Summits

The optics was compelling. This has to be the summit of the century – or at least the century so far.

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un walked to the border that divided the peninsula the past six decades and then took the hand of South Korean president Moon Jae-in who guided him across the boundary line. Like the moment when Neil Armstrong leapt from his lunar landing vehicle, it was one small step with great historic consequences.

Kim then invited his counterpart to step across the boundary line northwards. The South Korean president was on North Korean soil.

South Korea pulled out all the stops this historic day. The honor guard was all decked up in traditional Korean costumes. The two leaders alternately strolled in private and exchanged toasts at a reception.

A day after the high profile summit, Kim announced he would dismantle his most important nuclear testing site. He invited the world’s media to witness the event.

The rest of the world, ruffled by the pace of developments in the Korean peninsula, is still struggling to recover poise. The major powers can only repeat the old maxim when asked about Kim’s offer: Trust but Verify.  

No one expected this high profile summit happening only a few months ago.

The first step toward this historic summit began when North Korea, on the invitation of the South Korean president, agreed to participate in the Winter Olympics just over two months ago. Korean players from the North and the South joined in the women’s hockey team under the flag that showed the Korea archipelago.

Moon Jae-in is the only South Korean leader who could have possibly made this possible. His whole life, he has been an advocate of Korean unification. Now, significant steps have been taken toward that goal. His role has tended to be underemphasized by the western media.

Kim Jong-un, for his part, apparently enjoys great confidence in his grip on power to begin this experimentation. When senior South Korean officials visited Pyongyang, he surprised everybody by issuing an invitation for Donald Trump to sit down for talks. Although blindsided by the development, the American president readily accepted the offer.

Apparently at his initiative, Kim visited Beijing last month. He must have talked strategy with Chinese leader Xi Jinping and won his blessings for further dramatic moves toward peace.  

True, Kim is under heavy pressure from the UN-mandated economic sanctions on his country. He cannot pursue his old confrontational course without sacrificing his people’s wellbeing. He needed a new strategy and was quick to devise one. We will have to concede to him boldness as well as poise.

Modi-Xi

Unfairly overshadowed by the pomp and pageantry at the Demilitarized Zone, the summit meeting between Indian Prime Minister Nerandra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping is important in many ways.

India and China are not only the world’s two most populous nations. They are also the world’s fastest growing economies.

The relationship between these two countries, sharing a border high up in the Himalayas, has been tense for as long as we can remember. They have overlapping territorial claims. In 1962, the two countries came to blows. Both the Chinese and the Indian armies took significant casualties in the border war that broke out.

Since then, there have been several flare-ups between those two large armies. Less than a year ago, the two armies were locked in a 72-day standoff in the junction between China, India and Bhutan.

The summit between Modi and Xi, occurring nearly simultaneously with the meeting between the leaders of the two Koreas, produced an agreement to improve lines of communication between the two great armies. Even as it was not possible to resolve the territorial dispute between them, the two countries agreed to take steps to “build trust and mutual understanding.”

Neither country was ready to give up their territorial claims. This should not be a hindrance to evolving closer partnerships. We should be familiar with this sort of arrangement, given we are party to contending claims over parts of the South China Sea.

The more important story is this: What happens when the two most populous countries enjoying rapid economic expansion agree to be cooperative instead of confrontational?

 Should China and India expand trade and share markets, these two main drivers of global economic growth will change the dynamics of development more dramatically than we dare imagine.

Trump-Macron

The least significant of last week’s summit meetings must be the one held between US President Donald Trump and French President Emmanuel Macron.

The two leaders cynically played to the cameras, exchanging hugs and kisses and all the excessive gestures suggesting a “bromance” between the two. But beneath the veneer, serious issues divide the two leaders.

Macron used his state visit to the US to project himself as leader not just of France but of all of Europe. He wanted to use flattery to get Trump to agree to his policy positions, such as continued western military presence in Syria and preservation of the multilateral covenant with Iran. He failed.

In his speech before the joint session of the US Congress, Macron could not help but outline the major points of policy disagreement between France (and the rest of the Eurozone) and Donald Trump’s America. These policy disagreements range from climate change to free trade.

Macron just had to outline the points of disagreement – or risk becoming the laughing stock of all of Europe.