There is no doubt about the fact that the dust has finally settled on the Donald Trump-Kim Jong-un historic summit. There is, therefore, no harm in making an attempt to figure out what was ultimately achieved. There is also no doubt about the fact that the US President has made a stunning concession to the North Korean leader at a summit, the first between a sitting US president and a North Korean leader, which materialized in stark contrast to a flurry of North Korean nuclear and missile tests and angry exchanges of insults between Trump and Kim last year and fuelled worries about the outbreak of a nuclear war. "We will be stopping the war games which will save us a tremendous amount of money, unless and until we see the future negotiation is not going along like it should. But we'll be saving a tremendous amount of money, plus I think it's very provocative," Trump was quoted as saying. But Trump's decision has not only left Japan and South Korea in a state of bewilderment but also the Pentagon as his announcement has marked a dramatic reversal from the US' past rejection of China's "freeze-for-freeze" proposal, which called for an end to the military exercises in exchange for a cease to North Korean weapons tests. Many analysts, including one of the celebrated writers and broadcast journalists in the US, Fareed Zakaria, have been outraged by Trump who, according to them, has embraced North Korea's rhetoric. Zakaria, in his op-ed for the Washington Post, argues that "[T]he most striking elements of Trump's initiative were not simply that he lavished praise on the North Korean dictator, Kim Jong-un, but also that he announced the cancellation of military exercises with South Korea, adopting North Korea's own rhetoric by calling them "provocative"."
Although the US President, who is widely known for his 'penchant for unpredictability', tried to create an impression of a victor in Singapore, numerous analysts believe that his counterpart Kim has indeed made some gains, however modest or tangible. In other words, they argue that the real winners are China or North Korea, or both. It is quite interesting to note that Israel, one of the US' principal allies which is not situated anywhere in the Pacific but in the Middle East, has raised questions over Trump's way of doing diplomacy differently and his upbeat assessment of the Singapore summit. A classified Israeli report makes a point of noting that a brief document signed by Trump and Kim fails to commit the North to "full, verifiable, irreversible denuclearization" which has long been Washington's position. The Israeli response to the Trump-Kim summit seems to have generated an impression that the US President had actually held talks with Hasan Rouhani of Iran, not Kim of North Korea. It is needless to mention that Israel has always been one of the principal opponents of Iranian nuclear talks.
Be that as it may, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un therefore owes it to Beijing insofar as the phenomenal enhancement in his stature in a matter of weeks and months is concerned. Since January, Kim has met the Chinese President Xi Jinping twice, the South Korean President Moon Jae-in, the leadership of Singapore and, finally the US President Donald Trump. His stature has enhanced immensely. That China is fast emerging as one of the only two countries in the post-Cold War era to effectively check, if not challenge, the growing ascendancy of the only superpower in the post-Cold War world and China does it in a highly subtle or so delicate or precise manner as to be difficult to analyze or describe. The former 'Middle Kingdom' has ultimately emerged as a strong country to influence balancing the process which determines the real goals of participants and their strength of motivation, although Beijing's balancing behaviour remains fraught with conceptual ambiguities and competing theoretical and empirical claims. Kim has emerged as a clear beneficiary of China's balancing behaviour largesse.