North Korean ballistic missile and nuclear weapons programme

Even as US President Trump’s forthcoming meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un continues to be the subject of negotiation and speculation, the North Korean leader has just wrapped up his second unannounced meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping.
Western commentary continues to see Kim Jong-un’s forthcoming summit meeting with Donald Trump as they key goal of North Korea’s diplomacy, and the most important summit of Kim Jong-un’s career.  Kim Jong-un’s meetings with Xi Jinping and South Korean President Moon Jae-in are interpreted as steps to that goal.

A year ago the situation in the Korean Peninsula appeared to be sliding rapidly towards war, with North Korea pressing ahead with its ballistic missile and nuclear tests, with Donald Trump, the US’s newly elected and highly inexperienced President tweeting threats of military action, with General H.R. McMaster, Donald Trump’s hawkish National Security Adviser lobbying for military action, and US fleets moving backwards and forwards towards the Korean Peninsula alongside wild talk that they might be about to be used in action.
A year later the mood is transformed.

Events in the US since President Trump agreed to South Korean President Moon’s proposal that he meet North Korean leader Kim Jong-un show (1) the extent to which the US elite including large sections of the US government’s bureaucracy are willing President Trump to lose despite the huge damage this threatens the US; and (2) how President Trump’s foreign policy instincts are often superior to those of the foreign policy veterans or “adults” which whom he has become surrounded.

The key to understanding Kim Jong-un’s summit offer to Donald Trump is that it is the product of negotiations which have been underway since October.
At that time a senior North Korean diplomat visited Moscow, and reports of the talks which took place made it clear that the Russians were pressing for the opening of bilateral negotiations between the North Koreans and the South Koreans to end the crisis.

The pace of diplomatic activity to end the Korean crisis has intensified with a South Korean delegation delivering to US President Trump an invitation from North Korean leader Kim Jong-un for a summit meeting to be held before May.
Trump appears to have accepted the invitation

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The recent Global Times editorial, discussed by me in my article on UN Security Council Resolution 2753, has spoken of US attempts to use sanctions to ‘collapse’ North Korea’s economy and to ‘suffocate’ the North Korean regime as an idea that is both dangerous and counterproductive