The war melts | The back room of the summit …

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un arrived on Tuesday in Hanoi, capital of Vietnam, after 65 hours of travel on a heavy armored train crossing most of southern China. It is not that the North Korean inherited the atavistic fear of his father Kim Jong Il's planes, which has always refused to take off the feet of the earth and made legendary journeys across Russia and China, always on the train. The slow journey has two interpretations: it is a geopolitical gesture towards the red giant as the economic backer of North Korea, or the message is not to show the world again that to leave his country, Kim has need a plane loaned by the Chinese. The novelty of this side event of the second Kim-Trump Summit was the informal hidden camera that a Japanese television channel had directed against the president of North Korea, who had stopped his train in a rural station to stretch his legs. legs. While he was on the platform with both a relaxed and edgy attitude – of course, he was not seen – someone caught a camera from a window in the process of smoking a cigarette, something that he also once made next to an intercontinental ballistic missile powered by liquid fuel, documented by an official video. And here's the news: never before has the young leader been filmed in an unofficial manner, that is to say, he was not surrounded by that sacred air with which the unique North Korean dynastic communism has invested three generations of Kim with a touch of mysticism

On this platform, the king appears naked in front of the world for the first time, because the large digital wall builds not only around him, but throughout the country has never been punched: no information needs to enter or leave the walls without going through the official sieve. The few tourists who travel see the memory of their camera on their arrival and departure. And there is no telephone or internet contact with the outside. The South Korean philosopher Byung Chul Han theorized the hypermedia-driven "transparency society" governed by a new digital panoptic where mutual control leads to self-control, producing a blinding brightness that cancels all messages, diluting and fragmenting communication in an "infernal noise". "South Korea is the paradigm of this white noise and the north is the other side: a foucaldian panoptic disciplinary control society where an opacity is imposed that does not allow to see, except inwards." This Japanese camera spying a crack was the first crack of the digital wall surrounding a surprise Kim in the privacy of his tiring, already desperate and desperate trip to smoke a pucho.

The greatest hope of this meeting is that, for the first time, these diplomatic negotiations after an escalation that could have erased the Korean peninsula from the map lead to a signed denuclearization agreement. Trump came to start the process without his exuberant wife and with an eye on Venezuela, after 20 hours of flight. Until now, he had been content with little: that Kim had stopped doing nuclear tests, as he had stated before boarding the plane: "I do not do not want to rush anyone " And as soon as he set foot on the land of the winners of his country in 1973, he tweeted the ideal plans of his diplomacy: "Vietnam thrives like few other places on the planet". In North Korea, the same thing would happen very quickly if we stripped it. Its potential is incredible, an unprecedented opportunity in history, for my friend Kim Jong Un. "It is not innocent that this time the neutral ground of the meeting was the Indochinese peninsula, possible economic mirror and long-term politics of the Korean peninsula.

A constant in the world press has always been to lower the price and ridicule Kim Jong Un, whom his "friend" Trump called "chubby", "rocket" and "suicide". But at the moment of the results, the ingenious "friend" Kim returned with his rockets tossed nearly 70 years of aggressive American policy, nothing less than the most brutal president of the Republican presidents and without any casualties in combat . On the other hand, Trump could well win a great diplomatic victory in the next elections. Are waiting for an upcoming and hypothetical final meeting in Washington with South Korean President Moon, lifting economic sanctions and a final and complicated denuclearization, perhaps the entire peninsula.

Julián Varsavsky is co-author of the book Corea, two extremes of the same country