No matter what else comes of it, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has scored a huge win with President Donald Trump's agreement to sit down for a face-to-face meeting.
For decades, North Korean officials have angled to meet with a high-level U.S. representative using all measures of persuasion, whining, wheedling and threatening. To secure that meeting with a sitting U.S. president no less provides a success beyond their wildest dreams.
From a propaganda standpoint, getting into the same room with Donald Trump would elevate the 34-year-old Kim, a pariah and terrorist in the eyes of much of the world, to the status of a world leader.
"This has been North Korea's long-standing objective to get the president of the United States to come," said Sue Mi Terry, a former CIA analyst now with the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "They just got lucky with Trump. They have been monitoring him very closely. They saw him as a window of opportunity with a personality that likes to grab attention."
Proud and isolated, jealous of their capitalist cousin, South Korea, North Koreans have long yearned to be treated as a great power. Their nuclear program has been motivated not only by their desire to protect their system of government but by their hunger for respect on the world stage, analysts say.
Trump's agreement announced Thursday to sit down with Kim is being compared by some observers to President Richard Nixon's meeting with China's Mao Zedong in 1972, which is flattering to North Korea.
"The North Korean have always been waiting for the United States to treat them like China. The U.S. decision to improve relations with China showed China's centrality," said Scott Snyder of the Council on Foreign Relations. "They want to matter strategically."
Since the establishment of the Communist state of North Korea at the end of World War II, no sitting American president has met with a North Korean leader. But it was an ex-president, Jimmy Carter, who negotiated a 1994 pact known as the Agreed Framework that was going to provide energy assistance for North Korea in return for gradual denuclearization.
In October 2000, then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright traveled to Pyongyang to meet with Kim Jong Il, father of the current leader. The expectation was that her meeting would pave the way for a follow-up trip by President Bill Clinton to take place after the November election but before the inauguration of a new president. The momentum was lost amid the confusion about hanging chads and eventually the presidency of George W. Bush.
As a scant consolation prize to the North Koreans, Clinton did visit North Korea as an ex-president in 2009 to secure the release of American journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee, who had been taken prisoner while reporting on the China-North Korea border.
Under the Bush administration, the Agreed Framework collapsed. The North Koreans reached out repeatedly to get a meeting with Bush. They failed to get any high-level negotiations going with the United States and were frustrated that the nuclear issue was relegated to six-nation talks led by China.
North Korea's 25 million people are among the poorest and most isolated in Asia. Normalizing relations with the United States is seen as key to developing their economy and reintegrating then into the international community.
Although Kim's invitation to Trump and Trump's acceptance came as a shock to much of the world _ dominating headlines amid Trump's alleged tangles with porn actress Stormy Daniels and the Russia investigation_North Korea has been angling for this meeting almost from the moment Trump was inaugurated.
"Kim Jong Un is not some young callow kid. He is a very shrewd character," said Robert Carlin, a former CIA analyst and negotiator, now a visiting scholar at Stanford University. "I think the North Koreans have been on this course for months and months."
With its Fourth of July test of an intercontinental missile capable of reaching the continental United States to its powerful hydrogen bomb test in September, North Korea succeeded in getting Washington's attention. Then in November, when Kim announced the country had completed the development of its nuclear arsenal, he signaled that he was ready to launch a new phase that included negotiations.
The decision to participate in South Korea's Winter Olympics effectively co-opted Seoul _ a traditional U.S. ally _ in the role of an intermediary with its own prestige on the line to make the talks succeed.
"Now they have South Korea as their chess piece," said Carlin.
During the presidential campaign in 2016, Trump famously quipped that he'd been willing to meet with Kim over a hamburger, but his public statements once in office have been less about breaking bread than bloodying noses.
To the many North Korean analysts who were wringing their hands over a potentially catastrophic war, if not a nuclear Armageddon, the upcoming talks come as a relief. But any relief is balanced by the worry that Trump, inexperienced in diplomacy and anxious for a foreign policy win, will be no match for the surprisingly wily North Koreans.
As though anticipating a diplomatic breakthrough, North Korea in 2016 named a seasoned negotiator, Ri Yong Ho, as foreign minister and just two weeks ago promoted another, Choe Son Hui, to a vice ministerial position. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has been losing its experienced hands, most notably with the recent retirement of the State Department's top Korea specialist, Joseph Yun.
North Korea has said repeatedly it would not give up its nuclear program, which Kim has referred to as a "treasured sword," without assurances that the United States has dropped its "hostile policy" against North Korea. Those demands are likely to include the withdrawal of thousands of U.S. military personnel from South Korea.
Moreover, North Korea's nuclear program today is sufficiently advanced that even a freeze would leave them with enough plutonium to make 10 nuclear warheads.
"If I'm right about North Korea's game plan, they see the summit as a chance to sit down with the United States as 'one nuclear weapons state with another,'" Evans Revere, a former U.S. diplomat with decades of experience dealing with North Korea, wrote in response to an email query from the Los Angeles Times.
So far it is unclear where the proposed meeting between Trump and Kim would take place. One possibility would be for Trump to join with South Korean President Moon Jae-in at a summit scheduled for late April in Panmunjom, the truce village located at the demilitarized zone separating the Koreas.
Joshua Stanton, an attorney who helped draft the North Korean sanctions law, says that by all means Trump must avoid a trip to Pyongyang.
"That would show that Kim Jong Un is controlling the event and dictating terms to the president of the United States," Stanton said.
