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This week, the United States and South Korean inaugurated their summer-time joint military exercises, which will last until the end of August. Joint drills between the two allies are hardly new. What is new is the scale; for the first time since 2018, tens of thousands of troops from both countries will be in the field, practicing their skills for a variety of contingencies, including the removal of weapons of mass destruction.
More important than the actual drills, however, is what their resumption represents. Notwithstanding the Biden administration's repeated willingness to meet and talk with North Korea "anywhere, anytime, without preconditions," it isn't willing to delay the exercises any longer for the sake of a phantom diplomatic process. It's abundantly clear the U.S. doesn't envision negotiations with Pyongyang happening soon, if ever.
On strategy toward North Korea, the differences between Presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden couldn't be starker. Trump, who made his displeasure with the U.S. foreign policy establishment abundantly clear (even as he placed many establishment-minded individuals in key positions), was more than happy to buck the conventional wisdom, even if it opened himself up to criticism of being naïve, reckless, or unpredictable, Trump often prided himself on his unpredictability and was willing to do things—like meet North Korea's Kim Jong Un directly and cancel annual exercises with Seoul—that his predecessors would not dare. When Trump made the decision in March 2018 to begin his summitry with Kim, both his defense secretary and national security adviser were skeptical of the idea and highlighted the risks of doing so.
In contrast, President Biden's North Korea strategy has been the definition of conventional. Whereas Trump was perfectly fine strolling around the garden with Kim and singing his praises during press conferences, Biden has essentially outsourced North Korea policy to the lower rings of national security bureaucracy. Asked in May whether he would meet consider meeting with Kim, Biden stressed such a hypothetical meeting would only be possible if the North Koreans demonstrated a seriousness about denuclearization. At its core, the Biden administration's North Korea strategy is eerily similar to President Barack Obama's so-called strategic patience: increase U.S. economic sanctions against the North, boost Washington's military alliance with South Korea, and keep the pressure on until Pyongyang agrees to hold talks about nuclear disarmament.
Ironically, those two very different strategies resulted in the same result: failure. While Trump held three summits with Kim and was able to extract a North Korean moratorium on nuclear and long-range missile tests, he wasn't able to cajole the North Koreans into trading away their nuclear deterrent for economic incentives and promises of normalization. Biden's strategy has met a similar fate; the Kim dynasty is not only brushing off Washington's entreaties, but broke the moratorium on long-range missile tests in March and has spent the year testing new weapons systems at a steady clip. Pyongyang has conducted 18 rounds of missile tests so far in 2022, the most in a single year.
For U.S. policymakers responsible for North Korea, all of this is downright discouraging, if not depressing. The U.S. has tried to denuclearize North Korea since the George H.W. Bush administration and has come up short every time. Washington has seemingly utilized every strategy at its disposal, from stringent sanctions at the U.S. Security Council to direct, bilateral diplomacy at the leadership level. There have been promises of widespread economic assistance to the North Koreans and the occasional threat of military force. But nothing has worked.
Just recently, South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol proposed a comprehensive economic aid package to Pyongyang, from food aid to investments in North Korean infrastructure. Yet Kim Yo-jong, the sister of Kim Jong Un, dismissed Yoon's proposal with characteristic bluster, insulting the South Korean president personally and calling his initiative an idea tried numerous times in the past.
It's easy for U.S. officials to simply throw up their hands. But self-pity does no good—acknowledging the lessons of our failures would be far more productive.
First, it should be clear at this point that nuclear weapons are a core component of the Kim dynasty's identity and a significant source of its internal legitimacy. North Korea codified itself as a nuclear weapons state in its constitution a decade ago, could possess as many as 60 nuclear warheads in its arsenal, and is in the process of pairing those warheads to an increasingly diverse array of missile platforms. To trade those weapons away would be to overturn everything the Kim dynasty has worked for since the early 1990s and essentially turns its investment of a nuclear capability into a wasteful enterprise.
Second, Kim Jong Un is highly unlikely to cash in his nuclear chips for economic assistance, no matter how dire North Korea's internal situation. According to the Bank of Korea, the Kim regime's decision to close the borders as a COVID-19 measure has resulted in two years of economic contraction. The price of basic staples like rice and corn have risen, causing speculation that North Korea is flirting with famine. As much as Kim may wish to fix these problems and grow the North Korean economy, he isn't going to sacrifice his nuclear deterrent to do it.
Third and finally, the North Koreans are highly reactive to what goes on south of the 38th Parallel. The joint U.S.-South Korean military exercises are described by Washington and Seoul as defensive measures designed to ensure the allies retain the skills and capability to respond to a potential North Korean attack. Pyongyang, however, views those very same drills as offensive maneuvers—justifying its ongoing nuclear and conventional weapons development. While military exercises in South Korea are necessary to maintain deterrence, they also reconfirm the belief in North Korea that an operationally viable nuclear weapons program is an absolute prerequisite for regime security.
U.S. presidents come and go. But the perennial issue that is the North Korean nuclear weapons program stays very much the same.
Daniel R. DePetris is a fellow at Defense Priorities and a foreign affairs columnist at Newsweek.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
