Trump Courts North Korea’s Leader, but Might Need China to Reignite the Flame

The overtures from President Trump to one of his favorite dictators came hot and heavy over the summer.

In June, Mr. Trump posted a photo of himself strolling through the tropical grounds of a luxury hotel with Kim Jong-un, the leader of North Korea, during their historic summit in Singapore eight years ago.

Weeks later, he wrote online that the two had a “very good relationship.”

In that post, Mr. Trump announced that the American military would dial back exercises with South Korea, shocking the close U.S. ally and handing Mr. Kim a gift. Three days later, when a reporter asked whether he would meet with Mr. Kim this year, the American president said, “Yeah, I will be.”

The courtship is on. The question in the coming weeks is whether it will be requited.

Mr. Trump is expected to discuss North Korea with Xi Jinping, the leader of China, when Mr. Xi makes a state visit to Washington next week. China is North Korea’s oldest and most important ally.

Mr. Trump said he had spoken with Mr. Xi about North Korea during his visit to Beijing in May, weeks before he posted the photo taken in Singapore.

Mr. Xi is reluctant to have the United States and North Korea grow closer. But he could see helping broker a Trump-Kim summit as a favor to Mr. Trump and a way to gain leverage on other U.S.-China issues, a former Trump administration official said. It would also give Mr. Xi some control over the diplomacy.

For Mr. Trump, a summit with Mr. Kim would help him turn the spotlight away from the unpopular and costly war that he and Israel started against Iran and toward a leader-to-leader relationship that Mr. Trump has treasured since his first term, according to current and former officials and analysts.

Although Mr. Trump and Mr. Kim failed to reach a nuclear agreement during their second summit, in Hanoi, Vietnam, in 2019, the American president still feels a personal bond with the North Korean dictator, they say. He also values spectacle for the sake of spectacle and revels in main character energy.

From Mr. Trump’s perspective, resetting the relationship with North Korea “would be a big win,” said Nicholas J.C. Snyder, a career diplomat who worked in embassies in Asia and in the White House during Mr. Trump’s first administration.

“It’s been on his mind since Day 1,” said Mr. Snyder, now a business consultant and a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, a conservative foreign policy research group. “And it’s also on the mind of those from Trump 1 who came back for Trump 2. It’s part of his administration’s desire to take care of unfinished business in foreign policy.”

A Trump-Kim meeting could be timed to a potential trip by Mr. Trump to an annual Asian economic summit that Mr. Xi will host in southern China in November.

Unlike the Trump-Kim exchanges of effusive letters during the first Trump administration, Mr. Kim has yet to answer the American president’s overtures this time. Mr. Kim’s sister and close aide, Kim Yo-jong, said last month that she knew of no communications between her brother and Mr. Trump.

She also said that any reduction in U.S.-South Korea military exercises would not change “the provocative and offensive nature of them.”

Perhaps Mr. Kim is playing hardball because he thinks he is in a position of strength. He has been testing ballistic missiles and building up a nuclear weapons program while Mr. Trump has been mired in the war with Iran.

Since 2018 during his first term, Mr. Trump has delighted in his diplomacy with Mr. Kim. After an initial summit in Singapore, the two negotiated over North Korea’s nuclear program in Hanoi in February 2019, though they walked away without a deal. The flame seemed to fade. But they stoked the embers four months later, when Mr. Trump became the first American president to step across the border from South Korea into the North, where he shook Mr. Kim’s hand.

Mr. Trump has raved about Mr. Kim — the two “fell in love,” he once said, and he has shown visitors to the White House the “beautiful letters” the two men exchanged. Violating federal records rules, he took the correspondence to his Florida resort, Mar-a-Lago, after he lost the 2020 election.

“I’m not sure there is much more to Trump’s strategy than summitry itself. This is purely about the theatrics of a meeting,” said John Delury, a professor of international politics at the Hopkins-Nanjing Center in China. “I think he’s waiting for Kim to send a positive signal back. Then he’ll tell his team to make it happen.”

“He’s always liked North Korea, even if it didn’t work out well the first time around,” Mr. Delury added.

In past administrations, informal representatives from each country would meet in the hopes of opening the door to official dialogue. But those conversations stopped years ago. During the pandemic, North Korea sealed its borders and halted contact with the outside world.

North Korea has less need to build ties with the United States now. Its economy is stronger than it has been in many years. And the country has bolstered its diplomatic and military positions through its alliances with China and Russia.

Mr. Kim signed a mutual defense agreement with Russia two years after the country’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, ordered a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. North Korean forces have been fighting alongside the Russians against the Ukrainian military. Mr. Kim and Mr. Putin have met in each other’s countries. (A top aide to Mr. Putin said this month that the Russian leader might take part in a group meeting with Mr. Trump and Mr. Xi in China in November, which raises the possibility of a historic four-way summit if Mr. Kim joins.)

North Korea has shown no signs of a softening toward the United States, despite Mr. Trump’s decision to curtail U.S. military exercises with South Korea.

A North Korean Foreign Ministry spokesperson said recent U.S. statements and military actions showed that the United States had “fully reconfirmed its invariable hostile policy to wantonly violate the sovereignty, political system and security interests of the D.P.R.K.,” according to a report in late August by the Korean Central News Agency, an official outlet. (The formal name of North Korea is the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.)

The report also made clear that talks about the denuclearization of North Korea would lead nowhere.

North Korea, the spokesperson said, “can neither be weakened nor be diluted by the U.S. repeated expression of its stand on ‘denuclearization.’” The United States must not “absurdly stick to the past.”

Robert Carlin, a former U.S. intelligence analyst on North Korea, said Mr. Kim had maintained a policy change he enacted in 2021, two years after the Hanoi summit ended in disappointment for the two leaders.

“I think what people have to understand is there has been a tectonic shift in North Korean strategic perceptions and policy,” Mr. Carlin said. “They wouldn’t try to normalize relations with the U.S. And on top of that, there’s an even broader reality. Kim sees the world completely differently now. He sees himself as a leader of the anti-imperialist forces globally.”

Mr. Carlin added that Mr. Kim believes “that a confrontation with the U.S. is inevitable.” Mr. Trump’s war against Iran bolsters that notion, he said.

Decades of American policy on North Korea, including harsh economic sanctions, have failed to deter the advancement of the country’s nuclear weapons program. So leader-to-leader diplomacy is still worth a shot, some analysts say.

“Any morsel of a response at all is good, especially if it leads to a conversation with the United States,” said Jung Pak, a former State Department official and C.I.A. analyst on North Korea.

However, Ms. Pak faulted Mr. Trump for surprising South Korea with his announcement about rolling back military exercises.

“The way it was executed by the Trump administration is not great,” she said. “It made it look as if the alliance is not on an equal footing. The first rule is you make sure your best partner knows about what you’re doing.”