It is too early to expect a solution of a 64-year-old problem, but the chances of seeing the beginning of a constructive process toward a peaceful Korean Peninsula have rarely been better.

The Koreans seem eager and ready. Just look at those broad smiles, four-hand handshakes and the warmth of official greetings shared by estranged Korean cousins.

And don't underestimate the U.S. leader warming up for the "art of the deal."

It makes me think of similar scenes among the divided Germans while I was standing on Checkpoint Charlie of the wall-separated Berlin in late 1980s. That is now a museum in a bustling and sophisticated capital of a reunited Germany.

All it took to get there was a wise and affable Chancellor Helmut Kohl, and the enlightened leadership of President George H.W. Bush and the then Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. They worked together to reunite, in October 1990, a country that savagely destroyed Europe during World War II and created the worst human tragedy the continent had ever known.

What followed was another miracle: The long process of establishing a European currency was stepped up to create a genuine European customs union and an operational single market for goods and services. These measures helped to firmly anchor a reunited Germany within the continent's community of nations, and to make an epochal progress toward the European economic and political unification (aka, the "European project").