The North Korea-US summit held earlier this month in Singapore was billed as a moment of history, the day the world changed and one of the world's most frightening games of brinkmanship would be resolved.
The reality is starkly different with longtime watchers in South Korea and further afield writing off the event as a pointless endeavour used by both United States President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un to look good on the homefront. As the dust has settled and delegations have left Singapore, is the world any safer after the sweeping concessions the US has made with little in return?
If the summit and its outcomes occurred under previous president Barack Obama, some have since argued, those on the centre left would be cheering. There appears to be no basis for this claim other than as a 'gotcha' Tweet. The reality is, the summit would never have occurred under another president because no other president — or State Department — would have made the concession of a meeting at all for no apparent gain.
Indeed, a joint statement which promises nothing that has not been said before should be considered a failure given it was the outcome of negotiations made at a head of state level.
Analysts have been quick to point out that president Bill Clinton's administration in 1994 achieved more by including monitoring of nuclear sites. Although this agreement eventually faltered under suspicion North Korea was cheating the system of checks, it did provide enough depth to engender cautious optimism of actual change. This month's agreement does no such thing.
The first point of the statement is telling. It reaffirms a mutual desire to 'establish new US-DPRK relations in accordance with the desire of the peoples of the two countries for peace and prosperity'. The wording itself is nothing new, with commitments to engagement floated previously. But read alongside comments from Trump since, particularly regarding US private firms establishing footholds in North Korea, could this be the moment of fruition?
North Korean media last week reported Trump had promised Kim sanctions would be dropped. While the US State Department is yet to make a statement on sanctions, it does give an indication of the closed-doors conversation the pair held in Singapore.
"That Kim was greeted like a K-Pop star rather than a K-Dictator tells us more about the motives of his attendance than any statement could."
For much of the rest of