The three detainees, two of whom were arrested in 2017 under suspicion of hostile acts, were removed from a labour camp in early April, according to the Yonhap News Agency. The news came after Trump's national security adviser, John Bolton, suggested that North Korea releasing the detainees would be a "demonstration of their sincerity."
Speaking to Radio Sputnik's By Any Means Necessary, John Feffer, author and co-director of Foreign Policy in Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies, said that moving the detainees was part of North Korea's strategy leading up to the Trump-Kim meeting.
"With the release of the three Americans and also in addition to its moratorium on testing, it says it's going to close down its nuclear test site and bring in folks to verify that… all of that is in preparation for what will probably be more or less a ceremonial meeting between Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un," Feffer told show host Eugene Puryear. "I don't really expect any fireworks. Let's hope there are no tantrums, let's hope that they just kind of meet and greet and allow the two Koreas to kind of go forward with their own re-engagement."
Offering a bit of a historical recap, Feffer explained that the Korean War, which began in 1950, ended in an armistice in 1953, "not a peace treaty."
"The issue isn't so much the words on paper, but the status of North Korea as a country… now, of course, North Korea is recognized as an official country by the United Nations and other countries around the world, but it does not have the diplomatic recognition of South Korea, the United States or Japan," Feffer said. "A peace treaty would open the door for the resolution of that status problem."
"Once that is solved, that kind of paves the way for the potential for North Korea to engage, for instance, more thoroughly in the international economic community, which is something it desperately wants because it needs capital inflow," he added.
But when it comes to security assurances that the Land of the Free won't change its mind and attack North Korea anyway, it's all uncertain territory, the author told Puryear.
"North Korea has been looking for some kind of pledge, particularly from the United States, that it won't attack and you could argue that a peace treaty could be an indicator of that, but let's be honest here: at the moment the Trump administration is about to rip up… an agreement, a nuclear deal, with Iran," he noted.
"In other words, the Trump administration is saying that regardless of what another administration promised on paper, we're going to disregard that." "Given that, plus the diverse history of the United States reneging on promises, why should North Korea take anything, whether it would be a peace treaty or a verbal promise or any kind of assurance from the United States that it won't attack?" Feffer asked, stressing that that's really the "tough question."
For Feffer, questions such as "how much can we trust the United States to actually abide by any promise not to attack" and "how much can we trust North Korea to abide by any promise to denuclearize" will likely plague future talks for the next year or so.
"I think that's something that will be the critical issue going forward," he said.