How clearly can soldiers on the ground identify the line?

This was something that we had to study and explore a lot when I was at UNCMAC when the boundary hardening activities started.

The reality is the MDL is not clearly marked.

There's nowhere you can go on the DMZ that you're going to say there's the line.

And even when we had the markers up, there were 1,292 markers across a 240-kilometer-long area.

DMZ, which realistically in practice across rough terrain, mountains, rivers, everything else, you're talking about here's a marker and about two football pitches down, you might be able to see another marker.

And that's when all of them were still there.

Mike, from a military and armistice perspective, how different is the situation today from 2015? And does Seoul still have a realistic path to de-escalation if tensions rise further from here?

Do you think that Trump-Kim summons played a role in legitimizing him intentionally or not?

The way I break down the Kim Jong-un regime's tenures, I like to break it down almost into television seasons where you have these key inflection points.

And in between those key inflection points, you have an arc for the character of Kim Jong-un and how he's developed as a leader and leader.

as an individual atop the DPRK government.

The summits 2018-19, he was not so assured of himself.

It was interesting to watch.

Every time that he was going to go meet with Moon Jae-in, the South Korean president at the time, or Donald Trump, he preceded those visits with a trip to Beijing or engagement with Xi Jinping to basically get... synchronize their efforts, make sure they're on the same page before he did anything else, which is really interesting when you talk about where he is now.

What is your read on this latest move, and do you think the language we use has shaped or distorted how we interpret North Korean behavior?