Trump keeps reaching for North Korea: four throwback photos of himself with Kim Jong-un on Truth Social in nine days, a scaled-down annual US–South Korea military exercise, and reported overtures for a new summit — seven years after Hanoi ended with nothing signed. Kap Seol’s Jacobin essay reads the courtship as a distraction exercise, timed to pull attention from the failing Iran war, and explains why Kim will make Trump pay a high price this time.

  • The 2019 memory cuts both ways: Trump used the Hanoi summit to bury the Michael Cohen testimony story, while Kim rode his luxury train more than sixty hours home empty-handed and humiliated — after officials had wept with anticipation of sanctions relief
  • Kim’s price has climbed since: denuclearization off the table, all US–South Korea drills suspended in advance, arms-control talks, and recognition of North Korea as a nuclear power
  • The aftermath hardened him — the liaison office at the joint security area was demolished, a law authorized the death penalty for watching South Korean media, and warhead estimates now run from 57 (Trump’s number) to 120 (Seoul’s)
  • Pyongyang is riding the decline of the US unipolar order: troops and shells to Russia — about 2,300 North Korean soldiers killed in their first deployments, per the BBC — with China boosting trade 22 percent year over year to keep Kim out of Moscow’s orbit
  • Seoul is the one being sidelined: with inter-Korean dialogue severed, two-thirds of South Koreans now tell Gallup they want their own nuclear weapons, and President Lee Jae-myong is pressing to reclaim wartime operational control the US has held since 1950

The essay’s verdict is pointed: a “historic initiative” from an octogenarian autocrat with a limited attention span, meeting a shrewd young dictator whose bill is paid in working-class blood on foreign soil. Seol’s conclusion stays careful rather than romantic — even a summit would beat nothing between the world’s largest nuclear arsenal and a de facto nuclear power, but no one should mistake it for peace. The Left, he argues, should watch this space for openings to build a strong antinuclear peace campaign from below.