North Korean leader Kim Jong-un‘s appetite to make a major diplomatic deal with the U.S. seems all but dead.
But could it suddenly spring back to life in January 2025?
Robert Manning, a distinguished fellow at the Stimson Center’s Reimagining Grand Strategy program, said at an online forum Tuesday that he believes a second Donald Trump term in the White House could deliver a spark to the moribund relationship between Washington and Pyongyang — though he stressed it’s highly unclear whether such a course would lead to the best long-term policy outcome.
“I think in a sense, Kim may be waiting for Trump,” Mr. Manning said at “The Washington Brief,” a monthly forum hosted by The Washington Times Foundation, as the Biden administration’s efforts to revive denuclearization talks with the North have gone nowhere.
“Trump considers himself a dealmaker above all. He still brags in his campaign speeches about his relationship with Kim. And I think he would be tempted to try again,” Mr. Manning said. “I don’t think there’s much potential for it, but I think we could get dragged into a not-defensible deal with Kim, not for total nuclear disarmament, because Kim has taken that off the table with everything he’s done. But an attempt to try a nuclear freeze or something like that, which in theory is not a bad idea.”
“I think we may try, but I think it’s a very problematic situation,” Mr. Manning said, adding that the lack of transparency around North Korea‘s nuclear program makes any type of “freeze” exceedingly difficult to verify.
Olive branches
Mr. Trump, a near-lock to be the Republican nominee for president and poised for a rematch with President Biden in November, could see a second term in the White House as an opportunity to once again offer a diplomatic olive branch to Mr. Kim, as he did when the two men came face to face for a historic 2018 meeting in Singapore.
Mr. Trump went on to hold two more meetings with Mr. Kim in the hopes of securing a deal that would end Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons program in exchange for the kind of economic sanctions relief and international investment that Mr. Trump argued would transform North Korean society.
But the two men failed to reach an agreement. In the years since, analysts say the situation on the divided, heavily armed Korean peninsula has only grown more dangerous, with Pyongyang routinely conducting new missile tests and seeking to diversify its platforms of weapons of mass destruction beyond its ground-based missile units.
For Mr. Kim, ending his nuclear program entirely seems highly unlikely. But Mr. Manning said it’s possible that the U.S. could potentially open the door to other arrangements in a potential second Trump administration.
One possible outcome could involve the U.S. and the international community essentially offering to “legitimize” North Korea‘s nuclear program.
“In other words, they want to be like Israel, Pakistan,” Mr. Manning said, referring to nations known to possess nuclear weapons. “If Kim could get that and get sanctions dropped, I think he would be tempted.”
The broad notion of recognizing the nuclear reality on the Korean peninsula has its supporters in some U.S. national security circles.
Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper argued recently that America’s best course of action now might be to change course from its demands for “denuclearization” and instead recognize that North Korea is, in fact, a nuclear-capable state.
“I become an advocate for recognizing reality and acknowledging, officially, they have nuclear capabilities,” he said during last month’s “Washington Brief” forum. “Doing so doesn’t raise or lower the intrinsic threat that they pose one bit, and plays to their need for ‘face,’ for respect, and maybe puts them in a better mood to negotiate.”
Next steps
Former CIA official Joseph DeTrani, who moderated Tuesday’s event, said he thinks the door may still be cracked open — albeit slightly — to a future normalization accord between the U.S. and North Korea. But he said Mr. Kim‘s recent embrace of Russian President Vladimir Putin and his support for Mr. Putin’s war in Ukraine have greatly complicated the situation.
Mr. Kim over the past two years has deepened his strategic ties with Russia. North Korea has provided Moscow with arms and ammunition for the Ukraine campaign, in violation of international sanctions. Many suspect the Kremlin is offering Mr. Kim access to more sophisticated Russian weaponry and to Russian markets in exchange for his support.
“I think there’s still that prospect there that Kim Jong-un has not walked away from a normal relationship with the United States and the international community. Unfortunately, now he’s embraced Vladimir Putin,” Mr. DeTrani said.
“That has made it very, very difficult for North Korea to sort of pivot back to a more normal relationship with the international community, the United States,” he said. “However, I think that’s still there. I don’t think we should walk away from that.”
North Korea‘s string of recent missile tests and its embrace of Mr. Putin, along with Mr. Kim’s increasingly hostile rhetoric toward Seoul, have left specialists openly wondering whether the Korean peninsula faces its most dangerous moment since the Korean war of the 1950s. Indeed, the subject of Tuesday’s panel discussion was: “Is Kim Jong-un preparing for war?”
The consensus was that war certainly isn’t imminent. If Mr. Kim was planning to launch a military offensive against South Korea, analysts said, it’s highly unlikely he would be shipping major quantities of arms to Russia for use in Ukraine.
“The types of indicators we would expect to see on the eve of a North Korean attack, simply, we have not observed them,” said Alexandre Mansourov, professor at Georgetown University’s Center for Security Studies, who also spoke at Tuesday’s event.