I doubt it. First, some basic reminders about nuclear weapons. They are a deterrent. Remember Gaddafi? Remember how he isn't, you know, breathing anymore?
The US had a long and complicated relationship with Gaddafi. That's how I'm spelling it, and I don't feel like getting into a whole, big thing about it. Libyan dictator. Creepy guy. You know the one I mean. Reagan bombed him, he supported terrorists, and we had a lot of stand-offs with him.
When the Bush administration invaded Iraq on the pretense of "weapons of mass destruction," Gaddafi responded by starting to play nice with us. What did that get him? At the end of the day, the same thing it got Saddam. Slightly different path towards it, but we're sort of getting there. We weren't exactly going to refrain from shooting at him.
The second basic reminder is that other countries have domestic politics. Even dictatorships. They have to worry about uprisings, either from within the military, or from the populace. Gaddafi wound up facing a revolution, and that's how we wound up against him again.
The military and other figures in North Korea understand that the US invaded Iraq. Twice. The US played funny airspace games with Libya while Gaddafi got taken down after he tried to play nice because he saw what happened to Hussein. We toppled Noriega, and we've done all sorts of shit elsewhere.
You know who has been treated very carefully? North Korea. Why? Nukes. Were Kim to give that up against the will of his generals, he'd face a coup. Were he to weaken his military's non-nuclear capacity, he'd face a revolution.
So, what's going on here?
You keep reading that Trump's madman schtick is working, referencing the "madman theory," that became popularized under that name with Nixon, but owing to, of course, Thomas Schelling. Trump rattles his tiny, tiny sabre, the North Koreans have to worry that Trump might actually be crazy enough to do it, so they denuclearize to give the crazy guy something that they wouldn't give to a sane actor. I wrote a lot about this in the "Political science & craziness" series," in August of 2016, but getting the North Koreans to denuclearize would be... a lot.
What else could be going on here? First, there isn't a formal agreement on this yet. Partly, file this under "I'll believe it when I see it." The incentives against denuclearization for North Korea are just so strong that I have a really hard time seeing them do it. That leads me to my next point. International sanctions might work. They have been imposed for a long time, and the North Korean economy is practically nonexistent. Kim is dependent on the support of his generals, and he needs to keep them happy. If the North Korean economy is so bad that he can't even do that because of his inability to get things into the country, then he needs to do something or get taken down. International sanctions don't generally promote domestic political change, unless everybody is on-board, as in the case of South Africa and apartheid. (Well, everybody but Reagan! Gee, I wonder what Trump would have thought...) So, what's left? Perhaps this is all just theater. It frequently is.
What will happen? I don't know, but I'm going to throw this out there, as one who detests Trump. What if Trump goes into a meeting with Kim, and an agreement does come out of it? The probability isn't zero.
We need to be prepared to give a positive evaluation. Crazier things have happened.