The Korean Summits — Panmunjom and Singapore
The leaders of the two Koreas met three times in 2018 and one of them stepped across the line at Panmunjom. The year before had been the most dangerous since the war. North Korea had tested a hydrogen device and an intercontinental missile, and the two leaders had exchanged threats about total destruction and the relative size of their nuclear buttons. The opening was the Winter Olympics at Pyeongchang in February 2018, to which the North sent athletes, a delegation led by Kim Jong Un's sister, and a cheering squad, and where the two teams marched under a unification flag. The first summit followed on 27 April at the truce village. Kim crossed the military demarcation line, the first northern leader to enter the South since 1953, and then invited Moon Jae-in to step briefly north with him, which was not in the script. The Panmunjom Declaration promised a formal end to the war, denuclearisation of the peninsula in unspecified terms, family reunions and the removal of loudspeakers. Moon's own history explains his commitment: his parents were refugees from the North, and he had worked on the summit of 2007. Kim then met Trump in Singapore in June and at Hanoi in February 2019, where the talks collapsed over the sequence of sanctions relief and dismantlement. The liaison office at Kaesong was blown up by the North in 2020. Nothing agreed in 2018 has been implemented. The photograph of two men holding hands over a concrete kerb is the most reproduced image of the year and is now shorthand for a diplomatic opening that produced nothing. The Korean War has still not been ended by a treaty.
- Year: 2018 CE
- Category: Diplomatic
