► As the IAEA report sinks into the minds of the international community, the United States and North Korea are entering a dangerous territory, one that will likely embolden hardliners in Washington who are skeptical of any agreement with North Korea.

► The question is whether policymakers in both countries understand changes that are taking place within each country or will continue to operate within a self-serving lens that affirm their worst assumptions about each other. 

 

 

According to the International Atomic Energy Agency’s latest report, North Korea resumed the 5 MW graphite-moderated reactor at Yongbyon in July, breaking a hiatus that had been in place since December 2018. This development comes at a time when Washington is preoccupied with Afghanistan and the worsening Covid-19 pandemic, and Pyongyang appears uninterested in engaging American negotiators. As the IAEA report sinks into the minds of the international community, the United States and North Korea are entering a dangerous territory, one that will likely embolden hardliners in Washington who are skeptical of any agreement with North Korea. The question is whether policymakers in both countries understand changes that are taking place within each country or will continue to operate within a self-serving lens that affirm their worst assumptions about each other. 

 

For months, North Korea analysts in Washington (including this author) have been warning that absent a positive agenda, President Biden will walk into a crisis with nuclear-armed North Korea. Instead of passively waiting for North Korea to initiate dialogue or make nuclear weapons-related concessions up front, Biden should have deployed the full force of the U.S. foreign policy apparatus early on in the administration with a clear end goal in mind, whether it is a political settlement to the Korean War or a gradual relaxing of U.S.-led sanctions as part of a larger tension reduction/denuclearization process. Bold steps in the political or diplomatic realm would have been entirely consistent with the Biden administration’s stated policy of “build[ing] on the Singapore agreement and other previous agreements” and Biden’s vision to make diplomacy the center of U.S. foreign policy. It also would have breathed life into the moribund Inter-Korean cooperation such as building of inter-Korean railways as pledged in the 2018 Panmunjom Declaration. 

 

Instead, President Biden has taken a decidedly low-profile approach to this issue. The president has not made a single speech about North Korea since taking office or clearly laid out to the American people what is at stake, despite his rhetoric at his first press conference stating that North Korea is the U.S.’s top foreign policy challenge. His Special Representative for North Korea Policy and U.S. Ambassador to Indonesia Sung Kim is virtually invisible in Washington, with his most recent lengthy statement about the U.S. position on North Korea appearing in a South Korean newspaper as opposed to an American newspaper. This is reminiscent of candidate-Biden’s op-ed in South Korean newspaper Yonhap a few days before the U.S. presidential election, which was likely read only by South Koreans, not Americans.

 

In the meantime, North Koreans seem equally uninterested in prioritizing talks with the United States, as seen by the repeated refusal to engage in working-level talks. In some ways this is understandable, given the high-profile breakdown of the Hanoi Summit between Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un. North Korean officials who work on U.S. issues have been groomed to follow American affairs for some time and have long memories. They may have concluded that Washington in general is too politically divided to reach and stick to any agreement, whether it is the Iran Nuclear Deal, the Paris Climate Accords, or a comprehensive agreement with North Korea. Also, North Korea may also have determined that the United States will never agree to a deal that includes China due to the deepening U.S.-China strategic rivalry, even if Beijing’s cooperation is vital for lasting peace on the Korean Peninsula. 

 

It is important to note that the United States has limited visibility into the opaque and isolated North Korean regime, and that anti-North Korea sentiment runs high due to the regime’s abhorrent human rights record. Few channels of information exist beyond government-sanctioned news outlets such as Korean Central News Agency and Rodong Shinmun. Foreign diplomats are leaving Pyongyang as part of a closing of the North Korean border due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The only countries with diplomatic presence in North Korea now are China, Cuba, Egypt, Laos, Mongolia, Palestine, Russia, Syria, Vietnam, and Romania—none of which enjoy a particularly close relationship with Washington. Politicians who are often the driving force behind U.S. sanctions against North Korea have long stopped directly engaging with North Korean counterparts. For example, Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi told South Korean President Moon Jae-in during their meeting in May that her views about North Korea are shaped by her visit to the country in the 1990s. According to a person at the meeting, President Moon responded by saying that she should go again, since much has changed inside North Korea in the past three decades.

 

Rather than pre-judge each other’s intentions, Washington and Pyongyang must be more attuned to changes that are taking place in both countries. In the United States, there is a growing call among North Korea experts and nongovernmental leaders for a policy that is neither escalatory nor destabilizing, guided by the belief that the Korean War-era, Cold War mindset associated with the drive to maintain U.S. dominance and primacy is unsustainable and unnecessary for advancing America's core interests in the region. Those who serve in the military are also starting to echo this view. For example, the former Commander of the Republic of Korea–U.S. Combined Forces Command Vincent Brooks and former Deputy Commander of the Republic of Korea–U.S. Combined Forces Command Ho Young Leem recently co-wrote an article in Foreign Affairs calling for a grand bargain with North Korea, one that addresses the sources of North Korea’sinsecurities, particularly economic insecurity, in return for progress on denuclearization. They describe the status quo as “unacceptable” and call on American policymakers to seek a better future “without passing through the crucible of war once again.” Change is also happening in the halls of Congress. In May, Congressman Brad Sherman introduced Peace on the Korean Peninsula Act (H.R.3446), which calls for intensive diplomacy in pursuit of a binding peace agreement to formally end the Korean War. The bill recently attained a Republican cosponsor, increasing the chance of its passage in the House. 

 

The overuse of economic sanctions as a tool to punish adversaries are also getting fresh attention in Washington, spurred in part by a transpartisan coalition calling on the Biden administration to reform its sanctions agenda as part of its administration-wide sanctions review. Those who advocate for this indiscriminate tool of warfare argue that sanctions offer the best hope for curbing North Korea’s nuclear ambitions, even though reality has proven the exact opposite. According to this view, most recently expressed by Sue Mi Terry of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, “maximum pressure” against Tehran led to a rollback in its nuclear program in 2015. In reality, U.S.-led sanctions actually strengthened the hand of hardliners in Iran while ordinary citizens suffered.

 

Just as attitudes about North Korea in Washington may be evolving, it is possible that North Korea is also grappling with changes. To be sure, the opacity of the North Korean regime makes it difficult to ascertain the value of domestic changes taking place inside the closed country. But recent events in North Korea suggest that profound changes may be underway. For instance, Kim Jong Un at the second Political Bureau meeting in June discussed a looming “great crisis” in people’s safety due to senior officials’ failure to stem the Covid pandemic. This was followed by large-scale personnel replacements, which have become more frequent since early 2020, coinciding with the start of the pandemic.  

 

Another development that may not be on most Americans’ radar is the leadership change within the North Korean political system and what it might mean for U.S.-North Korea diplomacy. According to Andrei Lankov, who reviewed the full text of the Workers’ Party of Korea’s rules approved in January at the Eighth Party Congress, changes accorded in Articles 26 and 28 include naming of the first-ever deputy of the general secretary, equivalent to the U.S. vice president. This newly-created position could signal poor health on the part of Kim Jong Un or an attempt at diffusing responsibility at a time of worsening domestic conditions. Whatever the case may be, this points to the critical need for crisis management channels as well as access to reliable information about North Korea’s domestic conditions. 

 

Ultimately, operating under outdated or cynical assumptions about each other’s motives, as has often been the case in U.S.-North Korea relations, makes for bad policy. A deeper understanding of the domestic political changes that are taking place is needed to avoid costly miscalculations that could lead to conflict.


 

 

 

AUTHORS

Jessica J. Lee is a Senior Research Fellow in the East Asia Program at the Quincy Institute. Her research interests include U.S. foreign policy toward the Indo-Pacific region, with an emphasis on alliances and North Korea. Jessica is a non-resident senior associate fellow at the Asia Pacific Leadership Network, a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a member of the National Committee on North Korea, a 2021-2022 Arms Control Negotiation Academy Fellow, and a member of the National Committee on American Foreign Policy’s 2020 U.S.-Japan-Republic of Korea Emerging Leaders Working Group. Previously, Jessica led the Council of Korean Americans, a national leadership organization for Americans of Korean descent. Prior to CKA, Jessica was a Resident Fellow at the Pacific Forum and a senior manager at The Asia Group, LLC. She began her career on Capitol Hill, where she served  as a professional staff member handling the Asia region for the chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, and as a senior legislative assistant on international security and trade for a member of Congress on the Ways and Means Committee. 

Jessica holds a B.A. in Political Science from Wellesley College and an A.M. in Regional Studies-East Asia from Harvard University. She has advanced proficiency in Korean.