Good chance Kim Jong Un will give up his country's nuclear weapons: Trump

US President Donald Trump, who has agreed to meet with Kim Jong Un, said on Wednesday there is a now a good chance the North Korean leader will give up his country's nuclear weapons.

"For years and through many administrations, everyone said that peace and the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula was not even a small possibility," Trump wrote in an early morning tweet.

This is what he tweeted:

For years and through many administrations, everyone said that peace and the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula was not even a small possibility. Now there is a good chance that Kim Jong Un will do what is right for his people and for humanity. Look forward to our meeting!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) 28 March 2018

His comments came as Kim completed a secretive and unprecedented visit to Beijing on Wednesday as the two countries seek to repair frayed ties before Pyongyang's landmark summits with Washington and earlier with South Korea.

Five assumptions we make about North Korea - and why they're wrong

In the 2004 comedy film Team America, Kim Jong-un’s father, Kim Jong-il, is illustrative of a popular view of North Korea that both feeds and is fed by the perception that the Kim regime is irrational, crazy and evil.

This caricature is a poor foundation on which to build a North Korea policy.

Proponents of this view point to the Kim regime’s horrendous human rights record and the Orwellian social controls put in place to maintain the Kims at the head of North Korea’s unique authoritarian political system.
While the regime’s coercive arms have been responsible for crimes against the North Korean people that could be considered “evil”, this does not suffice as an explanation for why it engages in these practices.

The “why” is important. It feeds information into risk analyses and pinpoints leverage points for strategic interactions with North Korea.

We don’t have to like this logic or agree on its strategic utility to see there is rational strategy at work. We need to locate Kim and his regime within the context of the complex incentives and constraints of North Korea’s interwoven political, economic, cultural and ecological systems.

It is useful to step back from the whirlwind of recent developments to place the current situation in the broader context of North Korea’s regime survival strategy.
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