‘Tit for tat’: Why is Trump cozying up to North Korea’s Kim Jong Un again?

US President Donald Trump has again praised the leader of nuclear-armed North Korea while rebuking key ally Seoul for failing to help Washington fight Iran, reigniting one of the most contentious diplomatic issues from his first term.

Trump said on Monday that North Korea leader Kim Jong Un had responded to his recent overtures with a “very positive” exchange, a day after he ordered the Pentagon to scale back military drills with South Korea designed to prepare for a possible war with Pyongyang.

The US president said his ties with Kim, whom he met three times during his first term, made the Korean Peninsula “much safer”. The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday that Trump was pushing aides to arrange a meeting with Kim as soon as this autumn, ahead of the midterm elections on November 3 .

Analysts say a summit with Kim, irrespective of its outcome, would be a useful feather on Trump’s cap, particularly as Washington’s unpopular war on Iran stands unresolved and his electoral pledge to end the Ukraine war remains unfulfilled.

Yet, Trump’s effort to cozy up to Kim may also have to do with exercising leverage vis-a-vis South Korea, in a typical example of the US president’s transactional approach to diplomacy.

“Trump may want to put pressure on South Korea … following [Seoul]’s reluctance to cooperate with the US in the Iran war and the slow progress in South Korean investment in the United States,” Yong-Chool Ha, director of the Center for Korean Studies at the Henry Jackson School of International Studies in Washington, told Al Jazeera.

“This could be seen as a form of tit-for-tat diplomacy, despite the ongoing alliance between the two countries.”

Trump threatened North Korea with “fire and fury” in 2017 after reports that Pyongyang had produced a nuclear warhead small enough to fit inside its missiles.