Donald Trump, Kim Jong-un, North Korea’s nuclear weapons – and a tiny village caught in the middle

In a striking symbol of a firming anti-Western bloc, North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un made his debut on a shared global stage alongside Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian leader Vladimir Putin at a military parade in Beijing this month, giving the nuclear pariah a stamp of legitimacy from its powerful friends.

Meanwhile, tens of thousands of troops have patrolled either side of the DMZ for 70 years on high alert, their countries still technically in a state of war, both claiming to be the sole legitimate government of the whole Korean peninsula.

“We have always lived with uncertainty,” village leader Han Ho-hyeon, 64, says. He moved to Yugok-ri as a child as part of the first generation of residents. But it is the stifling daily presence of South Korea’s military forces that bothers villagers the most.

“We’ve endured 50-plus years of oppression. Now, no interference is our hope. No interference from soldiers, no checkpoints,” Han says, the interview monitored from a few metres away by two South Korean soldiers.

Military control has been a constant feature of life since Yugok-ri was set up as a strategic frontline village in 1973 by authoritarian president Park Chung-hee to show off South Korea’s rural development and economic progress to the North.

More than two hours’ drive from Seoul, it is inside the Civilian Control Line, a perimeter guarded by a military checkpoint that the public cannot cross unless they have been granted permission by South Korea’s defence force. Even family of residents must request access. This masthead was granted special approval to visit Yugok-ri to speak with locals about life on the border.

Just outside the village, a South Korean military guard perched on a hilly outcrop stares directly into the North’s territory. The guard also maintains a looming presence over his side’s farmland, where locals keep crops of soybeans, chillies, rice and tomatoes.

In the early days of Yugok-ri’s settlement, the North Korean side was more advanced and a neon sign on the mountain boasted of its free education and healthcare, Cho recalls. The villagers would use handheld speakers to trade messages with their neighbours over the border, each boasting of the food they had eaten that day.

“At first, they lived better than us, but we won with food,” Cho says. “I don’t consider them foreigners. From the hill, you can see North Korea. It makes you wish for reunification.”

Shifting geopolitics hangs over any future Trump-Kim meeting

Along the roadside on the drive through Cheorwon county to reach Yugok-ri, newly strung banners signpost the Lee government’s ban on balloon launches used by activists and defector groups to scatter anti-Kim regime leaflets over the border.

It is another example of the goodwill measures implemented on Lee’s watch since he took office in June for a five-year term, with a promise to reverse the hardline approach of his conservative predecessor, Yoon Suk Yeol, while maintaining a policy goal of denuclearising North Korea. These efforts have included repatriating six North Korean fishermen rescued in southern waters and a decision to end the public release of the government’s annual report into human rights abuses in North Korea.

But far from making headway, Pyongyang has repeatedly rejected the rapprochement. Kim Yo-jong, the sister and spokesperson of the North Korean leader, has described Seoul’s push for dialogue as a “delusion and a pipe dream” and Lee himself as “not a great figure who can change the tide of history”.

Lee conceded this month that North Korea’s attitude “remains cold”.

“Although there has been no special progress, we are constantly making efforts,” he told a press conference to mark his first 100 days in office.

Lee has taken the country’s reins at a time when the prospect of a unified Korea, a goal embedded in South Korea’s constitution, has arguably never been more distant.

In January 2024, Kim Jong-un officially abandoned North Korea’s peaceful unification vision, overturning decades of propaganda efforts promoted by his father and grandfather towards this aim, and instead denounced South Korea as the “principal enemy”.

This year, Kim has shrugged off North Korea’s hermit kingdom reputation and directly intervened in world affairs, first by sending troops to Russia’s frontline war against Ukraine, and then by stepping into the global spotlight at the military parade in Beijing.

“This is the diplomatic heyday for North Korea,” Rachel Minyoung Lee, a former North Korea analyst for the US government and a senior fellow at the Stimson Centre, a US think tank, says.

By attending the parade, Lee says, Kim wanted to send “a very clear message to home and abroad that North Korea is not only a player, but a leader in an effort to build an alternative global order side-by-side China and Russia”.

The appearance alongside Xi and Putin also signalled acceptance of the one thing Kim wants more than anything from the international community: official recognition of North Korea’s status as a nuclear power.

The North views recognition as a pathway to entry into the international system, as well as to sanctions relief and an end to US-led efforts to force it to completely denuclearise. It sees a model in India and Pakistan, which developed nuclear weapons outside a global treaty ban but are not isolated from the international community.

Many analysts have long warned that this could trigger an arms race in Asia, forcing South Korea and Japan to reconsider their non-nuclear stances, while rolling over to a hostile and untrustworthy regime.

It is uncontentious that North Korea has nuclear weapons. US and South Korean experts estimate it has 50 to 90 nuclear warheads and has been testing intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of reaching the US mainland.

South Korea’s Lee has signalled a shift in Seoul’s approach by acknowledging this reality. Despite heavy sanctions, Pyongyang is now capable of producing 10 to 20 nuclear weapons a year, he told a forum in Washington last month, adding “we cannot solve the problem by simply suppressing North Korea”.

The world now awaits the ultimate wild card: the potential resumption of face-to-face talks between Kim and US President Donald Trump on North Korea’s nuclear program.

“The North Korea nuclear issue depends heavily on President Trump’s active stance and will,” Kim Yong-hyun, an expert in North Korean studies at Seoul’s Dongguk University, says.

Trump is keen to meet with Kim, a desire he restated only last month while hosting Lee in the Oval Office. He remains the only sitting US president to have met a North Korean leader, though his three meetings with Kim during his previous presidential term collapsed without a breakthrough at the Hanoi Summit in 2018.

This time around, Pyongyang has not ruled out talks, but it has made clear its participation hinges on acceptance of its nuclear weapons program – a major break from the last talks, and a condition that would limit discussions to arms control at a time when North Korea’s leverage has considerably increased.

“Personally, I still have good memories of the current US President Trump,” Kim said in a speech to Pyongyang’s rubber-stamp parliament, carried by official state media on Monday.

He said there was “no reason not to face the US” if it dropped its “vain denuclearisation fixation and accepts reality”, adding that North Korea would “never lay down our nuclear weapons”.

“The world already knows well what the United States does after forcing other countries to give up their nuclear weapons and disarm,” Kim said.

North Korea now has practically everything it wants from Russia and China, says Lee from the Stimson Centre, noting that both countries have helped North Korea evade sanctions.

It leaves a question mark over what the US has to gain from a new round of negotiations and the price North Korea would demand for limiting its weapons program.

“Look at how much the North Korean nuclear threat has changed,” Sidney Seiler, a former US envoy for nuclear talks with North Korea, told a Centre for Strategic and International Studies panel discussion this year.

“There’s no way they’re going back to the table and putting anything of significance that would attract us, without high demands of us that I think we would just find unacceptable.”

For Trump, a president preoccupied with winning the Nobel Peace Prize – and with ceasefire deals between Russia and Ukraine, and Israel and Hamas seemingly beyond reach for now – the optics of a revived North Korea-US summit and even a pared-back nuclear deal might be enough to restart talks.

Unification a fading dream in Yugok-ri

By midday, locals in Yugok-ri have retreated from the heat, leaving its handful of streets empty. Outside their homes, mounds of freshly harvested chillies dry under the sun.

Village life lacks the vibrancy of other rural communities – the daily flea markets or festivals – but there is a modest church, some utilitarian outdoor exercise equipment, and a two-storey communal hall featuring a shared kitchen.

The isolation and military control have helped drive away younger generations, who have left for better jobs in the cities, and, over the years, the population has dwindled to about 90 from a peak of several hundred after it was established.

“This village will gradually disappear as older residents pass away, as is the case for rural areas nationwide,” Cho says. “Personally, I’m very attached to it. Once here, you don’t want to leave. It feels like family.”

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For now, the fading dream of unification lives on among Yugok-ri’s elderly villagers, a sign of the widening generational divide between old and young Koreans who, regular polling shows, increasingly see it as unnecessary or undesirable.

But Han, the village head, has little hope that President Lee will deliver any lasting change and sees his rapprochement attempts as part of a doomed cycle of history.

“When [former South Korean president] Moon Jae-in was in office, it sounded like reunification would come any moment. But then, when the conservatives came in, it felt like war could break out any moment, and people lived in anxiety,” Han says.

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Now that a liberal government is in office again, the loudspeakers are gone, but other strictures remain.

“The entry and exit controls [into Yugok-ri] have only gotten stricter,” he says. “I don’t think I’ll see reunification within my lifetime. To even speak of reunification feels premature right now.”

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