Let's look on the plus side

Donald Trump has to be given credit for making the Kim Jong-un summit possible even if he didn't achieve any real meaningful breakthrough. Denuclearisation is a long word and sounds good but so does discombobulate and antidisestablishmentarianism. But they mean nothing unless they really do mean something!! So North Korea agreeing to scrap nuclear weapons within three years would have been a fantastic result, or even an agreement to fix a timetable for talks about scrapping all of North Korea's nuclear weapons would have been an achievement. Nothing like that came out of the summit discussions but that word denuclearisation cropped up a lot. Nevertheless Trump and Kim Jong-un sat in the same room together, they chatted for 40 minutes with only interpreters present and they didn't fight each other or hurl insults or storm out in a temper, all of which is good news. And Trump deserves credit, even though it was actually Kim who started the process off by inviting the US president for a meeting. If the meeting makes war less likely - horrific war involving the death of millions - then historic progress has been made. It's not yet of Nobel peace prize proportions. but if the summit leads to a situation in which North Korea begins to look and sound more like South Korea, and nukes are no longer an issue, that is definitely Nobelish. But there's a helluva long way to go. We've been down this path before, with promises of denuclearisation going nowhere. But the face-to-face between Trump and Kim DOES make a huge difference. What is worrying for the moment is that Kim seems to be the one who has made most of the running. Certainly the North Korean state media is going overboard about how the US is going to lift sanctions. If this doesn't happen - and it won't yet and possibly won't for a long time - disillusion will set in fast. Then I anticipate the rhetoric will start all over again, with Kim's spokesmen mouthing off about how Trump has failed to honour his pledges. The next few months will tell whether this historic summit will lead to a genuinely new era or just another potentially dangerous disappointment.