This photo, taken on June 30, 2019, shows then U.S. President Donald Trump (L) shaking hands with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un at the inter-Korean border truce village of Panmunjom. (Image courtesy of Yonhap)
SEOUL, July 1 (Korea Bizwire) — When American B-2 bombers streaked across the sky and obliterated three key nuclear sites in Iran last month, the world watched with a mix of awe and unease. But for one veteran U.S. expert on Korean affairs, the shockwaves from the strike may be felt in a far more unexpected corner of the world — the Korean Peninsula.
Victor Cha, a former White House adviser and current head of Geopolitics and Foreign Policy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), believes that the Iran operation may reopen the door — however narrowly — for another high-stakes diplomatic moment: a possible meeting between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un.
Speaking at a panel discussion hosted by CSIS on Monday, Cha floated the possibility that Trump, who is expected to visit South Korea for the APEC summit in late October, might use the occasion to stage another dramatic encounter at Panmunjom — the symbolic truce village where Trump and Kim famously shook hands in 2019.
“President Trump famously likes his friend in North Korea,” Cha said with a knowing tone. “He’s scheduled to go to APEC in Korea. Who knows what could happen there? He could go up to Panmunjom to meet the North Korean leader again.”
But this time, the stakes and the context would be very different.
Cha emphasized that while the earlier Trump-Kim summits were framed around the goal of denuclearization, any future meeting would likely revolve around security guarantees. After watching Iran’s nuclear sites be bombed into rubble, Kim — who has spent years carefully cultivating a nuclear deterrent — may be thinking more about survival than surrender.
Victor Cha, president of the Geopolitics and Foreign Policy Department at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), speaks during a panel discussion hosted by the Asan Institute for Policy Studies in Seoul on Oct. 17, 2024. (Yonhap)
“In a different context,” Cha noted, “the show of military force by the United States may cause Kim to say, ‘I need some insurance that that doesn’t happen to me.’”
It’s a chilling recalibration. While Washington celebrated the strike as a strategic success, Pyongyang may have read it as a warning — and a vindication.
“If anything,” Cha said, “they’re reaffirmed that they’ve pursued the right path.”
For North Korea, the Iran attack could serve as both a red flag and a roadmap: a reminder that regimes without nukes are vulnerable, and perhaps further justification for keeping — or even expanding — its arsenal. The idea of CVID — the “complete, verifiable, and irreversible denuclearization” of North Korea — may be slipping further out of reach.
“One of the costs of our bombing of Iran,” Cha said bluntly, “is that we may have ended CVID with North Korea.”
Since returning to office, Trump has made headlines for referring to North Korea as a “nuclear power” — a subtle but notable shift that suggests the White House may now lean toward arms control, not disarmament.
For Cha, this shift may be both inevitable and strategic. “The lesson North Korea has taken away,” he said, “is that we need to keep our weapons to avoid massive ordnance penetrators being dropped on North Korea, like they were dropped on Iran.”
And so, paradoxically, a show of force half a world away might soon lead to a show of diplomacy on the Korean Peninsula.
“So for all the wrong reasons,” Cha concluded, “this strike against Iran may bring the North Koreans and the U.S. into negotiations.”
Whether such talks would bring progress — or simply pageantry — remains to be seen. But in a world where symbolism matters, another handshake at the DMZ could once again captivate headlines.
M. H. Lee (mhlee@koreabizwire.com)
