"By telling the North Korean leader that he's a 'smart cookie' and he'd be 'honored' to talk to them, I sense a difference in the US policy goals coming to North Korea," Sun said. "President Trump's goal and his agenda are quite strictly limited to the denuclearization of North Korea."
Sun contrasted this with another agenda: addressing North Korea's abysmal human-rights record and the dynastic nature of its leadership. According to Sun, Trump may be speaking highly of Kim to signal his goal is not regime change, only neutralizing the nuclear threat.
Sun characterized Trump's apparent course as "pretty classic carrot-and-stick."
But according to Jenny Town, the assistant director of the US-Korea Institute and a managing editor at 38 North, there may not be much to gain by reading into Trump's statements, which have been all over the place. In addition to the "smart cookie" comment, "he's also called Kim a madman, imbalanced, and irrational," Town said.
Town noted that Trump said he'd talk to Kim only "under the right circumstances." If those circumstances were understood to mean North Korea's denuclearization, they would still be "above the threshold of what we can expect North Korea to do unilaterally," Town said.
However, if the US could assure the Kim regime that it didn't want to remove it from power, it may be a little more willing to abandon its nuclear ambitions.
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According to Sun, these actions are likely to pressure the Kim regime while showing that there's a realistic, non-humiliating off-ramp on the road to a nuclear confrontation.