Opinion | Donald Trump-Kim Jong-un handshake at Korean border was nice, but fundamental challenges haven’t changed

US President Donald Trump’s summit diplomacy with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un is back on. The two leaders met on the last day of June for a quick meeting at the inter-Korean Joint Security Area, along the Military Demarcation Line that has separated North and South Korea since 1953.

The meeting served an important purpose: it allowed both leaders to replace the bitter aftertaste of their last summit encounter in Hanoi, Vietnam, in February with something sweeter. In practical terms, Trump and Kim agreed to re-establish working-level talks between lower-level functionaries from both countries.

The summit has caused a surge of optimism worldwide, with many newspaper headlines expressing optimism that “stalled” nuclear negotiations will be back on. But, as should be clear by now, no amount of Trump-Kim pageantry will save this process until the underlying fundamentals improve.

It was these troublesome and mismatched fundamentals – expressed in each sides’ negotiating position – that caused the collapse of the summit in Hanoi. In short, North Korea is not ready to give up its nuclear weapons and the United States is not ready to offer Pyongyang sanctions relief for anything short of total disarmament.

This basic reality existed leading up to the first US-North Korea summit in June 2018, when Trump and Kim had their historic meeting in Singapore. Now, even as Trump became the first sitting US president to symbolically step foot on North Korean soil, these fundamentals have yet to change.

Working-level talks between the two sides, if they resume as planned, will look familiar. Stephen Biegun, the American special representative on North Korea, lamented that his previous counterparts appeared not to be empowered to discuss nuclear disarmament issues with any degree of specificity. That is unlikely to change.