Seoul, South Korea
—
As President Donald Trump danced on the tarmac in Malaysia, had an audience with Japan’s Emperor in Tokyo, and accepted a golden crown in South Korea, one important question lingered: Will he hold a surprise meeting with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un?
Mr. Trump has publicly stated on several occasions that he would like to meet Mr. Kim while in the region. This could have been a made-for-TV sequel to Trump’s surprise visit to the demilitarized zone (DMZ) in 2019, when he made history as the first sitting US president to set foot on North Korean soil.
In the end it didn’t come together. And just a few hundred miles away in Pyongyang, it was as if Trump’s visit had never happened.
There were no headlines. There were no TV news reports. There was no mention of the US president’s offer to “work hard with Kim Jong Un” to bring peace to the Korean peninsula. North Korea’s state media remained silent even as Trump’s entourage traveled across Asia and speculation swirled about a possible reunion between the two leaders.
Justin Martel, an American filmmaker and manager of Young Pioneer Tours, had just returned from an eight-day trip to Pyongyang, where he was attending an international film festival that happened to coincide with much of President Trump’s Asian tour.
He said most of the people he spoke to in Pyongyang didn’t even know Trump was in the area, and no one knew Trump wanted to reunite with Kim.
“They weren’t negative about it,” he told CNN. “They didn’t have too high expectations either. They just reiterated what Kim Jong-un has said recently: Kim Jong-un has warm memories of President Trump, but politics is different from emotion.”
Martell said the tone was not hostile, just indifferent. “It was more or less like, ‘This is how we feel right now. If that happens, great. If not, not much has changed.’
This bland indifference marks a marked change from 2018 and 2019, when President Trump and Kim Jong Un’s summits, first in Singapore, then Hanoi, and later in the Demilitarized Zone, captivated both countries’ capitals and dominated global headlines.
Fast forward to 2025, and President Trump’s proposal hardly registered. But there’s a good reason for that.
Just last month, Kim stood alongside China’s Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin in a historic military parade in central Beijing, in an unprecedented and historic show of solidarity with the West.
Mr. Kim now has Moscow on arms deals and oil, Beijing on trade, and a domestic narrative of resilience under sanctions and heroism on the battlefield in Ukraine.
Frankly, shaking hands with the president of the United States no longer carries the weight it once did.
President Trump said his failure to meet with Kim was a “timing issue.”
“We never got to talk because…we were so busy,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One on Thursday after leaving South Korea to complete a tour of Asia.
North Korean Foreign Minister Choe Song-hui was also absent this week on his own diplomatic mission. She first flew to Russia to meet with President Putin to discuss strengthening ties, and then spoke at an international forum in Belarus.
That made it logistically impossible for North Korea’s top diplomat to help arrange a last-minute meeting between Kim and Trump, as Choe did in 2019. That time, Choi helped organize the meeting at the demilitarized zone, hours after President Trump posted on social media that he wanted to meet with Kim.
Instead, North Korea test-fired a cruise missile on the western side of the peninsula ahead of Trump’s visit and a summit meeting with South Korean President Lee Jae-myung.
But as Martel’s conversations in Pyongyang suggest, timing may be only part of the problem. North Korea may no longer feel a strong need to say “yes.”
Kim has made the conditions clear. He said he would only meet with Trump if Washington abandoned what he called an “irrational obsession” with denuclearization. In a speech in September, he said he still had “fond memories” of President Trump, but that his country would “never give up its nuclear weapons to escape sanctions.”
In other words, the deal President Trump proposed six years ago to trade sanctions relief for arms control is no longer on the table. North Korea wants to be recognized as a nuclear state.
What Martel saw in Pyongyang underscores why.
North Korean elites in Pyongyang, whose support is essential to maintaining the state’s stability despite Kim’s near-absolute power, appear to enjoy a higher standard of living than before, with increased access to modern technology and amenities. Sanctions have had little impact on life, at least for the elites.
South Korean President Lee also appears to be aware of the difficulty of bringing Kim to the negotiating table.
Lee said in an interview with me this week that while President Trump can act as a “peacemaker,” he hopes South Korea can act as a “pacemaker” and create conditions for dialogue that remain “difficult to achieve directly.” “If the leaders of the United States and North Korea could suddenly come together, we would welcome such engagement,” Lee said.
High-rise buildings and traffic jams in Hirahattan
Martel had not visited Pyongyang since 2017. He said he was amazed at the capital’s progress over the past eight years, despite sanctions and extreme isolation due to the coronavirus pandemic.
“It used to feel like it was less developed than other parts of the region,” he says. “Right now, to be honest, Pyongyang feels like a very modern city.”
He described futuristic skyscrapers, residents paying with QR codes, new national apps for ordering taxis and food, and social media.
“It used to take 20 minutes, now it takes 40 minutes,” he said of the traffic. It’s so developed that “we kept joking with our Korean guide that this was Heihattan.”
Inside the capital’s new Hwaseong district, he dined at a trendy restaurant serving both Asian and Western cuisine, along with a selection of premium alcoholic beverages. When he visited, all the restaurants were crowded with locals.
Private car ownership was once rare and politically sensitive. They are now so common that they sometimes cause traffic jams in downtown areas. “There seems to be a booming middle class right now,” Martell said.
Even outside the capital, he saw evidence of growth. As I drove two hours north to Mt. Myoka, I noticed a new house under construction. “For farmers too,” he said.
Despite the sanctions, “North Korea appears to be in a much different position than it was 10 years ago,” he said.
At the National Art Museum near Kim Il Sung Square, he saw a new mural commemorating the 80th anniversary of the founding of the Workers’ Party. Near the end, there was a vivid depiction of North Korean soldiers fighting for Russia.
“It’s a large North Korean-style mural depicting soldiers who fought against the Ukrainians and won,” he said.
North Korean films are also evolving. At the Pyongyang International Film Festival, Martel watched the new state-run thriller “Day and Night of Confrontation,” which dramatizes the real-life plot to assassinate Kim Jong Il.
The film featured violence, modern production values, and even brief nudity, all unprecedented in North Korean films. “I’ve certainly never seen a character suffocate to death in a plastic bag in a North Korean movie,” he said, using an abbreviation of North Korea’s official name.
President Trump’s portrait remains ‘front and center’
Despite President Trump’s continued silence on his recent trip to Asia, he has not disappeared from North Korea’s official memory.
Martel’s group was the first Western delegation in years to visit the International Friendship Fair, a vast mountainside museum displaying gifts and artifacts from foreign dignitaries. Taking photos inside the exhibition rooms is strictly prohibited.
“In the section dedicated to Kim Jong-un, there were the expected photos: Putin, Lavrov, Xi Jinping, Dennis Rodman, etc.,” Martel said. “And President Trump was still there, very prominently displayed.”
Based on my experience visiting the country, if the door to future dialogue had truly been closed, the photo would likely have been deleted.
“It’s still pretty much front and center,” Martell said.
President Trump has indicated that he would like to meet Kim the next time he visits Asia. “I plan to visit again, and I will work hard with Kim Jong Un and everyone to bring the situation under control,” he told reporters on Wednesday.
