
China’s Preparations for a ‘Major-Power War’
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MEMO TO THE PRESIDENT — To the President-elect:
North Korea spent almost thirty years trying to normalize relations with the U.S., knowing it would legitimize the regime and generate international development assistance. Now North Korea is aligned with a revanchist Russian Federation, providing artillery shells, ballistic missiles and reportedly over 10,000 special forces troops to aid Russia in its war of aggression in Ukraine. What happened?
It’s a question your second administration will have to reckon with.
For thirty years, North Korea had agreed to the U.S. demand of complete and verifiable denuclearization. We had the Agreed Framework in 1994, the Six Party Talks Joint Statement in 2005 and the Singapore declaration in 2018 between President-elect Donald Trump and Chairman Kim Jong Un. During most of these years, however, North Korea was pursuing a secret Highly Enriched Uranium (HEU) program for nuclear weapons, in violation of these agreements. During your second summit with Mr. Kim, held in February 2019 in Hanoi, the North Korean leader proposed the lifting of sanctions imposed on his country, in exchange for the North halting activities at their Plutonium facility at Yongbyon. When you countered, asking North Korea to halt all nuclear activities, to include at their nondeclared HEU facilities, Mr. Kim refused, and the Hanoi Summit ended abruptly.
On June 30, 2019, you shook hands with Mr. Kim at the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) that separates North and South Korea and took 20 steps into North Korea, making history as the first sitting president to enter North Korea. Since that friendly encounter, there has been no official contact with North Korea.
A dangerous spiral
During the past four years, North Korea has launched hundreds of ballistic missiles, to include the Hwasong-19 Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) capable of reaching the whole of the U.S. Recently, North Korea publicly tested suicide drones that could be provided to Russia for its war with Ukraine. Mr. Kim reportedly codified in the country’s constitution the designation of two nations as North Korea’s principal enemies: South Korea and the U.S. He has now publicly eschewed reunification with South Korea and dismantled all roads and rail lines connecting the two Koreas. And in June 2024, Russian President Vladimir Putin visited Pyongyang and signed a mutual defense treaty with North Korea that commits each to come to the defense of the other if attacked.
I’ve often been asked why we should care about North Korea. My response hasn’t changed over the years: we don’t want another Korean War, which this time would be waged against a nuclear North Korea with ballistic missiles capable of targeting our allies in South Korea and Japan, and now with ICBMs capable of targeting the U.S. as well. Although North Korea knows it would be suicidal to use nuclear weapons against Seoul or Tokyo, the likelihood of an emboldened North Korea, now aligned with Russia, using conventional weapons to incite conflict with South Korea is greater than any time since the Korean War.
A way forward?
My main message to you and your foreign policy team: We should not give up on North Korea. Except for the past four years, the U.S. has maintained routine senior level contact with North Korea for decades, including your two summits with Mr. Kim and those twenty steps you took into North Korea. And in early October 2000, former President Bill Clinton welcomed to the White House Marshall Jo Myong-rok, the second most powerful official in North Korea. They discussed the potential normalization of relations, and President Clinton was invited to visit North Korea. His Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, then visited Pyongyang in late October and had good meetings with Chairman Kim Jong Il, the father of Kim Jong Un. They also discussed the normalization of relations, with Mr. Kim committing to complete and verifiable denuclearization.
That seems like another era now.
A quarter century later, Mr. Kim knows that his close relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin, and overt support for Russia’s invasion of a sovereign nation, will prevent North Korea from receiving the international development assistance it wants and needs, and the international legitimacy it seeks. In the long term, I do no not believe that aligning with a pariah state – Russia – that will again abandon North Korea, as it did after the implosion of the Soviet Union.
Your next administration has the opportunity to reverse the recent negative developments with North Korea. And given the personal relationship you have with Mr. Kim – fraught though it may be –it’s likely North Korea will respond favorably to an overture that proposes the eventual lifting of sanctions, on an action-for-action basis, as North Korea halts the production of fissile material for nuclear weapons and halts all nuclear tests and ballistic missile launches.
Obviously, keeping our allies in South Korea and Japan apprised of developments with North Korea is important, while recommitting to the defense of our allies.
There is a way forward for the U.S. and North Korea. I urge you to pursue it.
This column by Cipher Brief Expert Ambassador Joseph DeTrani was first published in The Washington Times
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