MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
So they have arrived. President Trump and Kim Jong Un have both arrived in Singapore for their historic meeting that's supposed to start on Tuesday morning. It will be, as you've probably heard many times by now, the very first between the leaders of the two countries, so we decided to take some time now to walk through what this could mean and what we might expect.
But we're going to start with a quick look at the history of U.S. relations with North Korea - a history that President Trump described this way.
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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: North Korea's a situation that should have been handled 25 years ago, 20 years ago, 15 years ago, 10 years ago and five years ago, and it could have been handled much more easily. You had various administrations - many administrations - which left me a mess.
MARTIN: Analyst Isaac Stone Fish at the Asia Society traces the mess - for want of a better word - back to 1950, when North Korean communist troops invaded South Korea, drawing in the United States.
ISAAC STONE FISH: From the disastrous Korean War, where 54,000 Americans died and millions of Koreans, up to the nuclear tensions and Trump's famous fire and fury comments about destroying North Korea, the U.S. hasn't really had a good way of solving the North Korea problem.
MARTIN: In 1953, President Eisenhower signed an armistice. It was not a peace treaty, but it largely kept the peace. Then, in 1968, North Korea intercepted a U.S. Navy spy ship in the Sea of Japan, killing one American crew member and taking 82 others hostage. A year later, North Korea shot down a U.S. Navy spy plane, killing all 31 crew members.
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RICHARD NIXON: This attack was unprovoked. It was deliberate. It was without warning.
STONE FISH: You've got to hand it to Nixon. He really decided to use restraint against North Korea - decided that even though this could have been seen as an act of war, he decided that North Korea was not worth the effort to fight against.
MARTIN: In 1983, when Ronald Reagan was president, North Korea tried to assassinate South Korea's president in Burma. He survived, but 21 other people, including senior South Korean officials, were killed.
STONE FISH: This was another flashpoint that ended up receding because Reagan had the evil empire - the Soviet Union - to deal with and didn't want to spend too much time on North Korea.
MARTIN: North Korea kept working to develop a nuclear capability, and by 1994, spoke openly of its desire to develop a nuclear weapon. President Clinton became engaged and negotiated what was known as the Agreed Framework.
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BILL CLINTON: Under the agreement, North Korea has agreed to freeze its existing nuclear program and to accept international inspection of all existing facilities.
MARTIN: After North Korea began testing ballistic missiles, Clinton tried to expand on this agreement and sent Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to Pyongyang. He considered making the trip himself but did not.
STONE FISH: And when Bush comes into office, relations begin to tailspin.
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GEORGE W. BUSH: States like these and their terrorist allies constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger.
MARTIN: In 2003, the U.S. joined South Korea, Japan, China and Russia to launch six-party talks with North Korea. But in 2006, North Korea conducted its first nuclear test.
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BARACK OBAMA: North Korea's continued pursuit of nuclear weapons is a path that leads only to more isolation.
MARTIN: Analyst Isaac Stone Fish says, during the Obama presidency, North Korea refined its nuclear capability.
STONE FISH: Obama had a policy called strategic patience, which is basically as close to the Taoist's ideal of inaction as one can imagine. It's basically leaving North Korea to its own devices.
MARTIN: Obama told the incoming President Trump that North Korea would be his greatest challenge - a challenge Trump is now tackling.
STONE FISH: The problem that all U.S. presidents before Trump now have to contend with - now have to have their records contend with is that they all decided that North Korea was not worth their time or their bandwidth to really try to solve.
[POST-BROADCAST CORRECTION: Isaac Stone Fish asserted that 54,000 Americans were killed in the Korean war. This figure was widely accepted for decades. However, the Department of Defense later clarified that many of these deaths occurred elsewhere, and the actual number of Americans killed in the theater of operations during the Korean War was fewer than 37,000.] Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.