North and South Korea Summit Is Short on Details, but Long on Theater

HONG KONG — A handshake across the world’s most heavily fortified border. A lengthy one-on-one conversation on a bridge, beyond the range of microphones. Longstanding enemies on a divided peninsula calling for peace after a year of threats.

Friday’s summit meeting between the leaders of North and South Korea was a master class in diplomatic stagecraft, with each scene arranged for its power as political theater and broadcast live. In a perilous standoff that has resisted solutions, it was these images that offered hope, much more than the actual results from the meeting — vague pledges to work toward nuclear disarmament and a peace treaty.

The dance between Kim Jong-un, the leader of North Korea, and President Moon Jae-in of South Korea began with a two-step: Each leader crossed the border into the other man’s country before they headed, hand in hand, to a meeting in Panmunjom, the truce village at the center of the heavily fortified Demilitarized Zone.

From there, the talks unfolded in ways both surprisingly public and surprisingly profound. Few settings present a backdrop more dramatic than the Demilitarized Zone, the bloodstained border that has divided the Korean Peninsula for 70 years and at which the leaders of North and South Korea have never previously met.

The highlight took place in the afternoon, when Mr. Kim and Mr. Moon sat at the end of a blue bridge and engaged in what appeared to be deep conversation in full view of journalists’ cameras. For some 30 minutes, the two leaders talked as the world looked on, scrutinizing their gestures and facial expressions for insight into how it was going.

They looked less like sworn enemies than members of the same family, separated by a generation. They spoke alone, without aides, a face-to-face discussion that many would have thought impossible only a few months ago.

In details large and small, the men, each an expert in political messaging, made the most of their shared stage. At times they flexed their personal power. Mr. Kim, for instance, drove to lunch in a Mercedes limousine surrounded by 12 running bodyguards. At other moments they savored the symbolism of their shared history: embracing in front of a painting of Mount Kumgang, a landmark cherished on both sides of the border, and admiring a wall of calligraphy in hangul, the Korean alphabet.

Summit meetings are typically staid and secretive affairs. Held behind closed doors, details filter out only in jargon-filled communiqués intended to be oblique. Friday’s meeting was almost the opposite, largely held outdoors under a bright spring sun.

The meeting was a stark contrast with what came before: a secretive visit Mr. Kim made to Beijing last month under the cover of night, and two previous summit meetings in which Mr. Moon’s predecessors traveled to the hermetic North Korean capital, Pyongyang, to see Mr. Kim’s father.

The morning was filled with the classics of public diplomacy — broad smiles long handshakes, even a joke about North Korean missile tests waking the South Korean president early in the morning. But sometimes there was a twist. There was the traditional pomp and pageantry of a South Korean honor guard, but the soldiers wore 19th-century imperial costumes, recalling a time before the peninsula was divided by ideology and war.

As the day progressed, the scale of the meetings became more intimate. A large delegation of officials was whittled down before lunch to six people — three North Koreans and three South Koreans, including Mr. Kim’s sister Kim Yo-jong, the only woman in the delegation.

In a lighthearted moment — one of several — the North Korean leader noted how his sister stole the show when she visited South Korea for the Winter Olympics in February, prompting laughter from delegates — and a blush from Ms. Kim.

Even the clothing the two leaders wore projected a message. For Mr. Moon, a dark business suit was paired with a light blue tie that echoed the hue used in the Korean Unification Flag, which the countries use when competing together as single team at international sporting events.

Mr. Kim wore an austere black Mao-style suit, a message to his citizens that despite being in enemy territory he was still committed to the ideals — and dress — of his grandfather Kim Il-sung, North Korea’s founder, who ordered the 1950 invasion of the South that started the Korean War.

The day began with Mr. Kim stepping over the concrete slab that marks the border between the two countries, becoming the first North Korean leader to set foot in the South. (That achievement will soon be overshadowed by his meeting with Mr. Trump, when he becomes the first North Korean leader to meet with a sitting American president.)

Inside Peace House, the building in which a meeting of top-level officials took place, even the décor was chosen for its political optics.

The table and chairs inside the meeting room were designed with a pattern evoking two bridges coming together, foreshadowing the bridge on which the two men would later hold their one-on-one conversation.

At another moment infused with symbolism, the men replanted a tree with soil and water taken from both sides of the border. It was originally planted in the DMZ in 1953, the year the Korean War effectively ended in an armistice.