I’m wondering if it may be Kim Jong un’s ego causing him to want the meetings. He can either be remembered as just another Kim or he can be remembered as the Kim who transformed North Korea and brought it into the modern world. That might lead to his doom, but someone like him used to having unchecked power may think he can manage the change and survive it.
Even the Soviet leadership eventually realized what they were doing just wasn’t working and was never going to work. Maybe Kim Jong un has had an epiphany.
We will know more in a week or so.
I had thought that the reaction of Kim after he went to Beijing the second time was terrible.
Trump cancelled.
Now maybe things are improving. Maybe.
We will see.
“Maybe Kim Jong un has had an epiphany.”
I suspect that people who have executed their relatives by setting dogs on them, mortars and antiaircraft guns can’t afford to act on an epiphany. They can only stay in their gated, guarded palaces or move about with plenty of guards. If Un loses power, no matter how little, he will be murdered.
I’ll bet getting promoted to Un’s ‘right hand man” is about as safe a place to be as, say, Stalin’s head of the NKVD. Dictators regularly dispose of their right hand men because they don’t want those men to develop enough contacts to kill the dictator.
I think you’re on to something there. Gorbachev thought he could do the same in the USSR with glasnost. Just tinker with the system a bit. Put curtains on the cell windows, tell the folks what a monster Stalin was(seeing how he was dead) and give the masses some extra smokes and vodka and you keep keep things going. Boy, was he ever wrong.