Center for East Asia Policy Studies

[On what a successful summit would look like for Kim Jong-un] A vague statement, big smiles, big banquet, his wife is there — charming, lovely, young — talking to Trump, and he walks away. Maybe there's another summit, maybe there's follow-up meetings, maybe there's a declaration for peace, but in any case I think it's up to Kim if he's gonna start doing nasty things again or if he's just gonna stay quiet for seven years.

Kim [Jong-un]'s not just good at maximum pressure, he's also pretty good at maximum engagement. [Kim has demonstrated that he's] quite skilled at playing the regional players against the other...and sees Beijing as a key counterweight (and probably an insurance policy) against the United States.

There might be some kind of a broad document signed in Singapore, we don’t know yet, that would mark at least, on paper, the formal end of the Korean war, the formal end of hostilities on the Korean peninsula. But the problem with that is that hostilities have not ended on the Korean peninsula. North Korea is armed to the teeth, South Korea also has very substantial capabilities of it’s own, the United States has a very significant presence, so none of those things have changed and that is not even getting into the question of the long-term status of North Korea’s nuclear weapons capabilities.

We’ve been in situations like this before where the North and South [Koreas] have made momentary accommodation with one another, [but] right now the stakes are much higher, because you now have nuclear weapons deployed in North Korea, you have long-range missiles, you have a variety of threats to the region. Unless and until those issues can be meaningfully addressed, we…may be in a cessation of hostilities, but the possibility of war would be ever present.

I'd be cautious about saying the [recent] leadership shuffle [in North Korea] is a sign of Kim [Jong-un]'s weakness. It's a sign he's comfortable shuffling people around. When you do lop off some senior officials ... you create a whole different cohort of people who are loyal to you.

[On Kim Jong-un's ouster of top military officials] I'd be cautious about saying the leadership shuffle is a sign of Kim's weakness...It's a sign he's comfortable shuffling people around [and a way to consolidate influence and prevent the formation of other power centers]. When you do lop off some senior officials...you create a whole different cohort of people who are loyal to you.