Why North Korea’s Kim expects the US to come ‘cap in hand’ for Trump talks

2026.03.19 01:50 North Korean leader Kim Jong-un inspects a shooting competition to mark the army’s “Snipers’ Day” at a training base on March 3. Photo: KCNA/KNS/AFP/Getty Images/TNS North Korea fired a volley of ballistic missiles on Saturday, just as US officials were in Seoul exploring ways to reopen talks with the regime that launched them. But Kim Jong-un is not waiting by the phone. Instead, analysts say North Korea’s supreme leader has set terms that leave little room for negotiation, with a calendar that leaves even less room for a summit. US Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Michael DeSombre touched down in Seoul last week and met Jeong Yeon-doo, South Korea’s chief nuclear negotiator and vice-minister for strategy and intelligence, to discuss the situation on the Korean peninsula, South Korean media reported. A test-launch of 600 mm-calibre multiple rocket launchers by North Korea’s military on Saturday. Photo: KCNA/Reuters The talks appeared tied to an expected visit by Trump to China. But that trip, originally planned for later this month, was pushed back “five or six weeks” amid the war on Iran, the US president confirmed on Tuesday. Kim appeared to leave the door ajar to talks at last month’s ninth congress of the ruling Workers’ Party, saying “there is no reason not to get along well with the US” – but only if Washington recognised North Korea as a nuclear state and abandoned what Pyongyang calls its “hostile policy”. But that condition is precisely where any diplomacy would likely collapse, analysts said. Nah Liang Tuang, a research fellow at Singapore’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies who specialises in North Korea, said the wreckage of the 2019 Hanoi summit had left Kim with little appetite for re-engagement. North Korea’s Kim Jong-un talks to US President Donald Trump in the garden of the Metropole hotel during their second summit in Hanoi, Vietnam, in February 2019. Photo: Reuters At that meeting, Pyong

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