Global crises and conflict zones have cast a particularly long shadow over the 2024 presidential election. On top of the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, North Korea just tested a long-range intercontinental ballistic missile, one of more than 100 such tests carried out by Kim Jong Un’s regime since the beginning of 2022. The next president must think about how to handle North Korea, which for decades has defied U.S. demands, requests and grievances.
A plan that abandons denuclearization as a precondition to an agreement with the North merely reflects the current dynamics of the problem.
With respect to Donald Trump, we may already have some clues. Citing three anonymous sources close to Trump’s thinking, Politico reported on Dec. 13 that the former president is considering a plan that would allow North Korea to keep its nuclear arsenal but not develop any new nuclear weapons or hold new tests in exchange for economic sanctions relief to Pyongyang. Trump strongly denied the report, calling it “a made up story” manufactured by his political opponents.
Such an approach, however, would be a dramatic U.S. policy shift on the North, which withdrew from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in 2003, has conducted six underground nuclear tests — the last during Trump’s term — and continues to violate multiple U.N. Security Council resolutions to this day. If a framework like the one described were to be seriously considered, let alone implemented, it would leave foreign policy pundits aghast, as the general consensus is that such an approach is akin to rewarding the North Korean dictatorship’s worst behavior.
Yet if we are being completely honest, a plan that abandons denuclearization as a precondition to an agreement with the North merely reflects the current dynamics of the problem. It’s exceedingly unlikely the United States, under any president, can bribe or compel the North Koreans to disarm. This has less to do with a lack of U.S. resolve, as the conventional wisdom suggests, and more to do with the Kim dynasty’s prioritization of regime stability above all else. While it leaves a bad taste in the mouth to concede the point, nuclear weapons remain the best deterrent to a foreign attack, which is why handing them over is strongly resisted in Pyongyang.
The paramount U.S. objective, dating back to the George H.W. Bush administration, has been the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. On the southern half, this goal was relatively simple to pull off because South Korea never had nuclear weapons in the first place. In October 1991, the Bush administration redeployed all U.S. tactical nuclear weapons from South Korean territory, hoping to persuade Pyongyang to abandon its own nuclear program. President Bill Clinton sought to pick up where his predecessor left off by negotiating the Agreed Framework, which allowed the North to construct light-water reactors for energy purposes but enhanced the international community’s monitoring of the North Korean program. The deal collapsed a few years later after North Korea and the U.S. both failed to live up to its obligations.
In 2017, Trump inherited a North Korea policy then in the doldrums. George W. Bush’s multilateral diplomacy had come to a halt after years of give-and-take, and Barack Obama had largely ignored the issue during his presidency. After a counterproductive burst of war-like rhetoric, Trump gambled that personal diplomacy with Kim could get North Korea to do what it had previously refused to do: become a nonnuclear state. Of course, we know how that played out; despite three leader summits, no agreement was reached. The U.S. once again insisted on complete, irreversible denuclearization, and North Korea once again refused.
U.S.-North Korea relations haven’t gotten any better. In fact, there isn’t much of a relationship to speak of. The Biden administration insists it is willing to talk directly with the North Koreans on all matters of concern, but Pyongyang has ruled out talks. Attempts to jump-start diplomacy have been a disappointment. Kim authorized intercontinental ballistic missile tests in February, March, August and most recently this week, when a solid-fuel ICBM reached an apogee of 3,700 miles and splashed into the water after a 620-mile flight. The U.S., in an attempt to mollify Seoul’s concerns, has deployed more U.S. military assets in South Korea and declared that any North Korean nuclear attack against the South would result in the end of the Kim dynasty — a position that exacerbates the sense of paranoia and despondency in the North.
Brass tacks — the U.S. has tried pretty much everything (short of a full-scale war, which no U.S. president should contemplate) to denuclearize North Korea, but the result has always been the same: failure. This isn’t for a lack of energy or smarts on the part of U.S. officials but rather a lack of control. Ultimately, the only person who can order North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons program is Kim Jong Un, a man who recently codified it into the North’s Constitution and urged his scientists and military engineers to produce more of them.
North Korea is a nuclear-armed power whether we like it or not.
The winner of the 2024 U.S. presidential election will have two choices. The first is to do what every other U.S. administration has done under the delusion that Washington can transform North Korea into a nonnuclear state. The other is to adopt an altogether different strategy that accepts reality as its starting point: North Korea is a nuclear-armed power whether we like it or not, and the prospects of this relatively isolated state surrendering the one tool that is keeping its stronger neighbors in check is minuscule at best.
The next U.S. president, whoever it is, should exhibit more creativity in managing the problem instead of leaning on cookie-cutter statements about denuclearization. This strategy would entail setting more attainable objectives and tying the normalization of relations and economic sanctions relief to concessions the Kim dynasty may be open to exploring — including, but not limited to, resuming military de-escalation with South Korea and a moratorium on ICBM development. The U.S. can no longer allow the perfect to be the enemy of the good-enough.