By Daniel R. DePetris
Thursday, June 12, 2025
In 2018, at the urging of then–South Korean President
Moon Jae-in, Trump decided to do what no sitting American president had done
before: meet the head of North Korea’s Kim dynasty face-to-face. His national
security advisers at the time were gobsmacked at the idea and advised against
it. But there was some logic in Trump’s diplomatic gamble. First, diplomacy was
better than the alternatives. Second, everything else had been tried and
produced nothing but disappointment. And third, there was only one man in North
Korea who could sign off on an agreement anyway, and his name was Kim Jong-un.
Why not test the proposition?
By now, we all know the story. Much like the presidential
diplomacy of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama, which took a more
bottom-up approach to the North Korean nuclear problem, Trump’s top-level
interaction with a North Korean leader, which included two summits and a
historic step into the Hermit Kingdom by a sitting U.S. president, couldn’t
produce a comprehensive deal. Although Kim agreed to suspend nuclear and
long-range missile tests as long as talks were progressing, the negotiations ultimately
ran into the same big obstruction that prior efforts met with: The positions of
the two sides were irreconcilable, and neither man was willing to walk away
with half a loaf. Trump wanted North Korea to hand over its nuclear warheads
for destruction, and Kim wanted to keep his warheads and have a blossoming
bilateral relationship with the United States at the same time. Working-level
discussions collapsed in October 2019, turning the joint garden strolls and
cordial photo opportunities into an odd interlude.
Yet Trump never forgot about the experience. In fact, he
consistently reminded anybody who would listen that his personal relationship
with Kim was great, that his summitry was the right move despite the naysayers,
and that he single-handedly averted what could have been a catastrophic war on
the Korean Peninsula. Whether any or all of this is true is beside the point;
the president clearly believes it.
The obvious question arises: How will Trump tackle the
North Korea challenge in his second term? By all indications, it appears the
president wants to pick up where he left off. Part of this strategy revolves
around using the media to telegraph his intentions to his old pal Kim. “He
liked me and I got along with him,” Trump told Sean Hannity in a Fox News
interview days after his inauguration. Asked in March whether he plans to reach
out to North Korea, Trump replied in the affirmative, adding, again, that his
ties with Kim were terrific. “There is communication,” Trump told reporters on
March 31. “I think it’s very important. . . . I will probably do something at
some point.”
If Trump had his way, the talks would already be
happening. Yet while Trump may be the most powerful individual on earth, he
isn’t calling the shots here. As Trump likes to say, “it takes two to tango,”
and Kim Jong-un is in no mood to dance. He has spent the last four years
stewing as Washington has solidified a trilateral military arrangement with
South Korea and Japan, the two closest U.S. allies in Northeast Asia, and he
has deployed additional military hardware in the region. Trump won’t admit it openly,
but any diplomacy with North Korea in 2025 — assuming diplomacy even starts —
is likely to be more difficult than it was in 2018 and 2019.
***
The international environment has changed in Pyongyang’s
favor. Back in 2018, when Trump was preparing for his first summit, North Korea
was in dire straits economically and geopolitically. Stronger U.N. Security
Council sanctions, pushed by the Trump administration, were strangling a North
Korean economy whose dependence on China was one of the Kim regime’s most
glaring vulnerabilities. South Korea’s central bank assessed that North Korean
exports declined by nearly 90 percent in 2018, helping to shrink the North
Korean economy by 4.1 percent, the biggest contraction in 21 years.
The Kim regime’s international relationships at the time
were virtually nonexistent. More than six years into his rule, Kim had yet to
meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping, a reflection of Beijing’s irritation
with how North Korea had behaved up to that point. Yes, North Korea and China
technically had a long-standing friendship treaty that required Beijing to come
to Pyongyang’s aid in the event of a crisis. But the reality was that Xi wasn’t
going to sacrifice Chinese troops to save Kim’s skin. Nor was he going to go to
war against the United States if Pyongyang picked a fight.
Russia’s Vladimir Putin wasn’t much help, either. Moscow
supported Washington’s sanctions drive at the U.N. Security Council in 2016 and
2017, was still officially committed to denuclearizing Kim’s regime, and warned
Pyongyang to tone down the warlike invective. After the North Koreans
threatened preventive war against the United States and South Korea in 2016,
the Russian Foreign Ministry tersely replied that Pyongyang was making it
easier for other states to cite self-defense as a rationale if they chose to
take military action against North Korea’s nuclear and missile facilities.
Today, China and Russia have evolved to become North
Korea’s major defenders in international forums. This is a marked contrast to
their previous status as cautious proponents of Washington’s maximum pressure
campaign. Thanks to the collective vetoes of Russia and China, the U.N.
Security Council has been unable to adopt additional sanctions on Pyongyang. In
March 2024, Russia killed the Security Council’s sanctions-monitoring team.
Now, Moscow can violate its own economic restrictions, and Kim can import crude
oil and gas without prying eyes. Washington and its East Asian allies have been
forced to cobble together another multilateral sanctions-enforcement mechanism
on the fly.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, meanwhile, has been the
gift that keeps on giving for the North Koreans. Although the Russians hold
approximately 20 percent of Ukrainian territory, the costs to the Russian army
have been some of the highest in modern warfare. Putin’s war of choice, which
entered its fourth year this past February, was riddled with false assumptions
about Ukrainian military prowess, Western military support, and the competence
of his own troops. The result has been Russian casualties in the hundreds of
thousands, diplomatic isolation from Europe, and a growing reliance on China
and India to take the crude oil and pipeline natural gas exports the West has
shunned.
Kim, however, is a beneficiary of this war. He has
muscled his way into the conflict and has used Putin’s desperation for weapons,
men, and military support to North Korea’s advantage. Since 2023, the North
Koreans have been mass-producing and shipping tons of matériel, including
artillery munitions, short-range ballistic missiles, self-propelled howitzers,
and multiple rocket launchers, to aid the Russian army’s war of attrition.
North Korean military supplies have given Russia’s defense industry more time
to ramp up its own production. In June 2024, after their second face-to-face
meeting in less than a year, Putin and Kim signed a defense treaty that
committed both to come to the defense of the other if attacked. Kim, for his
part, has lived up to his word; approximately 12,000 North Korean troops were
deployed to Russia’s Kursk region, helping the Russian army push the Ukrainian
army back across the border after a six-month counteroffensive. (According to
open sources, those North Korean personnel are still there.) The strong
Russia–North Korea relationship, in turn, has caused concern in Beijing and
forced the Chinese Communist Party to take a more hand-in-glove approach to
Pyongyang, if only to retain China’s historic influence on the Korean
Peninsula.
North Korea’s weapons programs are also increasing in
both quantity and quality. Since U.S.–North Korea talks broke down in 2019, Kim
has directed his country’s military technicians, engineers, and scientists to
ramp up the development, testing, and production of defense platforms as varied
as attack and surveillance drones, short- and medium-range ballistic missiles
with multiple warheads, submarines, and hypersonic glide vehicles. In October
2024, North Korea conducted its longest intercontinental ballistic missile test
ever. The International Atomic Energy Agency, meanwhile, is increasingly
worried about the lack of eyes and ears over Pyongyang’s nuclear program. “You
cannot have a country like this, which is completely off the charts with this
nuclear arsenal . . . with all these facilities, without us having any clue of
any safety or security measures which are being applied to it,” IAEA Director
General Rafael Grossi told a Washington, D.C., conference in April.
***
You don’t need an international relations degree to
comprehend what all this means. If Trump manages to restart a diplomatic
process with North Korea after a four-year hiatus, then he’s going to be
playing with a new deck of cards. Kim Jong-un has a better hand today than he
did when he sat down with Trump seven years ago. North Korea’s weapons arsenal
is larger, its economy is less isolated, China and Russia are no longer cogs in
Washington’s North Korea policy, and Pyongyang’s Rolodex of international relationships
is a bit fuller. As a consequence, the North Koreans are likely to ask for more
U.S. concessions, above and beyond the typical U.S. sanctions relief and
political normalization that Kim’s father and grandfather prioritized.
This presumes Kim is even interested in negotiations to
begin with. He spent four years stiff-arming Biden’s overtures, partly over
doubts about whether Washington would settle for anything other than total
capitulation. It’s difficult to see Kim’s resistance softening as long as
Russia and China remain on Pyongyang’s side. Those relationships are a major
commodity for Kim, affording him the flexibility to keep the United States
twisting in the wind for as long as he finds it prudent to do so.
Trump’s options are therefore limited. First, he could
write off the North Korean nuclear issue as a lost cause, which is essentially
the course Obama took during his second term. This would spare him the
indignity of having to endure another round of diplomacy with one of America’s
foremost adversaries while freeing his foreign policy team to concentrate on
higher strategic priorities. Yet kicking the can down the road is not exactly a
synonym for success. The North Koreans are likely to exploit the absence of a
negotiation by ramping up their conventional and nuclear capabilities to an
even greater degree than they have already.
Alternatively, Trump could settle on the path of least
resistance by doubling down on Washington’s long-standing status quo policy:
ratcheting up the sanctions pressure, deploying more U.S. military assets
around the Korean Peninsula as a pressure tactic, and accelerating U.S.
military exercises with Seoul until Pyongyang is forced to enter a negotiation
to denuclearize. But every U.S. administration since George W. Bush has tried
this numerous times — without success. North Korea is now a more challenging nuclear
power than it was when the maximum pressure strategy was gamed out two decades
ago, and maximum pressure at the hands of Washington is usually met in
Pyongyang with more weapons development and missile tests. Moreover, Kim has
reiterated again and again that North Korea’s nuclear warheads are not to be
traded away under any circumstances. U.S. officials can continue doubting the
sincerity of such statements, but eventually they will have to conclude that
Kim means what he says.
Trump’s third option would be to overturn the entire
paradigm by ditching denuclearization for arms control. The costs associated
with such a drastic U.S. policy change are easy to see. The U.S. foreign policy
elite, for starters, would have nightmares that an American president was
jeopardizing Washington’s commitment to nonproliferation. Trump would have to
deal with a torrent of bad press about his negotiating acumen, which would
grate on a man who considers himself the world’s best dealmaker. Some separation
is also bound to occur between the White House and Republican lawmakers usually
in lockstep with Trump.
But the political consequences of such a deal would be
acceptable if the result is a stabler Korean Peninsula and the removal of the
North Korean nuclear problem from Washington’s foreign policy to-do list. Trump
would hardly be the first U.S. president in history to ditch a popular yet
stale and unproductive foreign policy. There was once another Republican
president who was pilloried by senior members of his party for negotiating arms
control accords with an adversary. That man was Ronald Reagan. His diplomacy
with the Soviets proved to be one of the finest achievements of his eight-year
tenure.
Of course, Trump is no Reagan, Kim Jong-un is no Mikhail
Gorbachev, and North Korea is no superpower like the Soviet Union. But a
nuclear-armed North Korea that is contained and deterred would surely be a
better outcome for U.S. interests than a nuclear-armed North Korea that is free
of limitations.
Will Trump’s second roll of the dice on North Korea
policy prove more successful than his first? Nobody should rule out this
scenario. Whether successful or not, the entire endeavor is bound to be more
excruciating than it was in 2018–19. And an accord, if one is signed, is likely
to be less impressive than many would like. North Korea is a problem to be
managed, not solved.
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