North Korean Missile Crisis Response: Smart Power

We all remember the big ol' nuclear scare of 2018, and how it was solved, and almost ended in all of us being wiped off the face of the planet. I'll be going over how we responded to that and why I consider it to be smart power. We'll start with one half of smart power, the hard part. Hard power in this situation comes from the US essentially telling them not to do anything, though Trump's 'eloquent' words about his nuclear button weren't very smart, they certainly were hard. Most of the early part of the crisis was basically us telling North Korea not to make more missiles and them doing it anyway. The soft power element came in March 2018, when Trump first agreed to a US/North Korea summit. This is soft power due to the fact that the US is using its power to try and pressure diplomatic relations. The threats of military strikes from the US pressured North Korea into accepting the Summit. This semi-diplomatic relationship would continue for quite a while, it would even seem to rub off on the North Korean leader as he would, next month, take the first-ever visit of a North Korean leader to South Korea. The relationship would take a weird turn when Trump pulled out of a summit in Singapore citing unnatural anger and frustration from Kim Jong Un. In the following years, there would be plenty of accomplishments on the journey to a nuclear-free Korea. In my opinion, the reason why Kim Jong Un would've pledged all these promises is due to the pressuring of the United States, as well as their newfound diplomatic relationship. To this date, there has been no true conclusion to the nuclear problem, but it seems that the US is continuing to search for diplomacy with North Korea. All we here can hope for is that we don't end up as melted piles of nuclear ash.

Source: https://www.cfr.org/timeline/north-korean-nuclear-negotiations