The Trump administration thinks it can calm North Korea by suspending military exercises and offering continued pledges for diplomacy. It is wrong.
Because North Korea wants something that President Trump, to his credit, is unwilling to give: namely, sanctions relief without commensurate North Korean concessions on its nuclear and missile programs. A recent editorial in the Pyongyang Times emphasized this case by quoting Kim Yong Chol, a top regime hard-liner and senior negotiator.
Kim observed that “The U.S. always calls for negotiation for denuclearization, but there is no room to say about the negotiation before the complete and irrevocable withdrawal of its hostile policy toward the DPRK, the root cause of the nuclear issue of the Korean peninsula.” Kim added, “From now on, the DPRK will get due compensation for every administrative achievement the U.S. president has talked too much about for over a year.”
Here we see a return to the old North Korean rhetoric of blaming America for a “hostile policy.” This is standard-fare North Korean stuff, a cover of righteous fury designed to conceal Pyongyang’s reluctance to make new concessions. But it had been reduced in ferocity and regularity as Trump and Kim Jong Un sought to build a personal relationship. No longer.
Note the editorial’s veiled insult of Trump, who Kim Yong Chol says “has talked too much” about diplomacy of late.
North Korea is setting the ground for escalation, likely in the form of a new long-range ballistic missile test. The ingredients for this escalation have become increasingly clear over the past few months with various symbolic gestures, submarine tests, and diplomatic acts of repudiation rebuking the idea of a near term nuclear deal. The Trump administration has rightly not budged in response to those actions. But neither has North Korea become disabused with the idea of escalation as a means of improving its position. Pyongyang, which faces an upcoming famine, evidently feels it cannot wait to push the United States into a new, more concessionary understanding.
In short, escalation is coming.
