The risk of a war between North Korea and the US has been mounting steadily for the past year. So the sudden announcement that the leaders of the two countries are to meet for talks is very welcome. Of course, there are big risks attached to a summit meeting between Kim Jong Un and Donald Trump. Both leaders are volatile and the nuclear crisis is inherently intractable. There is plenty that can go wrong. But the alternatives to this meeting were hardly attractive.
North Korea’s nuclear programme has been developing rapidly. The Kim Jong Un regime is getting ever closer to its goal of developing a nuclear-tipped missile that could strike the US. President Trump has vowed this will never happen and threatened “fire and fury” in response to any nuclear provocations. The risks of armed — possibly even nuclear — conflict on the Korean peninsula have been rising inexorably.
Many diplomats have pointed out that, traditionally, a leaders’ summit comes at the end of a negotiation process, rather than the beginning. To allow the two heads of state to meet, without painstaking preparation and a draft text for them to agree, undoubtedly raises the stakes. But the North Korean nuclear programme has been progressing so rapidly that time was running out for traditional diplomacy. It is also likely that South Korea has done at least some of the preparatory work for a possible agreement on the de-nuclearisation of the Korean peninsula.