President Trump will resume campaign rallies starting next Saturday as he confronts the twin crises of a pandemic and widespread protests over racial bias in policing. It’s a busy time, but still, he should not allow himself to get distracted from North Korea’s rising escalation.
This week, Kim Jong Un’s regime unilaterally suspended communications with its South Korean neighbor. Referring to Seoul as “the enemy,” North Korean state media declared its “conclusion that there is no need to sit face-to-face with the South Korean authorities and there is no issue to discuss with them, as they have only aroused our dismay.” South Korean media reports that Seoul attempted communication multiple times on Tuesday with no response.
Why is North Korea so angry?
Well, because the totalitarian regime says that South Korea has failed to stop anti-Pyongyang propaganda balloons from being flown into North Korean territory. If this communications cut-off seems like an overreaction, that’s because it is. Such antics are to be expected from the erratic hermit kingdom, which revels on getting international attention and concessions however it can. Still, we suggest it would be a dangerous mistake to laugh off this latest North Korean eccentricity. After all, Kim’s sister and right-hand woman, Kim Yo Jong, has defended the suspension of communications. That choice reflects Pyongyang’s desire to show it is seriously dissatisfied, rather than simply playing games. And that matters because it fits with a broader decline in relations between Seoul and Pyongyang, as well as Washington and Pyongyang. In that sense, this mild North Korean freakout portends further escalations with America.
Two factors underline why we believe Trump must be attentive to this concern.
First, North Korea is in desperate need of financial relief. Guided by his former intelligence chief Kim Yong Chol, Kim Jong Un had expected Trump to bend in his demands that sanctions relief would only come with Kim’s credible nuclear and ballistic missile disarmament. Confident that the previous American example of demanding much, then settling for little, would hold true, Kim is now caught in a difficult position. His economy and his higher-ranking elites remain constrained in their access to international financing and freedom of action, but Trump isn’t budging. Chinese and Russian sanctions busting via the smuggling of goods can only do so much. One way or another, Kim needs goods to rebuild his agricultural-industrial base and foreign capital to invigorate his economy. Should he fail to do so, the unusually paranoid (even by Pyongyang standards) leader risks his own future.
That speaks to the second issue demanding Trump’s attention: Kim’s unchanging strategic calculus.
While it may change, Kim’s strategy is now committed to retaining a nuclear-ballistic missile program. But if Kim cannot achieve sanctions relief without sacrificing his weapons programs, what does he do?
The most obvious answer is by doing what North Korean leaders have always done: waving the specter of terrible war as the price of the world’s failure to appease. In short, we fear that Kim may use the approaching U.S. elections to offer Trump a choice: Give me concessions, or receive repeated intercontinental ballistic missiles, nuclear tests, or other dangerous escalations.
For all their absurdities, the North Korean security elites are keen students of American politics and personalities. They know that Trump views his own reelection as the be-all and end-all of success — as something to be achieved at all costs. The growing risk, then, is that Pyongyang may believe Trump can be corralled into a fictional diplomatic arrangement by the threat of escalations that undermines him. Considering the significant political capital Trump has staked on a successful outcome to his personal diplomacy with Kim, North Korea may credibly assume that the president cannot easily allow that diplomacy to fail — especially when Election Day is growing ever closer.
We thus implore the president to hold firm to his present resolution. Trump must not entertain a diplomatic delusion in which Kim receives sanctions relief in return only for a shallow pretense of reciprocal compromise. A pretense, for example, in which North Korea allows international inspectors into its declared Nyongbyon nuclear facility and suspends that facility’s operations while continuing its nuclear weapons and missile work apace at dozens of other undeclared locations. That outcome would mean North Korea’s further advancement of an intolerable threat to the American homeland.
Trump has obvious electoral considerations. But the president must keep a keen eye on what Kim is doing and why. If he fails to monitor both equations, the consequences for his presidency, his legacy, and the nation may be catastrophic.
