Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, arrived in Vietnam early Tuesday, as he prepared to meet with President Trump to discuss a range of thorny diplomatic issues, including the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. However the summit meeting turns out, Mr. That is partly because Vietnam and North Korea have a long friendship that includes cooperation during the Vietnam War, as well as complex relationships with China, their mutual neighbor. His movements and comments in Vietnam may offer a glimpse of whether he agrees.
Kim arrived by armored train at the China-Vietnam border around a. Hanoi time, and got into a motorcade heading south toward the capital. Kim may go in Vietnam, and the political and historical symbolism that would lie just below the surface.
Kim traveled from North Korea to the Vietnamese border via China in a famously slow, bulletproof train. The train arrived in Dong Dang, one of the places Chinese troops crossed into Vietnam in , setting off a brief but bloody border war. That war came during a strained period in Vietnamese-North Korean relations. It would later join China in providing material and personnel to North Vietnam for its war against the United States.
The prince later spent years splitting his time between villas in Beijing and Pyongyang. Relations between Vietnam and China, meanwhile, were not restored until From the border, Mr. Kim is expected to travel through several northern Vietnamese provinces. One would be Bac Giang, where hundreds of North Korean Air Force personnel were deployed during the Vietnam War β a symbol of trust and cooperation between the two countries. Their remains were repatriated from Vietnam to North Korea in , but their graves still stand in a Bac Giang rice paddy.
From Bac Giang, Mr. Kim might visit the Samsung factory this week. In Hanoi, the Vietnamese capital, Mr. Kim is expected to meet with Mr. Trump on Wednesday and Thursday at one of two downtown venues. One is the Government Guest House, the former residence of the colonial governor of Tonkin, the name for northern Vietnam during the French colonial period.
