HANOI, Vietnam — As President Trump settled into the dining room of a French-colonial hotel in Hanoi on Thursday morning with whom he’d struck the strangest of friendships the chief, already turned stressed.
At a dinner in the Metropole Hotel the night before, mere feet from the bomb shelter where guests took refuge during the Vietnam War, Mr. Kim had resisted what Mr. Trump posed as a grand bargain: North Korea would exchange all its nuclear weapons, material and amenities for an end to the American-led sanctions squeezing its market.
A official later explained this as”a proposal to go big,” a wager by Mr. Trump that his force of character, and view of himself as a consummate dealmaker, would succeed where three previous presidents had neglected.
But Mr. Trump’s deal was basically the same deal that the United States has pushed and the North has rejected — for a quarter-century. Intelligence agencies had warned himpublicly, Mr. Kim wouldn’t be eager to give up the arsenal entirely. North Korea itself had stated that it would only proceed.
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