OPINION / EXPERT PERSPECTIVE — On December 18, 2023, North Korea successfully launched a solid fuel, road mobile Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) – Hwasong-18 – that was assessed to travel over 15,000 kilometers (9,320 miles), capable of targeting the entire U.S. It was North Korea’s third successful launch of an ICBM, with a record number of ballistic missile launches in 2023, all in violation of United Nations Security Council Resolutions.
Concurrently, the U.S. has been working closely with South Korea and Japan on enhanced extended nuclear deterrence, via meetings of the nuclear consultative group, which shares real time information on North Korea. Senior Biden Administration officials have stated publicly and clearly that any North Korean nuclear attack will be the end of the North Korean regime.
At the December 27, 2023, Korean Workers’ Congress, Chairman Kim Jong Un focused on the need to accomplish the country’s five-year development plan, stressing the importance of agriculture – given reports of food shortages throughout the country. Kim also called on the military to accelerate war preparations due to the unprecedented anti-North Korea confrontation with the U.S. Kim declared that North Korea will no longer seek reconciliation and reunification with South Korea, claiming that inter-Korean relations had become “a relationship between two hostile countries and two belligerents at war”, according to North Korea’s news agency KCNA. Kim also vowed to put three new military reconnaissance satellites into orbit in 2024.
On September 13, 2023, Kim met with Russian President Vladamir Putin in Russia’s Far East, touring the Vostochny Cosmodrome, with officials from Roscosmos Federal Space Agency briefing Kim on the latest Russian space technology. Previously, Putin disclosed to the media that Russia would help with North Korea’s efforts to launch a satellite. In August 2023, North Korea failed in its second attempt to put a satellite in orbit. But on November 21, 2023, possibly with the help of Russia, North Korea successfully placed its first reconnaissance satellite in orbit, in defiance of international condemnation from the U.S. and others. In return, North Korea reportedly recently delivered more than 1,000 containers of military equipment and munitions to Russia for its war in Ukraine, while continuing to provide artillery shells and rockets to Russia, in violation of UN Security Council resolutions.
And recent media reports of North Korea providing Hamas with the F-7 rocket-propelled grenade weapons for use against armored vehicles is of concern. Indeed, given Noth Korea’s long-term strategic relationship with Iran – Hamas, a proxy of Iran – may be benefiting from that relationship.
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To ring in the New Year, on January 1, 2024, Kim and Chinese leader Xi Jinping exchanged New Year’s messages, both pledging to deepen ties in a “year of China – DPRK friendship.”
So, the axis of authoritarian states – Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran – is alive and active, displaying to the world that they are aligned against all liberal democracies that are sickened by and opposed to Russia’s invasion of a sovereign Ukraine and Hamas’s horrific October 7th terrorist attack on Israel.
We should all be focused on North Korea, with its successful launches of ICBMs – Hwasong-15, Hwasong-17, Hwasong-18 – since 2017, and the likelihood that North Korea is now confident that they have a tested ICBM that can target the whole of the U.S., with the ability to mate a miniaturized nuclear warhead to any of these ICBMs. In short, North Korea believes they are a nuclear threat to the U.S., as they have been for the past decade to our allies in South Korea and Japan.
On June 22, 2006, in an op-ed in The Washington Post, William J. Perry and Ashton B. Carter, the former Secretary of Defense and Assistant Secretary of Defense respectively, wrote that “if North Korea persists in its launch preparations, the United States should immediately make clear its intention to strike and destroy the North Korean Taepodong missile before it can be launched. This could be accomplished, for example, by a cruise missile launched from a submarine carrying a high-explosive warhead … the effect on the Taepodong would be devastating … and cause it to explode … and the carefully engineered test bed for North Korea’s nascent missile force would be destroyed, and its attempt to retrogress to Cold War threats thwarted. There would be no damage to North Korea outside the immediate vicinity of the missile gantry.”
On July 4, 2006, North Korea’s apparent attempt to launch a Taepodong missile failed, but Perry and Carter in a Time Magazine article on July 6, 2006, said “… even a failed test provides critical data. More important is the test’s symbolic significance and once again North Korea has crossed a line in the sand clearly drawn by the U.S. and its partners … we continue to advise the U.S. government to strike any further taepodong test missiles before they can be launched.”
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Clearly, the Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden Administrations did not heed Perry and Carter’s advice. We are now dealing with a North Korea that’s building more nuclear weapons, with a new Light Water reactor at their Yongbyon nuclear site soon to be activated, and ballistic missiles capable of targeting the U.S. It’s a North Korea that refuses to talk to the U.S. and views the U.S. and South Korea as enemies, while aligned with Russia, China, and Iran – the axis of authoritarian states.
The U.S. strategy since the failed Hanoi Summit in February 2019, between former President Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un has been to “contain and deter” North Korea, while trying to get China to convince North Korea to return to negotiations and refrain from a seventh nuclear test. So far, China hasn’t helped with North Korea, given its own tension with the U.S. And given Russia’s and China’s unwillingness to support any UN Security Council resolution sanctioning North Korea for its ballistic missile – and satellite — launches, and its blatant willingness to trade with and support North Korea, it’s proving difficult to contain a belligerent North Korea from building more nuclear weapons and missiles to deliver them.
Although the likelihood of North Korea giving up its nuclear weapons is now nil, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t persist with efforts to get North Korea back to negotiations. During my thirteen years of direct negotiations and talks with senior North Korean officials (2003-2016), these refrains from North Korean interlocutors stay with me: “We want normal relations with the U.S.; we’ll be a good friend of the U.S.; our nuclear weapons are for deterrence purposes; we distrust China.”
A proactive strategy for attempting to re-engage with North Korea is needed.
This opinion column by Cipher Brief Expert Ambassador Joe Detrani was first published in The Washington Times
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