Trump rekindles diplomacy with North Korea, nuclear experts worry about history repeating itself

The last time President Trump vowed to stop a country's nuclear weapons program, he held three face-to-face meetings with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, claiming the two had developed a "very good relationship," only to come away empty-handed.

That was during Trump's first term. Not only did that diplomatic effort fail, Kim Jong Un immediately accelerated his nuclear program. Today, North Korea has about 60 nuclear weapons, according to some estimates, and missiles that appear to be capable of reaching the U.S. mainland — the very combination of weapons that Trump has vowed to eliminate.

Proliferation experts have questioned for months whether Trump, too, might come up empty-handed in his efforts to curb Iran's nuclear program — especially now that he appears more focused on getting the Strait of Hormuz open than on what to do with Iran's uranium stockpile. Those uranium stockpiles were buried under rubble after being bombed by the United States in June 2025.

After being stymied on Iran, Trump is increasingly turning his attention back to North Korea, even as analysts see little hope of quickly dismantling North Korea's expanding nuclear arsenal.

In a post on social media on Sunday night, Trump praised Kim Jong Un and publicly asked Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to reduce the level of U.S. participation in military exercises between the United States and South Korea, one of the United States' allies in the Pacific. This appeared to be a signal that he wanted to resume negotiations with North Korea. A day later, it was still unclear how the Pentagon would scale back the U.S. military's participation in the 11-day military exercise. The Pentagon press office sent a one-sentence statement to reporters Monday afternoon that also did not provide any clear information.

“The Department of War is actively implementing the directives of the Commander-in-Chief,” the statement read, using the Trump administration’s term for the Department of Defense.

Robert Litvak, a scholar at George Washington University, has written about North Korea and Iran's nuclear programs. He called Trump’s contrasting treatment of the two countries “a legendary contrast between two rogue states.”

"We are at war with Iran, a country that has reached the nuclear threshold. But with North Korea, we are appeasing a dictator who can nukes the United States homeland," he said.

Trump's outburst was also to punish South Korea for refusing to participate in the war with Iran. South Korea's stance made Trump very angry. He mentioned that in the same social media post and reiterated it Monday when taking questions from reporters in the Oval Office.

Trump is also dissatisfied with Seoul's delay in implementing new investment commitments. According to the White House, this investment is as high as 350 billion U.S. dollars, involving the shipbuilding industry and other fields. Last October, Trump visited South Korea and touted future South Korean investments in the United States, including Samsung's pledge to spend billions of dollars to expand its chip manufacturing plant in Texas.

"Trump always comes back to complaints about South Korea's 'free riding' on U.S. troops stationed in South Korea," said Scott Snyder, president and CEO of the Korea Economic Institute. "He uses the security relationship as leverage to put more pressure on the South Korean government."

Hanging over these tensions is the reality that Trump cannot extricate the United States from the war with Iran. In recent months, he has signaled that he is eager to end the conflict and return to dealing with Kim Jong Un, who satisfied Trump's desire for direct talks between leaders by holding summits with him during his first term.

South Korean President Lee Jae-myung said in June that Trump seemed to want to resume negotiations with Kim Jong-un; in recent months, Trump has posted photos of himself with the North Korean leader on social media at least twice.

"Kim Jong Un and I get along great!" Trump wrote on Saturday next to a photo of himself meeting with the North Korean leader at the border between North and South Korea in 2019.

Trump posted another affectionate post on Monday, this time a meme showing Kim Jong Un speaking on the phone with several military officers standing behind him. The caption read: "Hey Donald, we're good...right?"

North Korea's nuclear program has caused serious concerns as early as the late 1980s, long before Iran's nuclear program entered the international spotlight. In 1994, North Korea expelled international inspectors, triggering a crisis. At that time, the Clinton administration discussed launching a military strike against North Korea's Yongbyon nuclear facility, but ultimately did not take action. Later that year, former President Jimmy Carter struck a deal with Kim Il Sung, grandfather of North Korea's current leader, to end the nuclear program in exchange for help building civilian nuclear reactors.

But all this ultimately came to nothing, and subsequent efforts to control North Korea's nuclear program also failed again and again. North Korea conducted its first nuclear test in 2006 and five more since then, most recently in 2017.

The following year, Trump met with the North Korean leader in Singapore after labeling Kim "Little Rocket Man." After the meeting, he told a New York Times reporter that he expected North Korea to dismantle its nuclear program soon. "Progress will be very rapid," he said after the summit. "I really believe it will be very soon. And the size of its nuclear arsenal is huge. There's no doubt about that."

But while Trump recalls the meetings with pleasure — during his first term, he often pulled out letters from Kim Jong Un and read excerpts to visitors in the Oval Office — they have gone down in history as a diplomatic failure. A second summit in Vietnam ended with the collapse of negotiations. Then-national security adviser John Bolton later said Trump was ill-prepared for the talks and that the effort failed when Kim refused to dismantle facilities beyond the main enrichment and reprocessing center in Yongbyon.

Some worry the same thing could happen again. “Another Trump-Kim summit — which is what the president now seems to be seeking — could be a disaster,” said Joel Vitter, a former State Department diplomat who participated in the early U.S.-North Korea negotiations and wrote the history book “Fallout: The Inside Story of America’s Failure to Disarm North Korea.”

"Trump does not seem to realize that today's Kim Jong-un has no interest in improving relations with the United States. He is determined to keep his nuclear weapons, send troops to Ukraine to support his Russian allies, and threaten South Korea," Vitter said.

Critics of Trump's foreign policy were quick to blast the president on Monday for undermining a key ally. Senator Jack Reed, a Rhode Island Democrat and the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said Trump had made "another stupid, rash decision" and punished South Korea "for no reason other than Trump's ego."