This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, February 26, 2019.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The president and North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un

have signed off on another agreement,

this one with more detail.

But what's on the table when aspiration meets substantive

agreement, Cato's Eric Gomez comments. This is now the second time that this

president has met with Kim Jong-un.

What was the result of that first meeting?

The first meeting produced a document that was pretty broad and aspirational.

It talked a lot about the need to improve relations between the United States and North Korea,

North Korea agreeing to work towards nuclear disarmament,

but it was very broad strokes and I think that after that agreement was signed

Either side could kind of take from it what it wanted. It was it was too broad in that sense and what we saw since then is there was a lot of frustration on the part of the

United States about the pace of North Korean denuclearization activities.

There was frustration in North Korea over the U.S. not being willing to

take reciprocal action and do the things that we sort of hinted at that we would do.

And so I think that with this upcoming summit in Hanoi, it's the opportunity to put some

more details on paper and get to a more detailed and working level understanding of, okay, what are

the two sides actually going to do going forward?

Okay, so one of the details that seem striking in this second agreement, which again is also

broadly aspirational, is that South Korea and the United States were not

...