Trump and Kim:- The meeting the world’s been waiting for

The president of the United States meeting North Korea’s leader will be, diplomatically speaking, A Huge Deal.

What will the two men be talking about?
Will their meeting make the world a safer place?
What impact will it have on the lives of North Koreans?
Will it mean Mr Trump and Mr Kim get a Nobel Peace Prize?
And what has ice-skating got to do with it?

Why all the fuss?

This is about the leaders of two countries with nuclear weapons saying they want to try to patch things up. Until recently they were threatening to fire these weapons on each other.

North Korea has been a pariah state for decades, because of its relentless pursuit of nuclear weapons and its shocking human rights record.

North Korean leaders have always thought a face-to-face meeting with a US president would mean they were finally being taken seriously.

But the US – and most other countries – have long refused to engage with North Korea unless it mended its ways.

That all changed earlier this year when Donald Trump responded to an apparent olive branch from Kim Jong-un by saying he’d love to chat.

So this meeting could change the course of history.

Why do the US and North Korea hate each other so much?

It’s complicated, but basically they are political opposites who see each other as an existential threat.

America is a wealthy capitalist democracy. North Korea is an impoverished one-party, totalitarian state, born of the chaos of World War Two which divided the Korean peninsula.

They fought a war in the 1950s, when the North invaded South Korea and the US moved in to back the South.

That war has never been formally ended, just put on hold with a truce. So North and South Korea are, technically, at war.

North Korea developed as an isolationist, one-party state and its leaders decided it needed a full nuclear weapons programme if it was to survive.

 

About Mr Finix 184444 Articles
A prominent young man who graduated from University of Abuja, Studied Bsc. Economics, A Professional Fashion/Commercial Runway Model as well as a Pro-Basketballer...

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