Hacker News Reader

Reunification efforts in the late 1990s and early 2000s were complicated by the shift in US Policy from the Clinton to Bush Admin. Clinton's admin wanted to support the so called Sunshine Policy, which favored moving towards reunification.

For the US's part, they agreed to not re apply new sanctions on the North as long as the North continued to operate within the parameters of their Sunshine Policy negotiated with the South. That was what was happening, but then Bush came into office and this policy changed. New sanctions were put upon DPRK and they would eventually be included in the Bush Admin's "Axis of Evil" (Iran, Iraq, and North Korea).

This caused the North to go back on its agreements and the Sunshine Policy as a whole, and did also align with more conservative governments in South Korea.

All that said, I was smiling so big last night seeing the two leaders shaking hands, smiling themselves. A reunification of the 2 Koreas would be an absolute blessing upon the world. Many people in the North and South long to be reunited. Not to mention the ease of so many tensions in SE Asia that would come from 1 Korea.

Not to mention the fact that this can lead to easing the tremendous suffering of the people of North Korea. South Korea is an exciting country that is accomplishing some really cool stuff, and it would be great if the residents of the North to get a chance to participate in growing their prosperity instead of forever starving in a totalitarian nightmare.

Kim Jong-un wasn't the leader of NK from 98-08 as well, fwiw.

1998 had progress in detente between North Korea and the United States, which was not adhered to by either party. (Congress sunk the deal on the end of the US, and North Korea reacted in kind.)

2002-2008 was, if you recall, was the era of the Axis of Evil rhetoric.

> Under Trump, they have good reason to be concerned about the possibility of military force and are taking a more cautious and reconciliatory approach. I think the North Koreans are well aware that militaristic posturing won't get them very far with Trump the way it did with past presidents.

If they did fear Trump, why did they launch rocket after rocket while he threatened them with hell's fury? Trump role in the story appears more to be as an easily antagonalizable president against whom it is easy to show how "strong" you are. It's easier to negotiate from a position of strength than in one which you are thought of as to be inferior.

Kim and Trump are similar enough psychologically that they can have a comfortable dialogue. Kim looked at Obama and saw someone entirely alien. Vice versa, of course. That sort of disconnect existed between past administrations as well. The bluster and insult that is the native tongue of blessed creatures like K and T is a foreign language to most urbane cosmopolitan educated politicians. They recoiled at "Rocket Man". Kim thought to himself, "What an asshole! Finally someone is speaking my language!"

A more plausible explanation would be the that South Korea's Conservative hawkish president Park Geun-hye was replaced by Moon Jae-in who is more open to negotiations with North Korea.

It's early in the process, and it's possible to write off Moon's direct crediting of Trump as a diplomatic nicety. Certainly Moon is doing his part as well. Park was no ogre, however, and she was preceded by a number of other non-ogre SK leaders. Somehow they couldn't do what Moon has, while USA had its finger on the scale of conflict. One suspects that historians in decades to come will enjoy studying the contrasts between Trump and his predecessors, both the real contrasts and those reported in popular media.