Van Jackson
When President-elect Joe Biden enters the Oval Office on Jan. 20, he is unlikely to have North Korea at the front of his mind, given the many other urgent crises he will confront. But the Korean Peninsula has a way of forcing American presidents to pay attention. Crucial decisions about how to approach negotiations with Pyongyang over its nuclear program, as well as how to manage the U.S. alliance with South Korea, are now overdue. If Biden chooses wisely, his administration could prove transformational for the Korean Peninsula. If he errs or defers meaningful decisions to his successor, he risks being responsible for tragedy.
The past four years have seen North Korea steadily improve its capabilities, to the point where it can now plausibly reach any location in the continental United States with nuclear weapons. Pyongyang has also diversified the delivery systems from which it can launch long-range missiles, making its arsenal more survivable against attack. And it has begun to use solid-fuel propellant in its projectiles, which improves its ability to conduct launches with little to no advance warning. As time passes without a deal to curb its nuclear and missile programs, North Korea’s arsenal grows ever more lethal, with no foreseeable endpoint.
But the situation Biden faces is more problematic than when President Donald Trump took office nearly four years ago. The 2017 nuclear crisis broke overwhelmingly in North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s favor. Not only did he achieve his regime’s longstanding priority of achieving and demonstrating an operational nuclear deterrent against the United States, he did so while avoiding military calamity, defying the United States, securing the suspension of some U.S. military exercises and nuclear-capable bomber deployments, and winning favorable global media coverage the following year as the world—and the U.S. president—sought to engage with Pyongyang.
Consequently though, Kim now has every reason to believe not only that coercive policies pay off—which was already part of North Korea’s strategic culture—but also that he’s a good gambler. His experience of the 2017 crisis makes Kim more prone to risk-taking than he might have been otherwise, which all but guarantees he will soon return to the kinds of provocations that have forced Washington to pay attention in the past. These include nuclear tests, missile tests and incursions into South Korea.
Worse, Trump has neutered the ability of working-level diplomats to find a solution to the nuclear issue. Through his hastily arranged, made-for-TV summit meetings with Kim—which took place without any prior agreement or even meaningful negotiations on denuclearization or arms control—Trump has set a new precedent for how North Korea might make a future deal, involving leader-to-leader contacts that previous American presidents found unpalatable. It will now be more difficult than ever for U.S. negotiators to secure concessions from their North Korean counterparts without lavishing Kim with presidential attention. And because Kim walked away from last year’s summits with Trump concluding he made symbolic concessions to the United States without getting anything in return, he is now aggrieved. Public statements from Pyongyang indicate he believes he’s “owed” some form of concession from the United States, because Trump wildly inflated expectations about what the summits would deliver.
Biden could prove transformational for the Korean Peninsula. But if he errs or defers meaningful decisions to his successor, he risks being responsible for tragedy.
Meanwhile, the U.S.-South Korea alliance is in crisis. Biden has already indicated he will not pursue Trump’s exorbitant demands for Seoul to increase its support payments for U.S. military bases in South Korea, likely removing at least one source of bilateral friction. But the more existential issue facing the alliance is whether and how the United States will support South Korean President Moon Jae-in’s ongoing diplomatic engagement with Pyongyang. Since winning election in 2017, Moon and his fellow progressives have tried to advance an agenda of inter-Korean peace and reconciliation, even as the North continues to develop its nuclear and missile capabilities. If Biden defaults to the Washington foreign policy establishment’s deep preference for a hard-line stance toward North Korea, it will thwart Seoul’s reconciliation efforts and alienate one of America’s closest allies. On the other hand, if Biden embraces Seoul’s peace-based approach, he will face strong headwinds from a cynical Washington complex of think tanks, legislators and bureaucrats who retain a dim view of North Korea’s willingness to compromise its nuclear arsenal. There is no easy path forward.
Biden has committed to striking a less bombastic tone than his predecessor, but otherwise appears to be keeping his options open. On the campaign trail, he expressed wariness about doing anything that might “legitimize” North Korea as a nuclear state. He dismissed Kim as a “thug” and compared Trump’s bromance with Kim to having “a good relationship with Hitler before he in fact invaded Europe.” And in his previous roles as vice president and chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Biden has a history of close association with the ever-tightening sanctions regime that has quietly strangled the North Korean economy and poisoned bilateral ties over the years.
Yet Biden’s history as a North Korea hawk does not mean he will pursue similar policies as president, and he seems to understand that the context has changed. His previous record reflected a hubris that was widespread in Washington, at a time when many officials believed they could bend North Korea to their will. More recently, by contrast, Biden has indicated he’s willing to meet with Kim if it would help bring about reductions in Pyongyang’s arsenal. And in an unprecedented op-ed published in South Korea’s Yonhap news agency just before the election, Biden endorsed nuclear diplomacy with North Korea. He has even spoken favorably about a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula—a nod toward forswearing the future deployment of U.S. nuclear weapons and nuclear-capable assets as part of a potential negotiation.
Perhaps most importantly, the political winds in Seoul have shifted. Unlike the Obama era, when conservative South Korean presidents vocally opposed an accommodative posture toward Pyongyang, Moon is now the most vocal advocate for it. The current South Korean government fervently hopes Biden will take a more flexible posture in negotiations, consider some unilateral sanctions relief, and endorse the stalled inter-Korean peace process.
What happens next depends somewhat on whether North Korea’s signals are belligerent or restrained.
If Pyongyang does anything in the next several months that U.S. policymakers see as provocative or aggressive, it will unwittingly tie Biden’s hands and foreclose on his ability to support South Korea’s desire for a more conciliatory approach. Something like this happened to then-President Obama in 2009—he was committed to engagement but was boxed into a hard-line negotiating posture because North Korea’s nuclear and intercontinental ballistic missile tests at the start of his presidency made a more flexible approach politically impossible. North Korea’s choices have a tendency to empower Washington’s hawks.
On the other hand, if North Korea shows restraint and probes Biden in a more encouraging, diplomatic way, it will be harder for Biden’s team to ignore Seoul’s peace-centered approach to negotiations. The past four years have shown that the inter-Korean peace process hinges on progress in nuclear negotiations. The success of nuclear diplomacy, in turn, depends primarily on whether the United States can find a way to at least temporarily remove sanctions without getting much from North Korea in return—a proposition that has made past presidents balk. North Korea may also require leader-level summits to consecrate even modest deals, which only a few years ago would have been ludicrous.
But times have changed. The United States has far less leverage than it had in the past. As the last two decades have shown, time is not on Washington’s side. And North Korea’s continued existence as a nuclear-armed rival is a strategic vulnerability for the United States, posing the ongoing risk of nuclear war. No matter what Biden chooses to do, he will have some constituencies supporting him and others fighting him all the way. It is only a question of whose voices he will heed.
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