Donald Trump has announced there will now be a meeting between him and Kim Jong-Un. A number of venues have been discussed as to where this meeting could take place. Mongolia, the Demilitarised Zone between the two Koreas, and Singapore have all been mentioned. The meeting was originally scheduled for May but now it looks like it could be June after the G-7 summit in Canada.
The US is a member of this bloc so that is why the meeting has been put back. Japan also a member of the G-7 will want to know also what is happening between the US and North Korea.
Japan is a near neighbour of North Korea and it is in range of North Korea's missiles. Many nations both local and abroad want to see a successful meeting between the US and North Korea. Given both Trump and Kim's unpredictability, however, the meeting could be called off at the drop of a hat.
Can Kim be trusted?
Can Kim be trusted in these negotiations with the US? What has turned him from a man prepared to confront the US to the pussycat we now see before us? Trump's tough language has either scared Kim to death or he is St Paul on the road to Damascus. Either way, the prospect of Kim and Trump negotiating is something that would have been unthinkable a while ago.
Kim, however, may not be prepared to give up his nuclear capability and this may be a sticking point.
Kim will know what happened to Libya and Iraq that did not have a nuclear capacity. Kim will require words set in stone that the US and her Allies will not attack him should he shed his nuclear arsenal.
The Chinese will be keeping tabs on the Trump-Kim meeting and may advise Kim on the negotiations. However, the Chinese-North Korean relationship is at times complicated as Kim does not always listen to Beijing.
Gorbachev and Reagan
The tension in the 80's between the US and USSR was at a dangerous level. Reagan and Gorbachev met in Reykjavik in Iceland to de-escalate the tensions between the two nations. The meeting was only meant to last one day but instead, it ran into two days with both men getting on.
Both Presidents hammered out agreements that were landmark decisions at the time.
For example, the scaling back of the American and Soviet nuclear arsenals, the collapse of the Berlin Wall and other events.
Trump has been compared to a modern-day Ronald Reagan and so is Trump's counterpart Gorbachev? Time will tell what transpires at the meeting presumably in Singapore or even if it goes ahead at all.