Presidents from Bill Clinton to Joe Biden have all followed the same policy: North Korea must denuclearize — no ifs, ands, or buts. With the exception of Donald Trump’s unconventional personal diplomacy with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, Washington has utilized the same playbook. That means sanctions to starve the Kim dynasty of financing and offering economic and diplomatic concessions in return for Pyongyang dismantling its nuclear weapons program.
Yet, if a report in the Wall Street Journal is any guide, U.S. officials are finally admitting that Pyongyang’s denuclearization is not in the cards. They recently used a strategy session to agree that North Korea will remain a nuclear weapons state. The likelihood of North Korea giving up its weapons soon, one participant told the Journal, is “zero percent.”
The United States, in other words, is living in a twisted reality.
Most experts know deep down that denuclearization is a failing policy (a three-decade-long failure, I might add), but the policymakers tasked with executing the policy continue to pretend these maximalist goals are achievable.
But they aren’t. North Korea, a notoriously poor and weak state surrounded by much wealthier and more powerful neighbors, believes that only a nuclear arsenal gives it an ironclad security guarantee.
The U.S., Japan, and South Korea have tried to pressure and bribe the North Koreans into trading away this security guarantee. The South Koreans and Japanese promise mountains of cash, investment, and diplomatic normalization if Kim hands over his nuclear weapons, while the Americans try to sweeten the deal with security guarantees.
None of it has worked. And that’s for the simple reason that no concessions the U.S. and its allies can offer are more valuable to the Kim dynasty than nuclear arms. Kim Jong Un has no intention of being remembered in the history books as Asia’s version of Moammar Gadhafi, who gave up his weapons of mass destruction pursuits in 2003, only to find himself executed by armed rebels seven years later.
In turn, the operative question for U.S. policymakers shouldn’t be whether the North will revert to its previous status as a non-nuclear state. That train left a few stations ago, even if many in positions of authority don’t want to admit it openly. The question, rather, is how Washington can make the best of a tricky situation or at least manage it adequately?
A big part of the solution is to avoid stupid policy options like contemplating the use of military force (unless, of course, Kim is on the cusp of conducting a bolt-out-of-the-blue assault against U.S. troops in South Korea or Japan). But it also requires us to downsize our original objectives, focusing less on the ideal (aka denuclearization) and more on the realistic, such as the smaller but no less worthwhile task of an arms control accord.
Unfortunately, none of this will be possible if the U.S. foreign policy establishment doesn’t first recognize the futility of the status quo. Let’s hope we may now have reached this point. Albeit very late in the game.
Daniel DePetris (@DanDePetris) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. His opinions are his own.
