President-elect Donald Trump has made no secret of his ambition to negotiate big diplomatic agreements. He wants to forge peace between Ukraine and Russia, and he wants to finalize a historic peace agreement both between Saudi Arabia and Israel and between Israel and the Palestinians. The last seems an unlikely mix, to put it mildly. Trump even seems to want semi-detente with Iran, a country that has spent the past three years plotting to assassinate him.
Trump is keen to rekindle his previously amicable ties with Kim Jong Un, aiming for fresh negotiations with the North Korean leader. These discussions would ideally culminate in an agreement that diminishes North Korea’s nuclear threat to the United States, South Korea, and Japan.
Trump’s pursuit of such an accord is a good thing. Kim has spent the past four years improving his ballistic missile forces and integrating nuclear warheads with those missiles. North Korea tested an intermediate-range ballistic missile on Monday. This was probably intended to increase pressure on South Korea amid its political crisis and to remind Trump that he can ignore Pyongyang only at his peril. This matters because the Biden administration’s policy toward North Korea has seemed to focus on pretending North Korea doesn’t exist.
Time is not on America’s side. Of particular concern is the unprecedented technical support that Russia is providing North Korea. Russia needs Kim’s ammunition and troops for war against Ukraine. In return, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s scientists are helping Kim develop missiles that can carry nuclear warheads across the Pacific Ocean. There is no question that Kim’s threat is growing stronger because of this support. This unfortunate fact was underlined when North Korea successfully tested its new Hwasong-19 intercontinental ballistic missile last October.
That missile is a beast both in terms of its fuel and prospective warhead payloads. Designed to travel great distances and carry multiple nuclear warheads on each missile, the Hwasong-19 is clearly intended to boost North Korea’s strategic threat toward the U.S. Of additional concern, the missile system is movable on large transporters and uses solid fuel, not liquid. That means it doesn’t need to be fueled before launch and can more easily evade U.S. detection and interdiction efforts prior to launch. Put simply, North Korea is moving toward gaining a credible preemptive strike capability against the U.S.
How can Trump address this rising threat?
The first challenge will be to induce Kim to believe negotiations aren’t simply in his favor but necessary for his regime’s security. If Kim believes he can keep perfecting his nuclear missile capabilities without American riposte, he will have little reason not to keep doing so. At least not until Kim is confident North Korea has a viable threat against American cities. But allowing Kim to get to that point would obviously give him far greater negotiating power.
Trump must see time as his enemy. The incoming president will have to make clear to Kim that if he wants American concessions rather than American coercion, now is the time to come to the table. Trump should warn Kim that if he refuses serious negotiations and moves toward first-strike capability, he will increase the risk of U.S. military action, a U.S. naval blockade, or crippling sanctions against North Korea and its partners, China and Russia.
Trump’s unpredictability is valuable. Foreign leaders fear that Trump might act in an erratic and escalatory manner if they upset him. He successfully exploited this to get Kim talking during his first term in office. By threatening Kim with “fire and fury” if he failed to suspend his missile tests and turn to diplomacy, Trump made the North Korean dictator believe he had to choose between a war he would certainly lose and a diplomatic path that might benefit him. Trump needs to restore that understanding.
It’s clear Kim won’t be wooed by warm words. He has the world’s second-most capable and experienced nuclear weapons power acting as his de facto ally. And with U.S.-China tensions now on a Cold War footing, Beijing has little incentive to press Kim to do what America wants. The limits of Chinese influence over Kim were also underlined by Kim’s decision to join Russia’s war against Ukraine. China wants Russia to win, but it is uncomfortable with European anger over its support for Russia’s war effort. China fears this will lead the European Union to reduce its economic cooperation with China, something Beijing desperately needs to retain during its economic difficulties.
Trump could exploit this. With North Korea heavily reliant on its northern border trade with China, Trump could warn Kim that unless he comes to the negotiating table in good faith, he will impose sanctions on China unless it closes its border with North Korea. The North Korean economy remains utterly dependent on exports of drugs, arms, and low-value consumer goods. But with the Chinese economy also in trouble, Trump can leverage economic pressure on both countries.
Let’s assume Trump gets Kim back to the negotiating table. What then? What can Trump do to avoid new negotiations sharing the same fate as earlier ones?
The key is for Trump to be more realistic about what is possible. To his credit, Trump was willing to walk away from his bromance with Kim when it became clear that the North Korean leader was unwilling to make serious concessions. When Kim tried to manipulate Trump by stroking his ego and demanding unilateral American concessions, Trump refused to play along. Trump should recognize that any successful deal with Kim will require him to master the art of what is possible rather than that which dreams are made.
That means Trump should give up on North Korea’s total denuclearization. It’s not going to happen, at least not via diplomatic action. Kim clearly views his nuclear weapons as the ultimate guarantor of his regime. These weapons are the ace card that Kim can dangle to deter U.S. or South Korean efforts to destabilize or attack his regime.
Still, what threatens the U.S. is not Kim’s nuclear weapons but rather his means of delivering nuclear weapons against American cities. The focus in any negotiations should thus center on the suspension, verified by intrusive inspections, of Kim’s ICBM program. In return for significant U.S. investments, sanctions relief, and other carrots, Trump should demand that Kim surrender all his ICBMs and suspend research and development on ICBM programs. In contrast to the laughably weak inspection protocols as part of then-President Barack Obama’s 2015 nuclear weapon deal with Iran, vigorous inspection access would have to be part of an agreement with Kim.
Kim’s nuclear weapons concern could be addressed by an International Atomic Energy Agency monitoring arrangement. This might entail Kim agreeing to suspend production of new nuclear weapons and placing his existing stockpile within an IAEA facility on his soil. To counter Kim’s concerns that he would be sacrificing his key leverage, this facility could be located deep inside North Korea’s mountainous territory and surrounded by North Korean military forces.
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In essence, Kim would have means of moving to take active control of his weapons quickly if he desired. But the U.S. and its allies would also have confidence that the immediate threat of those weapons had been addressed. If Kim did take control of his nuclear weapons, the West would immediately know it was happening and could respond.
The key concern, then, is for Trump to make clear to Kim, China, and all other interested parties quickly that he is serious about greatly increasing pressure on them unless Kim is willing to reach a new accord. But also that he seeks a practically beneficial, rather than U.S. maximal-interest, agreement that all sides can live with.
