For North Korea, the most important takeaway from the first summit between Donald Trump and Lee Jae-myung was not what they said, but what they left unsaid.

At their meeting in Washington on Monday, the U.S. and South Korean presidents reaffirmed their country’s military alliance and reflected on the summitry of 2018-19.

But Trump’s failure to mention denuclearization and apparent acknowledgement that coercive approaches to the DPRK have failed hinted at a potential policy shift, something that Pyongyang has long demanded.

Beneath the surface, however, continuities in alliance modernization and