On Sunday, President Trump unexpectedly ordered a scaling back of the US–Republic of Korea Ulchi Freedom Shield military exercises scheduled for August 17–27. Invoking his “very good relationship” with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, he wrote that the drills would send an “inappropriate and hostile” signal to an “unthreatening and respectful” North Korea. And today, the Wall Street Journal reports that he has asked his advisors to try to arrange a meeting with Kim, possibly as soon as November, when Trump next visits Asia.
The move reflects a desire to reboot the US–Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) talks of Trump’s first term, when he became the first sitting US president to meet with a North Korean leader. The two sealed a landmark joint statement of principles in Singapore in 2018. Draft agreements were drawn up that would have regularized US-DPRK relations and declared an end to the Korean War, but the process foundered on the DPRK’s unwillingness to accede to US demands that it rapidly relinquish its nuclear weapons and production capabilities.
Seven years later, the DPRK has expanded its nuclear arsenal from 15 warheads to 50 and deployed more ballistic missiles that can probably strike the continental US. Chairman Kim has also developed an extensive military partnership with Russia, to which he has sold weapons and sent North Koreans to fight on its front lines. In exchange, Russia has probably granted Kim access to advanced military technologies. All of which is to say that the threat the DPRK poses to US interests is greater now than it was in 2016, when Trump came into power, or 2006, when the North tested its first nuclear device. Decades of sanctions and military deterrence have failed to turn things around. So ignore claims that Trump is selling out the free world by scaling back one military exercise. It serves US interests to talk to the North, and President Trump is right to make an overture.
The lesson of the 2018–2019 talks is that America’s maximalist negotiating position—that the North rapidly denuclearize—foreclosed progress on other goals, such as pausing North Korea’s missile-testing program, capping its stockpile of warheads and missiles, freezing its production of fissile material, or establishing a more regularized US-DPRK diplomatic relationship. These goals are more limited, but they are also more achievable. The US should use a new negotiating push to make progress on what is possible. Last September, Kim made it clear he is thinking along similar lines—that he is willing to talk to the US, but only if it “drops its hollow obsession with denuclearization.” South Korean President Lee Jae Myung has also rejected an up-front push for denuclearization.
A minor unilateral concession like President Trump’s scaling down of this week’s military exercise is a good place to start. North Korea is a weak country with a tiny margin of security compared with the US, so the onus is on the US to take the first confidence-building steps. Next, the White House should privately pitch DPRK interlocutors on a new, open-ended negotiating process formally based on the 2018 Singapore Declaration but, in practice, focused on incremental achievements. These could include freezing the North’s missile and warhead production or establishing a bilateral crisis hotline, a missile-launch notification agreement, a mutual nuclear no-first-use pledge, or a declaration to end the Korean War. Especially with an amenable government ruling in Seoul, there is an opportunity to make lasting progress on one of our longest-standing geopolitical stalemates.
North Korea is fully out of the gate as a nuclear-armed country. Reversing that development, however desirable it may be, is such a distant prospect as to be almost politically irrelevant. But the US can and should seek a more stable bilateral relationship that limits the nuclear and missile threats to the US homeland and gives the North geopolitical alternatives to Russia and China.
