Analysis: The administration thinks it can use Vietnam’s success as a lure in this week’s summit. North Korea may be drawing the exact opposite lesson from its history
This week’s second summit between President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un takes place in a highly symbolic location: Hanoi, the capital of Vietnam. For the Trump administration, the venue appears to be intended as a symbol of free-market victory: Vietnam's economy has thrived as it has opened to the world, and it is seen as a potential lure for North Korea, which might develop similarly through reform and openness.
Officially, the Korean War fighting ended in the 1953 armistice, leaving the peninsula split into two nations, but Kim Il Sung never dropped his drive to unify Korea under his control, and in the mid-60s he embarked upon a new strategy by actively assisting the North Vietnamese in their own war of unification. In August 1965, Kim told a Chinese delegation visiting North Korea that his government stood ready to provide support of any kind for the North Vietnamese.
Perhaps the greatest contribution that the Vietnam War made to North Korea’s own struggle for unification was to tie down the United States in Vietnam and constrain Washington’s ability to act or respond to events in Korea. The Kim regime never really ceased its provocations: North Korean commandos tried to assassinate South Korean President Park Chung Hee in January 1968; the raid failed but two days later, North Korea managed to capture a U.S.
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