After two meetings with North Korean dictator and mass murderer Kim Jong Un, Donald Trump’s excellent art-of-the-deal skills have generated a greatly elevated presence for Kim on the world stage, an end to the joint U.S.–South Korea military exercises that Kim hated, and a general relaxation of the willingness of other nations to join in a blanket sanction against Kim’s authoritarian regime. In exchange, Trump got some “beautiful love letters” and probably a cut of the Trump–Kim commemorative coins.
Through the whole period of the two summits, Trump has claimed personal victory based on the fact that North Korea stopped testing nuclear weapons and missiles. However, the reason for the first has more to do with the fact that North Korea’s testing facility collapsed, and the second is likely that, after firing multiple missiles into the Pacific, Kim had nothing more to prove and nothing new to test.
But that appears to be changing. The Stimson Center’s 38 North project has announced that, after what appeared to be the idling of the Sohae rocket launch facility, satellite imagery shows that North Korea has resumed work and is making rapid improvements to that site. Using commercial satellites, 38 North was able to compare images showing that improvements on buildings and facilities at Sohae started sometime “between February 16 and March 2, 2019.” Those dates don’t just show North Korea building up in the aftermath of the failed meeting with Trump. It shows it likely readying for new launches even before Trump arrived to meet Kim in the nation he’d been dodging for 50 years. In fact, photos showing activity at the site were taken on the same day that Trump reported “very productive” talks with Kim.
Improvements include laying new rails between an assembly building and a launch pad to facilitate bringing missiles out for launch, along with improvements to an engine test stand. From the nature of the items being improved, and the speed at which improvements are being made, it seems that North Korea does have a new missile to test. Soon.
The actions on the ground don’t show that a missile is actually on its way to the pad, but they do show that North Korea isn’t just replacing existing systems, but is improving on them. It’s exactly what would be expected if the next missile off that pad was planned to be one that had a greater range than previous launches—such as an extended-range ICBM that could threaten more of the United States.
At the latest summit, Trump was reportedly ready to prove his progress by signing a “peace declaration.” That declaration would not have been an actual peace treaty, because it wouldn’t have included South Korea or China, who are also signatories to the armistice that ended active fighting on the Korean peninsula in 1953. It also wouldn’t have been backed by any real evidence of peace, as Trump was willing to affix his scrawl even while Kim refused to provide so much as a count of either the number of nuclear weapons his government has built, or the number of missiles available to carry them.
The declaration was mostly just something for Trump to wave around to show that he had a win. And in exchange for this not-treaty, Kim would have gotten an even greater relaxation of sanctions, along with other concessions that are not quite clear. The plan eventually fell apart. Trump has indicated that the reason he shut down talks before lunch on the final day of the get-together was that Kim was being too demanding about the U.S. ending all sanctions instead of just some. Kim has denied making such a demand.
Now, with the news that North Korea was working to improve its missile test facility in ways that were clearly visible while Trump was in Hanoi talking about how he and Kim “fell in love,” it seems more likely that someone on Trump’s team finally made it clear to him that he was being played for a fool. The wonder isn’t that Trump won’t admit this. The wonder is that anyone managed to get it across to him in a way that got past his “love.”