Detente may be an option with North Korea

Sanctions won’t break Pyongyang, but it does want some distance from Beijing.

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un delivering an address at the Sixth Conference of Cell Secretaries of the Workers' Party of Korea at the Pyongyang gymnasium. Picture: AFP/KCNA via KNS

Pity the Biden staffers charged with developing a North Korea strategy. After 30 years of US diplomacy and escalating sanctions, Pyongyang’s nuclear arsenal continues to grow, North Korean missiles get better, and the day when the Kim dynasty can reliably strike targets on the American mainland with nuclear-armed ICBMs comes inexorably closer.

During those 30 years, US policy makers have pursued an enticing goal: the abolition of North Korea’s existing nuclear arsenal and a verifiable North Korean commitment to remain nuclear-free. It is politically impossible for an American president to abandon this goal; it is impossible as a practical matter for an American president to achieve it.

In foreign policy, an unshakeable commitment to an unreachable goal is neither a sign of wisdom nor a harbinger of success. During the so-called unipolar moment of the 1990s, when the US faced no serious rivals or competition around the world, American policy makers could indulge themselves in impossible dreams and vainglorious posturing with few immediate real-world consequences. Today, a rising China aligned with a hostile Russia poses the greatest threat to vital American interests since the height of the Cold War, and US foreign policy needs to be more grounded.

The nuclear impasse isn’t the only factor shaping US-North Korea relations. North Korea is a small country with limited resources on the border of an expansionist superpower — on which it almost entirely relies for diplomatic and economic support. For the Kim dynasty, whose core political philosophy is built around the concept of juche, a Korean term roughly translated as a mixture of self-reliance and unconditional sovereignty, near-total dependence on China is bad, even scary.

Distance from Beijing

There should be no illusions here. For North Korea, foreign policy is a tool to maintain the status quo at home. North Korea is not interested in changing its political system or in giving up its nuclear deterrent. But the stronger China gets, the more compelling is the cold Machiavellian logic behind Pyongyang’s desire to distance itself from Beijing.

Under the right circumstances, North Korean foreign policy could change with blinding speed. Pyongyang isn’t accountable to anyone domestically. The Kim dynasty can flip its foreign policy as easily as Stalin dropped years of anti-fascist rhetoric to sign his pact with Hitler. Kim Jong-un’s flirtation with Donald Trump suggests that there is real interest in Pyongyang in exploring different kinds of relationships with America.

The hope that another round of sanctions will bring North Korea to its knees is a distraction. While conditions in Pyongyang are so desperate that even foreign diplomats report an inability to get basic goods, China and North Korea look set to open cross-border trade later this month. Both China and Russia are likely to scale back their sanctions enforcement as relations with the US continue to worsen.

If tension with China continues, US President Joe Biden’s administration will need to think hard, and perhaps very fast, about how US-North Korea relations might evolve. Picture: AFP

Instead of devising more futile strategies to achieve the impossible, President Biden’s Korea strategists would do well to think hard about what could be gained by facilitating North Korea’s escape from China’s orbit. Beginning to address issues like the Japanese citizens abducted over the years and still held in the North, reducing tensions on and around the Korean Peninsula, and negotiating moratoriums on testing new missiles and weapons could help stabilise Northeast Asia in ways that benefit both the U.S. and Pyongyang. A pathway to detente that sidesteps the nuclear issue could unite American allies and consolidate a favourable balance of power in a critical theatre.

The US has made hard moral compromises before — siding with Stalin against Hitler during World War II and with Mao (at the height of the Cultural Revolution) against the Soviet Union. Such decisions are never pleasant and often lead to complications down the road. The ugly moral choices an all-out struggle with China would inevitably entail is one reason America should do its best to avoid such a contest. But if the current confrontation with Beijing continues to develop, Washington will need to think hard, and perhaps very fast, about how US-North Korea relations might evolve.

Difficult and threatening as North Korea can be, it is not the gravest threat either to human rights or to American strategic interests in the Indo-Pacific. If the US must, it can and should act resolutely with allies against destabilising North Korean actions in Northeast Asia. But quietly exploring other options is an avenue the Biden administration should not neglect.

The Wall Street Journal