Can Trump and Kim Jong Un pick up where they left off?

South Korean media have been filled with discussion about what Donald Trump’s return to power in the United States may mean for the Korean Peninsula.

High on the list is the possibility that Trump will rekindle his bromance with North Korean autocrat Kim Jong Un, picking up the threads of a bargain that broke down at the Hanoi Summit in late February 2019.

Trump himself fueled that speculation with remarks on the campaign trail. “It’s nice to get along when somebody has a lot of nuclear weapons or otherwise,” Trump said about Kim in July. “He’d like to see me back, too​. I think he misses me​, if you want to know the truth.”

Veteran officials, including former Trump administration officials who were engaged in the talks during his first term, anticipate that the president-elect will want to return to those negotiations at some point.

“It’s not a day one issue, probably not even a year one issue, but [Trump] will certainly seek to re-engage with Kim Jong Un,” former Trump senior defense official Randall Schriver said on November 21 at the Hudson Institute.

Renewal of talks “will have different contours to it than the first term, and the two summits in Singapore and Hanoi,” Schriver predicted. The second time around, Trump will likely offer to discuss a broader range of issues other than the goal of denuclearization, from economic aid to officially ending the Korean War – an issue that was prominent early in the previous talks.

The bottom line, however, is Trump’s own belief that he came tantalizingly close to declaring he had forged peace in Korea. “President Trump wasn’t happy that he didn’t get a deal,” said Schriver, who thinks the president-elect understands that the nuclear issue is an extraordinarily difficult one