Kim Jong Un Holds Stronger Hand as Trump Seeks North Korea Deal — SkimNews
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- Donald Trump revived a charm offensive in August 2026 by drastically scaling back US-South Korea joint military exercises and praising Kim Jong Un, but Pyongyang responded with missile tests and publicly denied Trump's claim that Kim responded 'very positively' to a request for talks
- Kim Jong Un used this week's US-South Korea-Japan five-day military drill as the backdrop to commission a new naval destroyer and reiterate that North Korea must build a 'powerful and reliable nuclear war deterrent'
- North Korea has a treaty-based alliance with Moscow and is drawing closer to Beijing, per Korea Risk Group's Joon Ha Park, who says that is why a single reduction in US-South Korea drills is not enough to sway Pyongyang
- North Korea's economy expanded 3.7% in 2024 — its fastest rate in eight years, according to South Korea's central bank — and Pyongyang has ramped up military production since its 2023 summit with Putin, trading arms for Russia in Ukraine for cash, food, and military technology
- Kim stood publicly alongside Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin at China's September 2025 Victory Day celebrations, a milestone the article attributes to Beijing pivoting to reclaim primacy after being alarmed by the deepening Russia-North Korea alignment
- North Korea now holds nearly 60 nuclear warheads — roughly double the 20-30 it possessed during Trump's 2018-2019 summits — and in Feb 2026 Kim declared the country's nuclear status 'irreversible,' while demanding US recognition as a nuclear state as a precondition for any talks
- ECFR's Alexander Lipke argues sanctions enforcement has 'widely collapsed' because Russia and China no longer pursue the non-proliferation stance of previous decades, noting the UN Security Council's last package was passed in 2017
Why it matters: The diplomatic math has inverted since Trump's first-term summits: North Korea's warhead count has roughly doubled, its two biggest neighbors are now allies rather than enforcers, and the UN sanctions regime last meaningfully updated in 2017. Any Trump-Kim summit without denuclearization on the agenda would amount to implicit US acceptance of a nuclear North Korea, per Park — meaning Washington gets either no deal or a deal that legitimizes Pyongyang's arsenal.
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