Speculation is growing about a potential meeting between U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un during Trump’s visit to Beijing, now planned for mid-May. With that in mind, it’s worth revisiting the last in-person meeting between the two leaders – and what went wrong with their summit diplomacy during Trump’s first term.

The following is a lightly edited excerpt from Joel Wit’s new book, “Fallout: The Inside Story of America’s Failure to Disarm North Korea” (Yale University Press, 2025). All rights reserved, Yale University Press.

On June 30, 2019, Trump and Kim settled into their soft chairs in Freedom House in the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) that separates the two Koreas. They were slated to spend 15 minutes together, but Trump’s secretary of state, Michael Pompeo, pushed into the room through the crowd of reporters, aided by White House staffer Dan Walsh, who threw a body block. 

Pompeo yelled for someone to get Ri Yong Ho. A State Department aide grabbed the North Korean foreign minister, who was determined to follow the original plan. But Ri relented and joined the three other men. 

With the collapse of the Hanoi summit still on everyone’s mind, the Americans hoped the DMZ meeting would be a chance to reassure Kim that the United States was still committed to diplomacy. They wanted the same from him. 

The smiles, laughter, and poses for cameras ended once the press left. The chairman was unhappy. Not given to histrionics, Kim was respectful, but “he doesn’t do theater very well. What you see is what you get,” one official observed.

The North Korean started with a list of grievances. Hanoi had been a disappointment. He wanted the United States to stop military exercises. That would help meet North Korea’s need for security guarantees and show him Washington was serious about addressing his concerns. 

His biggest complaint, however, was that, despite months of hints in his letters, in his public pronouncements, and in his advisers’ statements, Kim felt that “we were simply taking and not giving,” one American official recalled. He had halted long-range missile launches, shut down his nuclear test site, and started dismantling his satellite launch center. The United States hadn’t done anything.

Trump painted his usual picture of a bright economic future for North Korea and professed he was willing to compromise. But he and Pompeo didn’t know where the chairman was heading. 

Would Kim drop everything, travel to the DMZ for a summit, and then walk out? It didn’t make sense, although Trump had done that in Hanoi. Thirty minutes into the session, there appeared to be a new negative twist to the positive reality show. 

Then, Kim shifted gears. Good news always came after a laundry list of complaints. He still wanted diplomacy to work. The conversation refocused on opportunities and ended when the two leaders agreed to appoint negotiators, empowered to reach a deal, who would meet in a few weeks.

While the drama played out inside the small Freedom House room, Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump, Steve Mnuchin, Mick Mulvaney, top-ranking South Korean and North Korean officials, security guards, and reporters mingled outside. “It was the most surreal thing I had ever seen,” one American official recalled. 

Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner started a short conversation with Choe Son Hui, who was standing off to the side trying to be invisible. As she was the top female diplomat in North Korea, with close ties to the chairman’s influential sister, talking to her made sense. A student of American popular culture, Choe seemed to be enjoying standing next to the glamorous couple. 

More importantly, Choe and Steve Biegun, Trump’s special representative for North Korea, encountered each other again. In an open space with eavesdropping bystanders milling about, they talked more about the weather than denuclearization. 

Nonetheless, Choe hinted diplomacy might pick up again with her in charge. The two chatted about the age-old problem that had plagued the run-up to the DMZ meeting: how to communicate. She asked Biegun why he didn’t use the New York channel. The answer was obvious. Ten times out of ten the North Koreans had been unresponsive. 

Choe disclosed, however, that the channel had been “turned on” last week. She had ordered her aides to stay up all night and to answer any messages from Washington. That was good news. 

She also probed for information about the 2024 U.S. presidential election, then just 18 months away. The North Koreans had to calculate whether there was still time to strike a deal with Trump and whether it would last if he lost.

Trump and Kim emerged after 53 minutes. Joined by South Korea President Moon Jae-in, the two men escorted the chairman back to the border. As they said good-bye to him and returned to Freedom House to meet the press again, Biegun inched toward the exit. No one wanted to be left behind once the president’s motorcade left. 

Someone shouted his name, however. Trump was looking for Biegun. The president wanted the envoy to stand behind him to make the point that Biegun was his negotiator. One can only wonder what National Security Adviser John Bolton in far-off Ulaanbaatar was thinking. Trump told Biegun to move fast, get a deal, and he would sign it.

With Moon standing by his side, Trump bragged relations with North Korea were no longer a “fiery mess” and “nothing but trouble” like they were when he took office. His relationship with Kim had saved the day. 

Trump announced that the two leaders had agreed to start negotiations “over the next two or three weeks.” Biegun would lead the Americans. The president then flew by helicopter to address soldiers at Osan Air Force Base, south of Seoul, and boarded Air Force One for home. 

“It’s good for North Korea, it’s good for America, it’s good for the world,” Pompeo informed reporters, in a statement that sounded like Bill Clinton when he announced the 1994 nuclear deal. Pyongyang’s media said new breakthroughs were possible and hailed the snap summit as an “amazing event.” 

Donald Trump’s “Hail Mary” pass appeared to have paid off. The snap summit was a mesmerizing reality show, for which there had been no preparation. Its only purpose was to get negotiations rolling again. But without Trump punching through the stalemate, the post-Hanoi diplomatic deep freeze could have lasted months longer. 

The State Department followed up through the New York channel to schedule new talks. As Choe promised, the North Koreans responded right away. Then, there was radio silence. Something had gone wrong again. 

Was Kim Jong Un’s DMZ promise to restart talks real or just a ruse? Or did the United States do something to derail negotiations? The answer wasn’t obvious at first. 

Washington’s military exercises with South Korea turned out to be the problem once again. Trump had promised in Singapore to cancel the “war games.” However, Bolton, Pompeo, and Secretary of Defense James Mattis simply scaled them down to make them appear less threatening. One hundred small drills were conducted afterwards. 

The military drill scheduled for August 2019 – just weeks after the DMZ summit – had always been a major exercise. Two years earlier, jets ripped through the skies, tanks rumbled down roads, and Marines stormed beaches. The upcoming drill, however, would feature mainly officers sitting at computers. The “greatest risk was someone would spill a cup of coffee on their key boards,” one official observed. 

Two weeks after the snap summit, the North Koreans issued an official statement. They claimed Trump had promised at the DMZ summit to suspend military exercises, a personal commitment he had also made at the 2018 Singapore meeting. The North Koreans threatened to resume tests of weapons of mass destruction if the August maneuvers went ahead. 

Pyongyang punctuated its threat with action. In mid-July, the North Koreans conducted four rounds of missile launches, mostly short-range weapons, accompanied by solemn warnings for the United States and South Korea not to go ahead with the August drill. Twin launches on July 25 were “personally organized” by Kim. The North Koreans also unveiled a new submarine that could launch nuclear-armed missiles, the first of its kind. 

Predictably, Trump minimized North Korea’s moves, arguing the chairman “will do the right thing because… ​he does not want to disappoint his friend, President Trump!” 

North Korea’s actions, however, still begged the question, Why did it have such a strong reaction to a scaled-down exercise the North Koreans knew wasn’t a threat? The answer was clear. Trump had not only promised to suspend military exercises. Kim Jong Un believed the president had promised at the DMZ summit not to hold the August drill and then went ahead anyway. 

Pyongyang’s public pronouncement was mild compared to an extraordinary secret letter from Kim to Donald Trump on August 5, the day the exercise began. His letter was not beautiful, as Trump later described it, but rather “a long lament of raw emotion and unrelenting woe,” according to one expert. 

Kim recalled the president’s promise at the summit to resume talks, but he pointed out that “the current environment is different from that day.” The United States had gone ahead with “provocative combined military exercises” despite Kim’s understanding they “would either be canceled or postponed” ahead of the negotiations. 

“Who are they [the exercises] intended to defeat and attack?” the chairman asked and then answered his own question. The target was “our own military.” He condemned “these paranoid and hypersensitive actions,” which threatened his country’s security and were to blame for “the headache of ‘missile threats.’” Kim warned that “until these elements are eliminated, no changed outcome can be anticipated.” 

“I am clearly offended, and I do not want to hide this feeling from you,” the chairman complained. “I am really very offended.” Every time they met, Trump had praised his unilateral moratorium on nuclear and missile tests. 

Kim further lamented, “I have done more than I can at this present stage, very responsively and practically, in order to keep the trust we have.” He had nothing to show his people. “Have actions been relaxed or any of my country’s external environments been improved?” Kim asked. “Have military exercises been stopped?” 

In as direct a statement from a leader as anyone could imagine, Kim wrote, “If you do not think of our relationship as a steppingstone that only benefits you, then you would not make me look like an idiot that will only give without getting anything in return.”

“If this were like Hanoi, just a few months ago, when I held on to the dream of hastening the start of a better life, it would be different.” Now, “we are not in a hurry.” 

Still, Kim couldn’t bring himself to completely slam the door on Trump. He would reach out to discuss talks when the exercise was over. While the chairman had a positive feeling about their relationship, it would take an “even greater effort to protect my faith in you,” a warning that talks would not be easy. 

Was Kim’s anger justified? Trump’s willingness to cancel war games was obvious to everyone, including the North Koreans who had seen him cross his aides in Singapore. Perhaps that was why they had pushed to get him alone in the DMZ, and why Pompeo made sure he was there with the president. 

An unhappy Kim complained at the summit about the military exercise. He also probably knew how Trump would respond: with a steady stream of invectives and what seemed to be a promise to stop them. While a senior Blue House official recalled Trump did indeed promise to cancel the exercise, one White House official believed Pompeo thought he “put up a guardrail.” 

A few days after the summit, the secretary of state confided to Bolton that Trump had reverted to wanting to leave the peninsula entirely, but “we didn’t let anything out of the bag with Kim.” The chairman thought otherwise. 

Even as the drama played out with the North Koreans, the DMZ summit gave Bolton more opportunities to spike the president’s diplomacy. The national security adviser was incensed by a New York Times article published soon afterwards that claimed the administration was about to stage a “major retreat from the goal of rapid denuclearization” and accept a nuclear freeze as a “first step.” He blamed Biegun.

However, as one official pointed out, “Bolton was not simply an outsider with the president. He was an outsider to his own team.” A freeze had been the starting point, and denuclearization the end point, since Biegun’s speech at Stanford in January 2019. 

Pompeo finally put his foot down. The administration’s envoy was “a lot closer to the president than you are,” he told Bolton. The secretary ordered Biegun not to attend any meetings chaired by the national security adviser. 

Bolton then tried a different tack. Trump had instructed Bolton to stop the August exercise since it “agitated the ever-sensitive Kim Jong Un.” 

Drills, however, were also a pawn in another Trump gambit. He was determined to force South Korea and Japan to pay billions of dollars more to support American troops on their soil by threatening to withdraw them altogether. 

Bolton traveled to Asia and persuaded the allies to pay more. Then, he convinced Trump to let the August exercise go forward. The president even saw an upside to North Korea’s renewed missile tests. “John got it to $1 billion this year. You’ll get it to $5 billion because of the missiles,” he told other aides in private. 

Publicly, however, Trump agreed with the North Koreans. The exercises were “a total waste of money,” but he told his aides, “I don’t want to interfere… ​You can do them, if you think it’s necessary.” Kim must have been puzzled about why the president of the United States couldn’t order his aides to carry out his wishes.

Trump may have thought he was being clever, even though Kim’s August 5 letter was a sure sign he wasn’t. He made a promise he didn’t keep. Bolton didn’t know it at the time, and neither did the president, but he had finally succeeded in spiking Trump’s diplomacy. 

John Bolton was fired in a tweet that fall, the same unceremonious end as Trump’s first secretary of state, Rex Tillerson. Pompeo and Mnuchin had “shit-eating grins on their faces” at a press conference afterwards, according to a reporter. Trump ordered Pompeo to make sure he told the press that “Bolton is a scumbag loser.”

The 27 letters Trump and Kim exchanged in 2018 and 2019 were more than a flirtation. One expert observed they contained “tactical feints, unctuous flattery and psychological ploys” that resembled other correspondence between leaders throughout history. Still, they were indispensable in advancing diplomacy. 

The chairman remained open to talks, perhaps for old times’ sake. But August 5 was the last time Donald Trump would hear from Kim Jong Un. 

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