President Donald Trump is on his way to Vietnam today for the second summit between the United States and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
Trump goes into the meeting seemingly at odds with members of his own cabinet and intelligence community about the state of the North Korean nuclear program and the goals a summit can accomplish. Following the first meeting last June, Trump declared that North Korea was "no longer a nuclear threat" — a conclusion his Secretary of State flatly contradicted in an interview over the weekend. A January report from leaders of the intelligence community expressed skepticism that North Korea would ever agree to fully denuclearize.
Joining Boston Public Radio to share his take on what Americans can expect from the second meeting was Charles Sennott, a news analyst at WGBH and founder of The GroundTruth Project.
"The greatest expectation I think we have of this is we actually have an end of conflict agreement, we actually get some steps forward, and that will be good for everyone," Sennott said Monday.
However, both camps are going back into agreements having made little to no progress since their last talks — and may not even agree on the basic terms.
"The worry — the worry that's expressed within his own security team — is that North Korea is not living up even to the kind words that were professed around denuclearization, and there's a complete disconnect of what that means," Sennott said.
But while Sennott was skeptical that anything substantive would come on the denuclearization front, he believes symbolic progress is possible.
"I think the hope we can have is that there will be something symbolic, and that matters," Sennott said.
