The Case · North Korea

One Step Into the Hermit Kingdom

No sitting American president had ever set foot in North Korea. Then one just… walked in.

June 30, 2019. At Panmunjom, Donald J. Trump stepped over the concrete slab that has divided the Korean Peninsula for seven decades and became the first sitting U.S. president to set foot in North Korea — greeted by Kim Jong-un, on twenty-four hours’ notice, arranged by tweet.

Critics called the summits theater. Here is what the theater bought: face-to-face leader diplomacy with the most closed regime on Earth — Singapore 2018, Hanoi 2019, the DMZ — during a stretch in which the missile crises of 2017 (“fire and fury,” ICBMs over Japan) gave way to summits instead of escalation. He walked into the lion’s den, shook the lion’s hand, and strolled back out.

This site’s view: peace prizes have gone to people for starting talks with adversaries. He didn’t start talks; he crossed the line itself — personally, twice risking summit failure on live television, because personal risk is what that relationship required. A born peacemaker’s instinct, on the world’s most dangerous border.