Has the US-North Korea summit been a victory for peace?

Kim Jong Un promises ‘world will see a
major change’ following unprecedented talks with Donald Trump

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Trump described today’s talks in Singapore as “honest, direct
and productive”, and told a gathering of international reporters
that he would end America’s “war games” with Pyongyang. Meanwhile,
Kim promised that “the world will see a major change”.

The meeting was a “victory for peace”, writes Freddy Gray in the
US edition of the Spectator.

“Trump has just given the North Korean people more hope than any
other previous American president,” he continues, drawing
comparisons with Ronald Reagan’s meeting with the Soviet Union’s
Mikhail Gorbachev in 1986, which led to the Intermediate-Range
Nuclear Forces Treaty.

“Trump has changed the realpolitik of the Korean Peninsula”, and
that’s “no small feat”, Gray adds.

But others have been cautious about lauding Trump’s supposed
success.

“It is unclear if further negotiations will lead to the end goal
of denuclearisation,” Anthony Ruggiero, senior fellow of Washington
DC-based think tank Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told
Reuters. “This looks like a restatement of
where we left negotiations more than ten years ago and not a major
step forward.”

USA Today’s Susan Page argues that the leaders’
handshake was more historic than their words. The four-point
agreement “fell short of previous international accords reached
with Pyongyang and left big questions unanswered”, she says.

Trump indicated that tough sanctions on North Korea would be
removed once the denuclearisation process was well under way, and
said the US would stop staging joint military exercises with South
Korea. But as Page points out, there are no deadlines, no
timetables and no commitment to “complete, verifiable and
irreversible” nuclear disarmament.

The language in today’s agreement was similarly vague to that in
Kim’s April agreement with South Korean President Moon Jae-in,
she says, adding: “And it left unmentioned North Korea’s notorious
human-rights abuses.” 

According to The Washington Post, the agreement
essentially “fell short of the kind of deal the US president
himself has long said is needed”, leaving Trump “open to
criticism that he has given Kim what he has long wanted –
recognition, respect and legitimacy on the world stage as an equal
– without getting anything substantive on nukes in return”.