Trump's big challenge at the upcoming North Korea summit

In several days’ time, President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un will meet in Hanoi, Vietnam. The location is promising. After all, Hanoi stands as a testament to how relations between two adversaries can change.

On Christmas Day 1972, the U.S. dropped over 20,000 tons of explosives, mostly on Hanoi. The bombing attack was one of the last big American offensives in the long, bitter Vietnam War. Forty-six years later, the U.S. and Vietnam enjoy normal relations.

That’s not to say that everything is peachy keen between the two countries, or within Vietnam for that matter.

Recently, Human Rights Watch delivered a blistering assessment of political and civil rights in Vietnam. And while noting some improvement, The Heritage Foundation’s latest “Index of Economic Freedom” still rates the country’s economy as “mostly repressed.”

In sum, Vietnam looks nothing like the democracy that America was fighting to build four decades ago. Yet, rather than accentuate their differences and harbor the hostilities of the past, the two nations today look for common ground, forging ties and relations that make people less likely to pick up their cudgels again.