSA Military Demarcation Line (MDL) within the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) – the fortified inter-Korean border area where North Korean and US soldiers pointed their gun barrels at each other during the Korean War. Both of these things occurred for the first time since the armistice in 1953. The DMZ, one of the key symbols of a Cold War-era confrontation and conflict that has cast a shadow across both the 20th and 21st centuries on the Korean Peninsula, is now drawing worldwide attention as a setting for top-down diplomacy and the search for a new path forward in denuclearization and the Korean Peninsula peace process. Celebrities are capable of exciting major public interest in issues. With his command of Twitter-based politics and diplomacy, Trump is an excellent example of this.

The first piece of groundwork for the Panmunjom meeting was laid with a tweet from Trump on the morning of June 29, in which he said, “[I]f Chairman Kim of North Korea sees this [message], I would meet him at the Border/DMZ just to shake his hand and say Hello.” It came shortly after a closed-door discussion on the afternoon of June 28 between North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and Chinese President Xi Jinping, who visiting Pyongyang. While Trump claimed to have “just thought of” the tweet the morning of June 29, he also said a DMZ meeting was something he had long been considering. He was suggesting that the DMZ encounter was a spur-of-the-moment proposal without any working-level negotiations, but that it was also something Trump the “celebrity” had long envisioned.

And the figure responsible for that vision was South Korean President Moon Jae-in. During the preparations for the first North Korea-US summit last year, the South Korean government persistently recommended Panmunjom as a venue for behind-the-scenes discussions; Trump supported the idea, but it ultimately failed to come about due to vehement objections from US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and other high-level officials. Moon’s characterization of the North Korean and US leaders’ meeting at Panmunjom on the afternoon of June 30 as a “very historic and great moment in the Korean Peninsula peace process” can be read along these lines.

The Panmunjom meeting is an effort to hit the accelerator once again on the “top-down” approach and inject some new momentum into the peace process, which has flagged severely since the collapse of the second North Korea-US summit in Hanoi last February. It is expected to contribute considerably to fixing the blow to Kim’s domestic image as a leader from the Hanoi failure and to assuaging Kim’s apprehensions about Trump’s actual intentions. Indeed, Kim said that the meeting “could have a positive influence on our actions going ahead.”

The framework of the Panmunjom meeting – with Kim and Trump as the two “leads” and Moon billing himself as a “supporting player” – reflects the strategic visions and calculations of each party.

staff photographer)

First, Trump. In his case, two entirely different considerations regarding his re-election campaign seem to be at work. One of them concerns his trademark braggadocio – a self-serving motive for someone who routinely claims that he is the “only one” capable of achieving things. Numerous experts interpret him as apparently sending the message that he can “handle” North Korea and Kim Jong-un in a way nobody else has pulled off. At the same time, Trump also commented that the DMZ – the place chosen as a venue for this “meeting for peace on the peninsula” – was a “real border” that “nobody goes through.” His remarks appeared to be clear reference to his own vision of erecting an effective barrier against immigrants US-Mexico border. Second, Trump appeared to attempt to restore his own relationship of trust with Kim after its potential rift with Hanoi’s “no deal” outcome, applying the top-down approach to break through their impasse.

Kim, for his part, could not have been unaware of what Trump was up to with his proposal for a brief meeting to “shake his hand and say hello.” But his acceptance of the idea without any hesitation was by no means an unexpected response. A proposal to meet at the DMZ was an unspoken wish for the North, which has been emphasizing the “top-down approach” in messages such as a June 26 Foreign Ministry spokesperson’s statement that declared, “Even though the supreme leaders devote their all for establishing new DPRK-US relations, it would be difficult to look forward to the improvement of the bilateral relations and denuclearization of the Korean peninsula as long as the American politics are dominated by the policy-makers who have an inveterate antagonism towards the DPRK.”

Three different reasons appear to account for Moon’s decision to perform a supporting role: the fact that the main focus of the DMZ meeting was on denuclearization and North Korea-US relations rather than inter-Korean ties, Kim and Trump’s desire for “theater” in their political approaches, and Moon’s own approach of shunning credit as long as peace is achieved on the Korean Peninsula. Moon watched from a distance as global press attention focused on the North Korean and US leaders crossing the MDL, and after a brief dialogue with the two of them he returned to the sidelines. He presented himself as a supporting player, insisting that the “focus of the dialogue today is the US and North Korea,” while also saying that “what we truly want is permanent peace on the Korean Peninsula.” Evidence of his active supporting role can be seen in the selection of the South Korean-administered House of Freedom as a venue for the North Korean and US leaders’ domestic and foreign press conference and bilateral meeting.

The key question now is whether the Panmunjom meeting can yield content to match its historic format. The answer can be measured in at least two ways: an agreement in principle on holding a third North Korea-US summit within the year, and the swift resumption of the necessary senior working-level North Korea-US talks to achieve this. Trump’s message that he would “certainly extend the invite” for Kim to visit the White House is not a bad start. This has yielded concrete results, with Trump declaring after his “long talk” with Kim that they had agreed to designated representatives for comprehensive negotiations and announcing that within the next two to three weeks Pompeo would be overseeing the creation of a working-level negotiating team headed by State Department Special Representative for North Korea Stephen Biegun. On the evening of June 29, Biegun did preliminary coordinating with North Korean First Vice Foreign Minister Choe Son-hui for the North Korean and US leaders’ meeting in Panmunjom. It was the first working-level encounter between the two sides since Hanoi.

By Lee Je-hun, senior staff writer

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