But he did what he thought was the right thing to do-not just for his country but for peace and stability in the region and beyond. He was the catalyst.īeing a trusted long-term ally of the United States while living next door to a belligerent neighbour looking to acquire nuclear arms is not an enviable position to be in.

While credit must be given to President Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un for doing what seemed impossible only a few months ago, the role of South Korean President Moon Jae-in in the whole buildup to it cannot be overemphasised. Having staked so much, the real work for his administration begins now. Going from threatening to decimate North Korea and calling its leader 'rocket man' to addressing him as 'Excellency', and a 'talented' one at that, was perhaps a learning curve for someone who this time matched pragmatism with instinct. Not surprising therefore that President Trump wisely chose to describe the summit and its outcome before heading for Singapore as a 'process' rather than an all or nothing event. Finding common ground here will be a major challenge going forward. For the US, it means reduction, if not even elimination, of North Korea's nuclear weaponry, while Pyongyang's undeclared definition of the word has been one that includes what happens militarily in the south of its border where a large presence of the US military has been consistently described by the north as a major threat to its national security. Unlike the open and democratic United States, North Korea, officially called the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, represents a reclusive and closed society where political leadership has been hereditary and where international allegations of human rights violations have been a common thread.įor both President Trump and Kim Jong-un the keyword surrounding the summit was de-nuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula, albeit with diverse perspectives. Large doses of mutual praise, candour and promises for change give rise for optimism, even if a cautious one.Ĭoming into the summit, Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump, and the countries the two represent, could not have been more poles apart from each other in every sense of the term, except perhaps in their unpredictable leaders. While it is far too early to make too many mid- and long-term projections on the outcome of the Singapore summit, the optics, body language and the words spoken by both men, and indeed the fact that they signed an agreed document of intent, portend well for the future if taken on their face value alone.

Even Fox News ran out of language to describe its elation from the event, having thought not too long ago that this was like taking the proverbial holy water to the devil and venomously castigating President Barack Obama for even thinking about it. In the words of Donald Trump himself, it looked 'like a fantasy, like a science fiction move.' It indeed was.

Not since the fall of the Berlin Wall in the late 1980s has a political event created the potential for a tectonic shift in global politics than what one saw and heard immediately following this historic on-again, off-again, on-again summit. Since Egypt's President Anwar Sadat shook hands with declared enemy country Israel's Prime Minister Menachem Begin under the appreciating eyes of US President Jimmy Carter on the manicured lawns of Camp David more than four decades ago, no other handshake at that political level has drawn as much global attention as the one between North Korea's leader Kim Jong-un and US President Donald Trump in the serenity of Singapore's Sentosa Island this Tuesday.

Watershed moment definition