But he made key mistakes. He failed to get a nuclear freeze agreement from the North in return for the meeting, meaning that the country’s nuclear and missile production churned along while the two old adversaries returned to their old stances.
And Mr. Trump’s team, internally divided, could not back itself out of the corner the president initially put them with his vow for no serious sanctions relief until the arsenal was disbanded. Mr. Trump did cancel joint military exercises with South Korea — over Pentagon objections — but that was not enough for Mr. Kim.
But perhaps Mr. Trump’s biggest miscalculation was over-relying on the personal rapport he built with Mr. Kim, and overinterpreting the commitments he received from the young, wily North Korean leader.
That continues. On his way to a New Year’s party at his Mar-a-Lago club on Tuesday night, the president focused on their relationship, as if Mr. Kim’s declaration that he was no longer bound by any commitment to cease missile and nuclear testing didn’t exist. “He likes me, I like him, we get along,” Mr. Trump said. “He’s representing his country, I’m representing my country. We have to do what we have to do.”
Then he misrepresented the agreement in Singapore, describing it as if it were a real-estate deal. “But he did sign a contract,” he said of the vague declaration of principles reached in Singapore in June 2018. In fact, it was not a contract, it had no binding force, and it referred to the “denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.” That phrase means something very different in Pyongyang than it does in Washington: It means the North expects the United States to pull back its own nuclear-backed forces, including submarines and ships that can deliver such weapons to the peninsula.
So now Mr. Trump finds himself in roughly the same place his predecessors did: Awaiting a new missile test. It may be a solid-fuel, intercontinental missile, according to some experts like Vipin Narang, a nuclear expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to show that the North has finally mastered a weapon that can be rolled out and launched with little warning. And it may carry some kind of payload to demonstrate that the country now knows how to make a warhead that can withstand re-entry into the atmosphere, a difficult technology.
But buried in Mr. Kim’s New Years statement was a suggestion of what he really had in mind: talks with the United States about the “scope and depth” of the North’s nuclear force. That means he really isn’t interested in denuclearization at all. He’s interested in arms-control talks, like the United States conducted for decades with the Soviet Union, and then Russia. And arms control, of course, would achieve what Mr. Kim, his father and his grandfather all sought: that insurance policy for the family.