Frank Aum and Ankit Panda
Introduction
In October 2019, North Korea broke off working-level talks with the United States, ushering in more than five years of complete diplomatic disengagement between Washington and Pyongyang.2 That breakdown followed the collapse of the historic second U.S.–North Korea leader-level summit meeting in Hanoi, Vietnam, in February 2019, where the two sides disagreed on the right balance of sanctions relief for disarmament measures.
Since then, despite the lack of engagement, the salience of North Korea for U.S. interests in Northeast Asia, the Indo-Pacific region, and globally has only increased. Pyongyang now stands unquestionably as the third nuclear-armed adversary of the United States, fielding an increasingly capable nuclear force that poses a threat to U.S. and allied territory alike. In 2021, North Korea articulated explicit plans, for the first time, to develop and field tactical nuclear weapons designed to hold at risk South Korean and Japanese targets.3 Kim has also taken some geopolitical initiative as the great power competition between the United States, on the one hand, and Russia and China, on the other, has intensified. Nowhere is this seen more acutely than in the strategic partnership Kim has forged with Russian President Vladimir Putin; Kim has reportedly sent up to 14,000 North Korean forces to fight alongside Russians troops against Ukraine.4 In another expression of his confidence as a fully consolidated North Korean leader, Kim took what is arguably his most significant decision since inheriting leadership from his father: he formally turned his back on Pyongyang’s decades-long goal of seeking unification with South Korea. North Korea now treats South Korea as a distinct state and the “principal enemy.”5 Against this backdrop, little has changed concerning the lot of North Korea’s 26 million citizens, who largely continue to suffer under a regime indifferent to their welfare.
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