Nine years ago, when I lived in Ho Chi Minh City in southern Vietnam, I overheard three North Korean men having beers by a hotel pool. I tried to strike up a conversation with them in my elementary Korean.

“We are here to study the path of Vietnam,” one of them told me. The trip was funded and directed by the North Korean state. “We are touring factories and farms. It is about learning from our friends in Vietnam. We want to know how they got to where they are.”

This week, Hanoi, Vietnam, is abuzz with flower bouquets, patriotic flags and armored vehicles for Donald Trump’s second summit with North Korea’s dictator Kim Jong Un. For both the U.S. and North Korean sides, as well as their Vietnamese hosts, the symbolism of this location—once the capital of Communist North Vietnam, at war with the U.S.—is obvious.

“Vietnam is thriving like few places on earth. North Korea would be the same, and very quickly, if it would denuclearize,” Trump said in a tweet. “The potential is AWESOME, a great opportunity, like almost none other in history, for my friend Kim Jong Un.”

“I would say to our North Korean friends that as long as they have a conflict with the United States, they will not be able to develop their economy properly,” Major General Le Van Cuong, the former director of the Institute of Strategic Studies at the Vietnamese Ministry of Public Security, perhaps Vietnam’s most heavy-fisted and paranoid government ministry, surprisingly told The New York Times earlier this week.