The announcement of a Kim-Trump summit earlier in the year was often described as a unique event. While this characterization is largely correct – the heads of the DPRK and the United States have never met before – there is one period of history when the situation around the Korean peninsula bore many similarities to today.

In the early 1990s, the DPRK announced that it would withdraw from the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), provoking a crisis which ended with Pyongyang and Washington signing the Agreed Framework (AF) in 1994. This agreement ultimately failed, ending with the