Xi Visit Revives Trump-Kim Summit Prospects
SkimNews Take
Xi’s visit to Pyongyang, framed as a gesture of solidarity, implicitly signals China's enduring influence over North Korea's diplomatic engagement, even with leaders outside of Beijing's direct orbit.
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- Xi Jinping will visit North Korea on June 8 — his first international trip this year — weeks after hosting Trump and Putin in Beijing, a sequence that has put a third Trump-Kim summit back in play.
- South Korean President Lee Jae-myung's advisors are split between a 'jaju' (autonomy) camp that prioritizes inter-Korean relations and a 'dongmaeng' (alliance) camp that prioritizes the US relationship and is skeptical Kim Jong Un genuinely seeks dialogue.
- The dongmaeng camp argues Kim is in a stronger position due to Russian support for his nuclear program, and that North Korea's economic distress — despite extremely high inflation, runaway wages, and high rice prices — isn't acute enough to drive the regime toward sanctions relief.
- The jaju camp contends Kim would accept a summit if Trump does not make denuclearization a precondition, noting Russia has already recognized North Korea as a nuclear state and China may follow Trump's lead.
- A deal resembling the failed 2019 Hanoi talks is now conceivable, under which Kim would freeze his stockpile of more than 50 warheads, pledge not to proliferate to countries including Iran, and suspend ICBM development targeting North America.
- South Korea is the 'odd man out': Kim has declared the South a hostile state, abandoned unification, and severed inter-Korean channels, and Minister of Unification Chung Dong-young's call for four-party talks has gone nowhere.
- The viability of a summit for Trump depends partly on the war in Iran's conclusion, per the analysis — an ambiguous solution to Iran's nuclear program could let him claim he ended the 70-year state of war on the Korean Peninsula.
Why it matters: If a Trump-Kim summit materializes, it would sideline South Korea — the country with the most direct stake in the peninsula — and effectively ratify Kim's nuclear status, with Russia already having recognized North Korea as a nuclear-weapon state. The economic crisis inside North Korea, where Kim Byung-yeon of Seoul National University says conditions include extremely high inflation and runaway wages, gives Kim his own reasons to want a deal that opens the door to Chinese and Western investment.
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