As of: February 27, 2024, 4:49 p.m
By: Sven Hauberg
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North Korea is more dangerous than it has been for a long time.
This is also due to a summit meeting between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un that failed spectacularly exactly five years ago.
Of course, he could also have taken the plane; the journey from Pyongyang to Hanoi would have taken around five hours.
But Kim Jong-un prefers the railway.
So on a Saturday five years ago he boarded a special armored train in North Korea's capital, was driven through China for two days and around 4,500 kilometers, changed into a limousine at the border town of Dong Dang and drove the last 170 kilometers to Hanoi by car.
One can assume that Kim's special train offers significantly more comfort than a German ICE.
The long journey was certainly difficult.
Kim must have been even more frustrated when his short trip to Vietnam turned out to be a failure.
North Korea's dictator traveled to the communist country to meet with Donald Trump, then US President.
It was supposed to be the second meeting between the two heads of state after the historic summit in Singapore, at which Trump had announced a good six months earlier that he and Kim would now enter into “a great relationship”.
Kim seemed to think so: On board his special train to Hanoi, he supposedly had a composer who was supposed to write an opera about the dictator's diplomatic victory over the US president.
Trump on Kim's demands: "We couldn't do that"
But nothing came of it.
After dinner together at the posh Hôtel Métropole, it was initially said from Hanoi that Trump and Kim would sign a declaration the following afternoon.
The next day, February 28, 2019, Trump canceled the summit after a short conversation with Kim and before the planned lunch together.
There are different stories about what exactly happened.
The Americans apparently demanded that Kim end his entire nuclear weapons program and hand over all nuclear weapons.
North Korea, in turn, claimed that it had offered to dismantle the important nuclear facility in Yongbyon and in return demanded the withdrawal of some UN sanctions.
According to Trump, however, Kim had demanded that all sanctions be removed - "and we couldn't do that."
North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un and then US President Donald Trump in Hanoi in February 2019.
© Saul Loeb/AFP
Either way: the meeting was an embarrassment for Kim.
North Korea's dictator returned to Pyongyang empty-handed and convinced that the United States was not taking him seriously.
A third meeting with Trump did not change this, during which the US President even briefly crossed the border into North Korea a few months later.
Kim wanted to negotiate with Trump on an equal footing, while the US President was looking for a quick deal.
And that wasn't available with Kim.
North Korea: missile tests instead of summit diplomacy
So Kim began to attract attention in other ways: instead of diplomacy, he began using threatening military gestures.
In 2020, in the first Corona year, he had four rocket tests carried out, the following year twice as many and in 2022 a record number of around 90 tests.
“You would think that Trump's summit diplomacy would have influenced North Korea's behavior,” Victor Cha, Korea expert at the US think tank CSIS, said at a recent online event.
“But it didn’t.”
There are no longer any official contacts between Washington and Pyongyang, and North Korea does not appear to be a priority for Trump's successor Joe Biden.
The result: North Korea is a long way from denuclearization, as Trump had sought.
Several experts even expect that Kim Jong-un could order a nuclear bomb test this year for the first time since 2017.
Fully equipped: In March 2022, Kim Jong-un presents himself in front of a ballistic missile in “Top Gun” style.
© AFP
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Kim has recently increased his rhetoric, especially towards South Korea, and declared the country the main enemy.
Yoon Suk-yeol, a nationalist hardliner, is in power there and is seeking proximity to the USA and Japan in order to contain North Korea.
The failed Hanoi summit also caused a rethink in Seoul.
"Many South Koreans - not just conservatives but also liberals - no longer had any illusions about North Korea after Hanoi," says Ramon Pacheco Pardo from King's College London.
“It was clear to them that the north wasn’t going to change.”
“Kim Jong-un has made the decision to go to war.”
For the two renowned North Korea experts Robert Carlin and Siegfried Hecker, the situation is so serious that they felt compelled to issue a dramatic warning at the beginning of the year: “The situation on the Korean peninsula is more dangerous than it has been since the beginning of June 1950.” Carlin and Hecker wrote in a paper for the Stimson Center think tank.
The Korean War began in June 1950 and ended three years later with an armistice but no peace treaty.
“Kim Jong-un made the strategic decision to go to war,” said Carlin and Hecker.
CSIS expert Cha sees it differently: "North Korea wouldn't sell all of its ammunition to Putin if they were preparing for some kind of war." He is alluding to reports that Kim Jong-un has masses of ammunition and ballistic missiles for delivers the mission in the Ukraine war to the Russian President.
Bruce Klingner, Korea expert at the Heritage Foundation think tank, sees things similarly to Cha.
“I don’t think North Korea made the decision to go to war,” Klingner said at the CSIS event.
Kim Jong-un's threats must be taken seriously, but there are currently no preparations for war.
But if it does come to that, the USA would emerge victorious from a confrontation with North Korea.
“But it would be a pretty devastating victory, with massive losses and massive destruction,” said Klingner.