Trump is giving Kim what he needs, yet what will he receive consequently?

People there are not told that Kim Jong Un's grandfather, Kim Il Sung, started the Korean war - they are told that they were attacked by the United States, and their "puppet war maniacs" in South Korea, and that only their president's tactical brilliance saved them.

The history is false, however the obliteration that took after was genuine - more US bombs were dropped on North Korea than in the whole Pacific venue amid World War II, including 32,000 tons of napalm, with substantial parts of the nation diminished to ruins.

Successive generations of Kim leaders have presented their nuclear programme as the only means to stop this happening again - a necessary defensive measure to deter US aggression, and ensure the country's survival.

One senior regime official explained to me last year that they had learned the lessons of the past, and noted recent US actions in Afghanistan and Libya - "the only way to protect our country is to strengthen our power," Ambassador Choe Il said, "This was a lesson we felt in our bones."

A more graphic lesson in what happens when you give up your nuclear weapons could be found in the fate of Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi, who ended their days respectively in a hangman's noose, and dragged out of a drainage ditch by a baying mob.

So the notion that Kim Jong Un is about to voluntarily hand over his nuclear weapons, even when confronted with the ultimate dealmaker president, seems somewhat fanciful.

South Korean authorities say that denuclearisation is on the table, however as a general rule the conditions that would likely be joined to that result would incorporate the finish of US-South Korea military activities, and the withdrawal of US troops from the Korean promontory, neither of which is probably going to be satisfactory.

Instead, the lesson the Trump administration may inadvertently be delivering is that nuclear blackmail works.

Talks with Kim Jong Un are being presented as some sort of breakthrough - evidence that President Trump's strategy of sanctions and "maximum pressure" has worked and forced North Korea to the negotiating table, but to be clear - this is where Kim wants to be.

The North Korean leader, like his father before him, wants to sit down as an equal to talks with a US president - as the leader of one nuclear power to the other.

This could have been held out as the end goal of preliminary talks - that if enough progress was made, and North Korea proved it was serious - the presidential summit would be something to work towards.

Instead, inexplicably, it seems to be being offered as the starting point.

It's hard to perceive what concessions North Korea is putting forth - stopping tests on an atomic and rocket program you have beforehand proclaimed finish, and which genuine investigators accept has now accomplished the believable capacity to achieve the US terrain, isn't a noteworthy forfeit.

Similarly, accepting that annual US-South Korea drills will go ahead without protest is something, and it does help to break the cycle of escalation, but it is also not exactly a breakthrough.