HANOI, Vietnam — As President Trump settled into the dining area of a French-colonial hotel in Hanoi on Thursday morning with whom he’d struck the oddest of friendships the North Korean chief, turned tense.
In a supper in the Metropole Hotel the evening before, mere feet from the bomb shelter where guests took cover during the Vietnam War, Mr. Kim had resisted what Mr. Trump presented as a grand deal: North Korea would trade all its nuclear weapons, material and amenities for an end to the American-led sanctions squeezing its economy.
An American official later explained this as”a proposition to go big,” a bet by Mr. Trump his force of character, and perspective of himself as a consummate dealmaker, could triumph in which three previous presidents had neglected.
However, Mr. Trump’s offer was basically the exact same deal that the United States has pushed and the North has rejected — to get a quarter-century. Intelligence agencies had warned him, publicly, Mr. Kim would not be eager to give up the arsenal entirely. North Korea itself had said that it would proceed gradually.
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