The liaison office which has served as a de facto embassy between North and South Korea since 2018 collapsed in ruin Tuesday, blown to pieces by the Kim Jong Un’s regime.
Kim’s ostensible reason for the demolition was the distribution of anti-regime leaflets in North Korea by defectors who now reside in South Korea. “The recent foolish act of daring hurt the dignity of our supreme leadership,” the government said a statement published in North Korean state media. “The world will clearly see what severe punishment our people will mete out to the South Korean authorities and how they wipe the human scum off the earth.”
But the South Korean authorities neither distributed the leaflets nor supported their distribution, as Pyongyang surely knows. The Kim regime’s “punishment” is misapplied. We might blame this incoherence on the rot of despicable totalitarianism, but the recent history of North Korean behavior suggests another explanation: Pyongyang destroyed the liaison office because its diplomacy with South Korea and the United States has stalled. As a fundamentally weak regime with few options for getting what it wants, North Korea is attempting to shock negotiations back into motion.
This is not the first time North Korea has behaved this way. In fact, the Kim regime has a long record of outlandish insults and provocations. Granted, blowing up the liaison office is a significant escalation over branding President Trump a “dotard” in his dotage, but it nevertheless fits the regime’s pattern of lashing out in impotent frustration.
The nine missile tests this past March are a case in point. Angry at Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for urging further international cooperation to force Pyongyang into complete, verifiable, irreversible denuclearization, the Kim regime claimed Pompeo “seriously impaired the signboard of dialogue put up by the U.S. president as a decoy to buy time and create the environment favorable for himself.” Then came the missiles. None of them was capable of striking the U.S., but they were numerous enough to signal the extent of Pyongyang’s displeasure.
Tuesday’s destruction of the liaison office should be read along similar lines: not as a rejection of dialogue but as an attempt to unsettle the status quo. It’s supposed to be disruptive enough to restart diplomacy, but not enough to spark open conflict. Kim’s primary goal in U.S.-North Korea relations is deterring U.S.-forced regime change. His government has explicitly pointed to Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi as dictators whose path Kim does not wish to follow. He sees nuclear weapons as the only sure means of preventing American invasion, so Kim won’t surrender his arsenal unless he is convinced his power is safe.
This means the U.S. has no need to rush to “resolution” of the North Korea situation. Kim’s priority of regime survival means he will not conduct an unprovoked first strike on the U.S. or our close allies, such as South Korea. Our overwhelming military superiority guarantees not only his loss of such a war but also loss of his power and, likely, his life. Though we should expect insults and provocations (the weapons testing and this destruction of the liaison office) to continue, we can also expect to retain indefinite deterrence against North Korean initiation of outright war.
While that sort of detente is acceptable for U.S. security, peace should be our real goal and more specifically, peace obtained via gradual diplomatic progress. Yet this goal is unachievable, so long as Washington stays stuck on its delusional denuclearization demand. Complete, verifiable, irreversible denuclearization will not happen for the foreseeable future because Kim will remain terrified of American-orchestrated regime change for the foreseeable future, which is exactly what the last two decades of foreign policy misadventures have taught him to be. Giving Pyongyang the ultimatum of “denuclearization or nothing” makes constructive U.S.-North Korea diplomacy impossible.
The far better approach, one that might actually move us closer to peace and, in time, even the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, is to build a foundation of obtainable diplomatic accomplishments. Rather than layer on sanction after sanction, offer North Korea some real concessions, ideally, those that can benefit innocent people suffering under Kim’s administration of horror. A nuclear freeze would be a good short or medium-term concession for the U.S. to seek from Pyongyang in turn.
Letting South Korea, which has far greater cultural proximity to North Korea and more security interests at stake than the U.S., lead the way in negotiations would also help. Where Washington, especially under the Trump administration, tends to seek all-encompassing (and therefore unrealistic) deals with Pyongyang, South Korea is characteristically more measured and patient. The two Koreas must continue to take steps “towards national reconciliation, peace, and unification, however slow it may be,” South Korean President Moon Jae-in said this week. That is the mindset we need in order to avoid catastrophic war, an end to which denuclearization is only a means.
North Korea blew up the liaison office because diplomacy has stalled. Initiating productive, realistic diplomacy is the best way forward.
Bonnie Kristian is a fellow at Defense Priorities, contributing editor at The Week, and columnist at Christianity Today. Her writing has also appeared at CNN, Politico, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, Defense One, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.
