after long and painful negotiations

and they've fallen apart before.

So, the first expectation should be nothing will change

because in the past nothing has changed.

If, for some reason, they do reach some sort of

stable peace agreement, then I think we'll see

some reduction of the military assets on both sides.

You need some pullback of the troops from the border.

The other big thing we'll see is,

and this could be, you know, the real change,

is a much more back and forth, open travel between North Korea and South Korea.

Already there are limited abilities for families

in the South to visit families in the North,

but what will be really dramatic is if

anyone in the North can visit the South, which doesn't happen in a legal sense right now.

What seem kind of minor things,

allowing people to visit each other,

would be a really dramatic change

and would change the whole dynamic of the Korean peninsula.

The summit highlights that this is mainly

a North Korean-South Korean thing,

but Korea has always had outsiders involved

in their internal politics and that's not different here.

And so, China and the United States

both have their own interests.

The United States' interest I think is pretty clear.

United States wants denuclearization,

they want North Korea to give up

their nuclear weapons completely,

dismantle them and so that they can't restart it again.

China also wants denuclearization,

so in theory everyone wants the same thing.

But China also does not want to see North Korea

become too far under the influence of

South Korea or the United States because

North Korea is a traditional ally of China,

and also it's a buffer state between South Korea and the United States.

But other than that, China does actually want

North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons as well.

In a sense, everyone sort of has the same goal.

It's just China doesn't have the same urgency

as the United States does because

North Korea is not threatening China,

it's threatening South Korea and the United States.

When we talk about changing the dynamic on

the Korean peninsula so that South Korea, North Korea

are more interconnected and become closer to each other,

there I think China doesn't fully support

complete reconciliation.

They're happy to have reduction of tensions

but they're not happy to have North Korea

become too close to the other countries.

It seems crazy to talk about,

given where we were last year,

where we were worried about President Trump

starting a nuclear war with North Korea.

But I think that it's true that if somehow,

North Korea was normalized in the sense that,

say they gave up their nuclear weapons

in a verifiable way so that the U.S. was satisfied,

and they reached a peace arrangement

where they normalize relations with South Korea,

those two steps would be a massive change in international relations,

changing the dynamic of northeast Asia.

That's worthy of a Nobel Peace Prize.

Then the only question is who deserves the credit

and if it works out, it'll be everyone.

It'll be China, it'll be United States,

it'll be North Korea and South Korea most of all.

And it would be remarkable if it did.

But history tells us that it won't happen.