Did North Korean leader Kim Jong-un really seek to denuclearize?
Former South Korean President Moon Jae-in claims in his recent memoir that Kim was sincere in promising to denuclearize in 2018, and Moon believed him. Moon sees the failure to pursue Kim's willingness as a major lost opportunity. Can we believe such a claim?
Of course, we will never know for sure, but evidence suggests Kim was hardly sincere.
Just one year after Kim's supposed denuclearization offer, President Trump emerged from the 2019 Hanoi Summit to say the North Korean dictator was only willing to dismantle the Yongbyon complex for producing nuclear weapons in exchange for near complete removal of the economic sanctions on North Korea.
Trump later said that he had identified five key nuclear weapon production sites and Kim was only offering to dismantle one or two of them, apparently leaving Kim with substantial nuclear weapon production capability. There had been many U.S. criticisms of Trump's 2018 Singapore Agreement because it heavily favored North Korea, and Kim's Hanoi proposal was even more unbalanced.…
The remainder of this commentary is available at nationalinterest.org.
Bruce W. Bennett is a senior international/defense researcher at RAND, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research institution. He works primarily on research topics such as strategy, force planning, and counterproliferation within the RAND International Security and Defense Policy Center.