This is when Choi Son-hui rose to pre-eminence in the DPRK Foreign Ministry. Kim Jong-un was humiliated in Hanoi in February 2019. Trump and Bolton in a dramatic stunt scripted for media walked out from the negotiation. Trump rebuffed Choi, in the hallway, at the Hanoi Summit, when she chased after him, pleading with him to come back to the table with Kim. Trump curtly remarked, "Sometimes ya gotta walk," totally capitulating to the neo-cons. Clearly Choi is the most gifted and experienced negotiator in North Korean ruling circles, she served as Kim's mentor.
Not long after Kim and Choi Son-hui traveled to Vladivostok to explore options with Putin and Lavrov.
The major import of the summit seems to be having Kim recover momentum after the debacle at the Hanoi summit with the US. Everyone noticed that Kim Yong Chol wasn't with the North Korean delegation in Vladivostok. It looks like Choe Son Hui has been elevated to a primary position as nuclear negotiator. This would be in her new position as First Vice Minister of Foreign Policy, and as the new and solitary female member of the powerful State Affairs Committee.
The visit to Vladivostok brought Trump to Korea for the photo-op at Panmunjom in the summer of 2019, imitating an earlier meeting there between Moon Jae-in and Kim Jong-un that was a media sensation during the "Spring is coming" thaw in North and South relations in 2018. Trump completely under the thumb of the neocons overplaying their hand, did nothing with the second chance he was given to resolve the tension with North Korea. By December 2019, the North indicated they were done dealing with the US. Then the covid epidemic conveniently enough put everything on hold as the North locked down for years. The Biden administration adopted the neo-con "maximum pressure" approach to negotiations. Then as the war in Ukraine spun up, the idiot far right authoritarian Yoon took power in South Korea providing new opportunities, incentives and benefits for North Korean Russian cooperation. When Kim and Putin met at the Russian Space Center in the Far East, in Sept 2023, the possibilities envisioned by Choi and Lavrov in April 2019 came to fruition.
It is obvious that the agreements worked out and signed this week by Putin and Kim had been worked on for months at least. The national security advisors in the US and the so called far east czar Kurt Campbell are incompetent. Blinken, Sullivan, the whole lot of them don't know what they are doing. Siegfried Hecker and Robert Carlin the leading experts on North Korea have been saying this publicly for some time now.
Here's a tweet yesterday from another astute North Korea watcher-
Perhaps walking away from a deal at Hanoi wasn't such a good idea after all. Now all we're left with is op-eds calling for "greater economic and diplomatic pressure on Pyongyang" and hoping that Beijing can be made to carry out US policy goals in Korea. https://t.co/zLsxnTNsBx
— Kevin Gray (@DrKevinGray) June 19, 2024
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