The 2019 North Korea–United States Hanoi Summit, commonly known as the Hanoi Summit, was a two-day summit meeting between North Korean supreme leader Kim Jong Un and U.S. president Donald Trump, held at the French Colonial Hôtel Métropole in Hanoi, Vietnam, from February 27 to 28, 2019. It was the second meeting between the leaders of North Korea and the United States following their first meeting in Singapore the year prior.
On February 28, 2019, the White House announced that the summit was cut short and that no agreement was reached. Trump later clarified that it was due to North Korea's request to end all sanctions. North Korean foreign minister Ri Yong-ho asserted that the country only sought a partial lifting of the five United Nations sanctions placed on North Korea between 2016 and 2017.
Background
The first North Korea–United States summit between Kim Jong Un and Donald Trump took place in June 2018 in Singapore with the objectives of resolving the long-term Korean conflict involving ICBM nuclear weapons and denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. A series of bilateral summits was held between North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, CCP general secretary Xi Jinping, South Korean president Moon Jae-in, and US president Donald Trump.
Announcement
The White House confirmed the planned summit between Kim Jong Un and Trump on September 11, 2018. U.S. secretary of state Mike Pompeo stated that North Korea and the U.S. were "working diligently" to make sure the conditions were right for the summit.
Trump stated the host country would be Vietnam, and the dates to be February 27 to 28, during his second State of the Union Address on February 5, 2019. He later announced that the summit would take place in Hanoi.
Vietnam's reactions and preparations
Vietnamese Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Phạm Bình Minh visited North Korea at North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Yong-ho's invitation from February 12 to 14. The visit came ahead of the summit, which a spokeswoman from the Vietnamese Foreign Ministry said in a statement posted on Twitter.
Developments since the June 2018 Summit
Pompeo appointed Stephen Biegun as United States Special Representative for North Korea on August 23, 2018.
In September 2018, The New York Times reported that "North Korea is making nuclear fuel and building weapons as actively as ever" but did so quietly, "allowing Mr. Trump to portray a denuclearization effort as on track." Two months later, The Times reported that North Korea appeared to be engaged in a "great deception" by offering to dismantle one missile base while developing sixteen others, and that this expansion program was long known to American intelligence but contradicted Trump's public assertions that his diplomacy was yielding results. Immediately following the June 2018 summit, Trump had declared "There is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea ... sleep well tonight!"
A third inter-Korean summit was held from September 18 to 20, 2018, seeking a breakthrough in stalled talks with the U.S. and a solution to the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula.
In November 2018, North Korea repeated its demand that U.S. economic sanctions be lifted as a condition for proceeding with talks, while the Trump administration continued to insist that North Korea make concessions first. Meetings between Pompeo and North Korean officials were scheduled, canceled due to disagreements, and then rescheduled. The February 2019 summit was confirmed after Kim Yong-chol, North Korea's top negotiator, met with Trump in the Oval Office on January 18, 2019.
In the days leading up to the summit, Trump declared that former president Barack Obama had been on the verge of going to war with North Korea and had told Trump so during the transition, which suggested that Trump had pulled the U.S. back from the brink of war; former Obama aides denied these claims. Trump also suggested that he deserved the Nobel Peace Prize for his diplomacy with North Korea, with the U.S. informally asking Japan to nominate Trump, according to Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun, which reported Shinzo Abe doing so, but reports were neither confirmed nor denied, as it is tradition to keep nominations confidential. Noting that one of North Korea's primary objectives is to replace the Korean Armistice Agreement with a peace treaty to formally end the Korean War, Scott Snyder, the senior fellow for Korea studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, observed, "What I worry about is the president may want the peace most — more than the denuclearization...[o]ne of the big worries that people have is that somehow the president is going to trade the alliance for the prospect of a Nobel Peace Prize."
Top American intelligence officials testified to Congress in January 2019 that it was unlikely North Korea would fully dismantle its nuclear arsenal, and Trump's national security advisor John Bolton continued to believe North Korea could not be trusted and that denuclearization efforts would fail.
Trump asserted that North Korea's pause of weapons testing since the Singapore summit was a sign of progress, but Bruce Klingner of The Heritage Foundation said there had been longer testing pauses during previous administrations.
In the summit, wide gaps persisted between the two countries, including disputes on what the exact definition of denuclearization entailed. In January, Biegun had repeated the official American stance that sanctions on North Korea would not be lifted until the country had fully denuclearized. On January 31, 2019, Biegun indicated that American negotiators may not demand that North Korea provide a full inventory of its nuclear and missile programs as a first step toward denuclearization, a demand that North Korea had been resisting.
Preparations
Preparatory talks
On October 7, 2018, Pompeo traveled to Pyongyang to negotiate the second summit between Trump and Kim Jong Un. He later met with Moon in Seoul to inform him of the upcoming summit.
On January 8, 2019, Kim Jong Un met with Xi to consult with him on the possibility of the Trump–Kim summit in Vietnam. On February 16, 2019, Reuters reported that Kim Jong Un would arrive in Vietnam on February 25 ahead of the summit.
Train journey to Vietnam
Kim Jong Un departed from Pyongyang on February 23, 2019, according to images released by the KCNA news agency. The exact itinerary was kept secret. The train arrived in Đồng Đăng railway station of the Vietnamese border town of Đồng Đăng on February 26, and Kim Jong Un continued on to Hanoi by car.
Some experts analyzed Kim's motive for choosing to take a train instead of flying: Kim had wanted to follow Kim Il Sung, who had also traveled to Vietnam through China by railway in 1958.
Meeting location
Locations considered
Bloomberg and the South Korean newspaper Munhwa Ilbo anticipated the location of the second Trump–Kim Summit to be Hanoi, due to Vietnam maintaining good diplomatic relations with both North Korea and the United States. During the 2019 State of the Union Address, Trump announced Vietnam as the host of the second meeting between the two leaders.
City choice
Several Vietnamese cities were considered to host the summit, which included government direct-administered cities (Hanoi, Da Nang, Ho Chi Minh City) and some other places like Hạ Long, Nha Trang, and Phú Quốc. Hanoi was determined to be the best candidate due to various reasons, such as being presented with the title "City for Peace" by the UNESCO, being the capital of Vietnam, and as such, a favourable place for Vietnamese leaders to meet North Korean and American leaders.
It was reported that when the city in Vietnam was still being discussed, the main contenders were Hanoi (favoured by North Korea because it has its embassy there) and Da Nang (favored by the United States because the 2017 APEC Vietnam summit was held there).
On February 8, 2019, Trump confirmed that Hanoi would host the summit.
Venue choice
North Korean officials had repeatedly investigated the State Guest House and the Hôtel Métropole, Hanoi's first international hotel, the latter of which became the site for the summit.
Summit meeting
First day
Meeting with Vietnamese leaders
Trump met General Secretary, President of Vietnam Nguyễn Phú Trọng around 11:42 am local time. They watched the Vietnamese airline executives sign a series of business deals with U.S. companies.
Trump also had a meeting with the Vietnamese prime minister Nguyễn Xuân Phúc on February 27.
One-on-one meeting
At Hanoi's Metropole Hotel, Trump and Kim Jong Un had a one-on-one meeting for 30 minutes on Wednesday evening. They started the summit at 6:30 pm local time (6:30 am EST) with a handshake and then participated in a one-on-one meeting with interpreters only.
Dinner
Trump and Kim started with a social dinner in Hanoi on Wednesday. There were a few key attendees at the dinner; seated at the round table were U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, DPRK Vice Chairman Kim Yong-chol, and Minister of Foreign Affairs Ri Yong-ho. Trump assured North Korea a "tremendous future for your country" in his initial comments with Kim Jong Un. Kim Jong Un described the second summit as a "courageous political decision" by Trump and also added that there had been "a lot of thinking, effort, and patience" between now and the previous June summit in Singapore.
On the first night of the summit, the White House announced that Trump and Kim Jong Un would sign a "joint agreement" the next afternoon.
Second day
One-on-one meeting
During the one-on-one meeting in Hanoi, Kim Jong Un was asked by a reporter if he would consider opening a US liaison office in Pyongyang. Kim Jong Un initially hesitated to answer the question and asked Trump to excuse the press from the summit room, but Trump urged Kim Jong Un to answer the question, to which he responded through an interpreter that the idea was "welcomeable". Trump acknowledged the response as a positive one. After that, another reporter asked if Kim Jong Un was willing to shut down his nuclear program, to which he responded, "If I'm not willing to do that, I wouldn't be here right now." The leaders went into a closed-room meeting, but the planned working lunch between Trump and Kim Jong Un and the potential joint signing ceremony were canceled. After preliminary negotiations between Trump and Kim Jong Un went over a period of time, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters waiting to cover the lunch that it had been called off.
One month after the summit ended, Reuters reported that on the second day of the summit, Trump passed Kim Jong Un a note that bluntly called for North Korea to surrender all its nuclear weapons and fuel, in similar fashion to the "Libya model", a proposal the North Koreans had repeatedly rejected. The scheduled ceremonial luncheon was then abruptly canceled and the summit ended.
End of summit
On February 28, 2019, the White House announced that the summit was cut short and that no agreement was reached. Sanders did not tell reporters why the schedule was changed and whether there was going to be a signing ceremony; the unexpected turn of events caused stocks on the South Korea stock exchange to fall. Trump said in a press conference after the summit that it was cut short because North Korea wanted an end to economics sanctions. He elaborated and said: "Basically, they wanted the sanctions lifted in their entirety and we couldn't do that [...] We had to walk away from that particular suggestion. We had to walk away from that."
During the press conference after the summit, Trump discussed American student Otto Warmbier, who was imprisoned for 17 months by North Korea for conviction of subversion, and who died shortly after being returned comatose to the U.S. Trump said he believed Kim Jong Un's word that he did not personally know about Warmbier's alleged poor treatment when Warmbier was in North Korean custody, and that it was not to Kim Jong Un's benefit to allow Warmbier to be treated poorly.