The author says another Trump–Kim meeting is still possible, but it would no longer be about trading the North’s arsenal for sanctions relief and security pledges as in Singapore 2018 and Hanoi 2019.

Pyongyang now treats nuclear weapons as permanent deterrence and has more room with Russia and China; Washington still officially wants complete, verifiable denuclearization. Those aims do not meet.

A summit, in this view, would be for status, crisis management, and lowering the chance of war—not a “solve” of the nuclear file—because the U.S. agenda is wider (Europe and other wars) and North Korea is one problem among many.

Even if for now there are no more meetings between Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un, the possibility of a future meeting remains one of the major topics in current diplomatic discourse. Singapore 2018 and Hanoi 2019 opened up new ways of communication between the US President and the North Korean leader that are to be considered within the context of decades of icy relations between the US and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

However, many things have changed in the meantime and thus, what in the past would have been viewed as a great achievement in diplomatic efforts for the two countries may today not meet the same expectations anymore. A future meeting between Trump and Kim would today most likely serve the two leaders to manage their strategic rivalry and to stabilize their relations respectfully rather than trying to achieve the long-denominated and, in view of the current development, unachievable goal of complete and verifiable denuclearization of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

Most significantly, however, the North Korean strategic environment has changed considerably since 2018, and the premise upon which a large portion of the Western diplomatic community believed that the North would agree to swap nuclear arms for sanctions relief, economic aid and security assurances a foundation of the US’ negotiations with the North during the........

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