President Donald Trump is king of the random outburst. One day, he threatens to bomb Oman. The next, he claims the United States is going to annex the Strait of Hormuz. And in others, he teases out an imminent deal to end a six-month war that has gone pretty much nowhere, only to acknowledge, a day later, that talks aren’t taking place at all.
The pattern continued this week. Trump took to Truth Social and declared that annual U.S. military exercises with South Korea will be pared back considerably due to the cost, Seoul’s lackluster support for reopening the Middle East’s prime waterway and that “based on my very good relationship with” Kim Jong Un, the maneuvers sent a “totally inappropriate and hostile signal” to North Korea.
While the news caught many off-guard and appeared to be another one of Trump’s random acts, there may be more to the story. Trump is reportedly eager to meet with the North Korean dictator again and is pushing his advisers to set up a summit, perhaps on the sidelines of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting in China later this year. Asked on Wednesday whether he intended to shake hands with Kim again, the president had a ready reply: “Yeah, I will be.”
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With everything on Trump’s plate, why is he interested in dipping his toes into the turbulent waters of U.S.-North Korea nuclear diplomacy? Several explanations are at play.
Although the White House continues to describe Trump as the most successful U.S. president since the days of Abraham Lincoln, the truth is that on foreign policy, Trump’s resume is quite thin.
The deal-making prowess he highlighted on the campaign trail hasn’t resulted in anything of substance. All of Trump’s landmark diplomatic initiatives are stalled, if not fallen apart.
His 15-point peace plan in Gaza? Lost in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s and Hamas’ refusal to hand over its weapons without an Israeli troop withdrawal first.
His peace efforts in Ukraine have gone nowhere as Vladimir Putin bets he can squeeze more out of Kyiv by continuing the war rather than settling for an agreement.
And the nearly six-month war in Iran is now at a stalemate, with efforts to end it peacefully running into Trump’s maximalism and Tehran’s suspicion that whatever they sign with the Americans won’t be implemented anyway.
Establishing another set of negotiations with North Korea would therefore distract from some of the negative press coverage of the last few months and provide Trump with another opportunity to showcase the diplomatic acumen he so often brags about in public.
It could also have the potential of being historic; the chance to close the book on the North Korean nuclear problem—however unlikely and whatever form that would take—would offer Trump a significant foreign policy victory that none of his predecessors were able to reach.
“He has 57 very powerful nuclear weapons,” said Trump. “Should have never allowed it to happen. If I were president, I wouldn’t have allowed it.”
Of course, this rosy scenario assumes the minimum Trump is willing to accept from the North Koreans matches up with the maximum Pyongyang is willing to offer. That’s no sure thing given the three decade-long track record of failed nuclear talks between the two sides and Kim’s refusal to countenance anything short of Washington’s acceptance of North Korea as a legitimate nuclear weapons state.
But warm memories of happier, simpler times may play a role as well. During his first term, Trump made history by being the first sitting U.S. president to meet with a North Korean head-of-state face-to-face.
Trump was also the first U.S. president to step over the Demilitarized Zone and onto North Korean soil. Trump and Kim met on three separate occasions.
Ultimately, the diplomacy broke down after the Trump administration refused Pyongyang’s proposal to trade U.S. sanctions relief for a partial dismantlement of the North Korean nuclear weapons program.
Even so, Trump often comes back to those days as a sort of crutch, remembering Kim as if he was a childhood friend.
“He liked me and I got along with him,” Trump told Sean Hannity during a January 2025 interview. “He is not a religious zealot. He happens to be a smart guy.”
Nine months later he practically asked reporters to spread the word to the North Koreans about his openness to sitting down at the negotiating table again. His desire to relive those days hasn’t gotten any less intense over time.
There is also the possibility that Trump genuinely believes a second bite of the apple will succeed where the first one failed.
Although Trump’s personal engagement with Kim Jong-un was opposed by a broad swath of Capitol Hill and even some members of his own national security team, the decision itself was logical on the merits.
After all, it’s not like U.S. policy toward North Korea was a smashing success before the Trump-Kim summitry occurred.
George W. Bush’s carrot-and-stick approach withered on the vine; when he left, North Korea was a de-facto nuclear state.
Barack Obama and Joe Biden largely kicked the problem down the road, hoping that with the passage of time and more stringent U.S. sanctions, the Kim regime would see reason and denuclearize.
None of it worked.
That’s not to say a resurrection of summitry will work either. We’re no longer living in 2018 or 2019.
North Korea is arguably stronger today than it was back then—its strategic partnership with Russia has paid economic and military dividends for a regime that’s used to having no friends at all; its nuclear weapons program is getting larger and more diversified; and the U.N. sanctions regime designed to starve Pyongyang of revenue is repeatedly violated courtesy of Russia and China.
Still, you can’t blame the president for trying. He has fond memories, after all.
Daniel R. DePetris is a fellow at Defense Priorities and a syndicated foreign affairs columnist at the Chicago Tribune.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.