Trump-Kim summit: president says US 'will be stopping the war games' – live

The Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland wonders what candidate Trump would have made of the Singapore agreement after his bellicose rhetoric about Obama’s Iran deal.

The Iran deal, which Trump regularly denounced as “horrible” and from which he withdrew last month, consisted of 110 pages of detailed arrangements – including the deployment of International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors, cameras, seals and the like – to verify Tehran’s fulfilment of its nuclear promises. The Singapore text, which barely runs to a page and a half, does not so much as breathe the word “verifiable”. Indeed, Trump could not even get a commitment from Kim to basic transparency, to disclose the scope of North Korea’s current nuclear capacity, both the weapons it has and its manufacturing capability. How can the world know what Pyongyang has got rid of if it doesn’t know what it has?

Michael H Fuchs, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and a former deputy assistant secretary of state for east Asian and Pacific affairs, says Kim appears to be leaving Singapore with a spring in his step while Trump left with very little.

Writing in the Guardian he says:

The vague joint statement – much less detailed than either the 1994 Agreed Framework or the 2005 Six-Party statement – contains no specific commitments by North Korea. No commitment to inspections or verification. No commitment to interim steps along the path to denuclearization. There’s not even a commitment to continue a freeze on nuclear and missile testing.

Diplomacy with North Korea requires skepticism. North Korea has long ignored the demands of the international community to give up its nuclear programs, its aggressive behavior, and to end its systemic human rights violations. All previous diplomatic agreements failed to get rid of North Korea’s nuclear programs.

Diplomacy with Donald Trump requires skepticism. Today, Trump is heralding an historic deal, but tomorrow could decide he’s done with diplomacy – just days before this summit Trump agreed to a communique with the leaders of the G-7, then withdrew his support hours later. With Trump, always take events one day at a time.

Here’s the action-movie trailer style video Trump played to journalists and Kim at the summit.

Guardian film critic Peter Bradshaw is not impressed and thinks we have seen this movie before.

The point of any film’s trailer is to whet the audience’s appetite and give them an idea of what sort of film it is – without spoilers. Is this what A Story of Opportunity does? We’re getting sold an exciting action-adventure in which the good guys (America) convince the bad guys (North Korea) to come over the side of decency. But it could be more like Wag the Dog, Barry Levinson’s 1997 satire, starring Robert De Niro and Dustin Hoffman, about cynical politicos who concoct a big foreign sideshow to distract everyone’s attention from problems on the home front. At any rate, it looks weirdly boring.

The UK’s former foreign secretary Jack Straw said today’s summit was “genuinely historic”.

He told BBC Radio 4’s World at One programme: “The difference now between this and previous agreements is that these two leaders have put their own personalities and leadership positions on the line in order to secure a lasting agreement.”

Straw added:

There are some very big questions, particularly about the United States’ nuclear assets, most of which are not land-based. There is going to be an almighty discussion with the North Koreans about how far the US moves and undertakes to keep out of a large area around the Korean peninsula, it owns nuclear submarines.

That said this is genuinely historic. Kim Jong-un has got to be seen to deliver. Although this is a hereditary dictatorship he has got a backyard he has got to worry about. If the political establishment in North Korea and ultimately the North Korea people think that nothing much is being delivered they’re going to start getting very shirty about this.

The other thing that Donald Trump has to watch is that the North Koreans have a history of straightforwardly lying about what they are intending to do.

Ensuring that there is proper and effective verification is going to be critical.

Trump is returning home, but his secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, is travelling to South Korea and China to work on the so far absent detail of how to denuclearise the Korean peninsula.

Pompeo also picks out his highlights from the talks: North Korea’s commitment on the remains of prisoners of war; human rights; religious freedom and Japanese abductees.

Dr John Nilsson-Wright, senior research fellow on the Asia-Pacific Programme at the Chatham House, thinktank agrees that Trump has conceded more than he secured in return from Kim.

Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s World at One programme he said the agreement was ambiguous about what denuclearisation meant. He added: “Donald Trump has given quite an important concession by suspending those joint exercises.”

And Nilsson-Wright cautioned against reading too much into Trump’s praise for Kim.

He said: “We know that Donald Trump is pretty fickle in terms of his relationships, even with members of his own cabinet. He’d often in the past talked about special relationships, getting on with people, only later to change his position completely.”

He also suggested that Trump had oversold the agreement.

“Hats off to him he is an extraordinarily good salesman when it comes to emphasising the positive, but detail still remain to be finalised.

“Without sufficient trust, why would the North Koreans give up the one asset that protects them from a potential attack from a hostile power? This personal chemistry between the two men, if that’s what it is, is a useful first step, but sceptics would say that North Korea’s track record is not one of coming on board fully with these sorts of agreement. What Chairman Kim wants more than anything is time and he seems to have got that. This agreement unlike the April 27th North/South agreement includes no specific dates, no specific timetable no specific agreements on verification, on the arrival of inspectors.

“Donald Trump said in his press conference that he wasn’t able to get that detail. That is an extraordinary concession. It proves that for all of his much-vaunted negotiating prowess he hasn’t be able to solidify something that most sober-minded observers would say is essential.”

Trump was “hoodwinked” at the summit into suspending military exercises and secured very little in return, according to the New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff who has spent time in North Korea.

He writes:

The most remarkable aspect of the joint statement was what it didn’t contain. There was nothing about North Korea freezing plutonium and uranium programs, nothing about destroying intercontinental ballistic missiles, nothing about allowing inspectors to return to nuclear sites, nothing about North Korea making a full declaration of its nuclear program, nothing about a timetable, nothing about verification, not even any clear pledge to permanently halt testing of nuclear weapons or long-range missiles.

Kim seems to have completely out-negotiated Trump, and it’s scary that Trump doesn’t seem to realize this. For now Trump has much less to show than past negotiators who hammered out deals with North Korea like the 1994 Agreed Framework, which completely froze the country’s plutonium program with a rigorous monitoring system ...

For now at least, Trump seems to have been snookered into the same kind of deeply frustrating diplomatic process with North Korea that he has complained about, but that is far better than war.

Even so, it’s still bewildering how much Trump gave and how little he got. The cancellation of military exercises will raise questions among our allies, such as Japan, about America’s commitment to those allies.

The former Republican presidential hopeful Senator Marco Rubio has praised Trump for raising human rights at the summit.

But Rubio, a member of the Senate committee on foreign relations, admitted to concerns about how diplomacy with North Korea will turn out.

Britain’s foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, who was recorded last week approvingly imagining Trump leading Brexit negotiations, has welcomed the summit in Singapore.

Downing Street has joined the chorus of cautious welcome to the summit from the international community.

Theresa May’s spokesman said North Korea’s commitment to denuclearisation is a signal that Pyongyang has finally heeded the message, according to Reuters.

John Everard, the UK’s former ambassador to North Korea, says Kim Jong-un has emerged as the big winner from the summit, citing Trump’s commitment to end war games.

Kim will hail the summit as a “great triumph”, Everard told Sky News. He said:

He will claim that he, his genius, his diplomatic nous have brought the president of the United States to the negotiating table. He will say, rightly enough, that he has been the first member of the dynasty to actually sit with a US president and be treated as an equal. This guy is on a roll.

Kim Jong-un has scored a major major coup in this summit. All that he needed from it was the photo images, to be seen to be treated as an equal by the President of the United States. The rest was secondary.

The declaration suggests he didn’t get that much out of the summit. It was only later, during President Trump’s press conference that we learned almost casually that the US is now going to suspend the joint military exercises with South Korea, to which the North Koreans have so long objected. So another big win by Kim Jong-un.

From the US point of view, Everard dismissed the agreement as “rather flimsy”.

He said: “All we have is President Trump’s word that Kim Jong-un is serious and a rather flimsy joint statement signed by the two people that doesn’t really tell us anything very much.”

He pointed out that the commitment to denuclearisation had already been agreed in April.

“Not only was it announced at the inter-Korean summit. It has been standard North Korean doctrine for many years. But notice the phrasing, it talks about ‘denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula’ not just of denuclearisation just of North Korea. In the North Korean mind that means that not just North Korea surrenders its nuclear weapons, but also that the possibility of a nuclear strike against North Korea by other countries, notably the United States, is also removed. So the United States will have to take some fairly stringent measures to limit its ability to hit North Korea. I’m not sure just how far Donald Trump has realised what he has signed.”