Although Chairman Kim Jong-un has good personal feelings about President Trump, they are, in the true sense of the word, “personal” . . . There will never be such negotiations as that in Vietnam, in which we proposed exchanging a core nuclear facility of the country for the lift of some UN sanctions in a bid to lessen the sufferings of the peaceable people even a bit.
—KIM JONG-UN’S SPOKESPERSON, KIM KYE-GWAN, JANUARY 11, 20201
IN MID-MARCH 2018, I hosted Ambassador Chung and Japanese national security advisor Yachi Shotaro in San Francisco, the city that has served as America’s gateway to the Indo-Pacific region since the mid-nineteenth century. It was our third and final trilateral meeting in less than a year. The city and the particular venue for our meetings, the Marines’ Memorial Club Hotel, near Union Square, were well suited to our purpose. Since the height of the California gold rush, San Francisco has been home to vibrant Indo-Pacific expatriate communities, including Chinese, Taiwanese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Indian, and Korean immigrants. Since the 1990s, the booming Silicon Valley economy attracted a new wave of highly educated expatriates from the region, who helped make the city a global hub of technological and commercial innovation. The artifacts on display within the Marines’ Memorial Club Hotel commemorated the role of the United States in determining the historical trajectory of the Indo-Pacific in the twentieth century. Founded in 1946 as a living memorial for U.S. servicemen and women, the hotel featured many images of combat in the Pacific during World War II, from Imperial Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941, to the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945; and those of the Korean War, from North Korea’s invasion of the South on June 25, 1950, to the signing of the armistice on July 27, 1953. These images were reminders of the costs and horrors of war. They were also reminders of the achievements of an emerging superpower, a former enemy, and a nation victimized by that former enemy in the wake of those wars in building a better future.
During our first meeting at the White House in March 2017, Yachi had expressed concerns over what an “America First” foreign policy would mean for the Japanese-U.S. relationship. I assured him that although President Trump would insist on reciprocity, especially in the areas of trade, market access, and defense burden sharing, all in the administration understood that a strong United States–Japan alliance was essential to realizing the vision of a “free and open Indo-Pacific.” Yachi and I became close friends. I was grateful for the opportunity to work with one of Japan’s most experienced and respected diplomats. The growing threat to Japan from North Korea’s missiles and nuclear program was his top priority.
Yachi, born one year before the end of World War II, was a true believer in a strong U.S.-Japanese alliance. He was an infant when six million Japanese soldiers and civilians returned home to find their country ravaged by a sustained bombing campaign that culminated in America’s use of the most destructive weapon in human history to end the costliest war in human history. Yachi grew up at a time when the Japanese people wondered how their country, the size of the state of Montana and with a population of over one hundred million people yet few natural resources, could ever recover from the devastation. But the day after Japan’s surrender in 1945, America extended the hand of friendship to it, and the Japanese people proved to be resilient and determined to rebuild and reshape their nation. By Yachi’s eighth birthday, when the Allied occupation ended, the Japanese economy had almost recovered to prewar levels of production. It was only the beginning of an astonishing success story.2 It was also the beginning of what would become a strong, enduring alliance between Japan and the United States. Although the alliance was strained at times, such as in 1960, during the demonstrations against the renewal of the U.S.-Japanese Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security (or Anpo, as it is abbreviated in Japanese), the relationship between the former foes not only benefited their citizens, but also contributed to a remarkable economic expansion that lifted tens of millions out of poverty in East Asia. Abe Shinzo, Japan’s longest-serving prime minister (and the grandson of a prime minister and son of a foreign minister) described the Japan–United States alliance as one that has given the world hope. He asked rhetorically, “What should we call this, if not a miracle of history? Enemies that had fought each other so fiercely have become friends bonded in spirit.”3
I intended our meetings in San Francisco to serve as an implicit homage to what is known as the San Francisco System of U.S. alliances in East Asia. After World War II, that hub-and-spoke system of bilateral alliances included a range of political, economic, and military commitments with Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Thailand, and Australia.4 U.S. officials appreciated the mutually beneficial nature of those alliances, labeling Japan the “cornerstone” and South Korea the “linchpin” for security and prosperity in Northeast Asia. Relations between the cornerstone and the linchpin remained tense, however, and Prime Minister Abe’s grandfather Nobusuke Kishi inflamed those tensions when, in the late 1950s, as prime minister, he promoted postwar nationalist revisionism with acts such as dedicating a monument to Gen. Hideki Tojo and six other military leaders convicted and sentenced to death by the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal.
Like Yachi, Chung had witnessed extraordinary changes as South Korea emerged from the decades of war and brutal occupation. Against all odds—destroyed infrastructure, a denuded countryside, illiteracy, and corrupt governance—the South Korean people created a thriving democracy and the fifth-largest economy in Asia. Between 1960 and 2020, the South Korean economy increased by a factor of 350, life expectancy rose from fifty-four to eighty-two years and the country saw the most dramatic rise in standard of living in modern history.5
The Korean miracle, however, ended at the armistice line that divided North and South. In the second decade of the twenty-first century, only forty miles north of Seoul’s bustling streets, fewer than half of North Korea’s population have access to electricity, and residential plumbing remains a luxury exclusive to the upper class.6 Among children under the age of five, nearly 30 percent suffer stunted growth due to malnutrition.7 Meanwhile the North Korean regime distributes goods to the privileged few based on perceived loyalty. Those who demonstrate the highest loyalty live in relative comfort in Pyongyang, while others are condemned to lives of destitution and even starvation. The regime continues to prioritize its military, weapons programs, and even the building of monuments to the Kim family dictators over the welfare of its people.
The South Korean and Japanese people, despite their tremendous success and their common commitment to democratic governance and rule of law, are divided by difficult historical memories that create tensions in their relationship. Those tensions sometimes crept into the tenor of the discussions between two men who began their lives in the midst of devastating wars. I was determined to encourage a positive relationship between our allies and between Chung and Yachi. Tensions between Seoul and Tokyo would only benefit common adversaries. Beijing spoke of the U.S. alliance system in Asia as an irrelevant relic of the Cold War. The corollary to the Chinese narrative was that South Korea and Japan should resign themselves to China’s growing power.8 A rift between South Korea and Japan could allow China to drive a wedge between the United States and both allies and allow Beijing to pose as beneficent mediator even as it pursued primacy in Northeast Asia. Lack of unity among our three nations would also diminish both Beijing’s incentive to support denuclearization and Pyongyang’s fears that its nuclear and missile programs were driving the three nations together.
The images and artifacts in the Marines’ Memorial Club Hotel underscored the importance of remembering our history. I hoped that these artifacts might allow us to reflect on our achievements and the shared values fundamental to those achievements. Moving beyond a painful past was necessary to overcome challenges of the present and build a better future.
MATT POTTINGER and I met separately with Chung and Yachi on Saturday afternoon. NSC director for Korea, Allison Hooker, joined us for the South Korea meeting, and our NSC director for Japan, Eric Johnson, attended the Japan meeting. Pottinger and I then joined Chung and Yachi and their “plus ones” for dinner together at the Leatherneck Steakhouse, on the hotel’s top floor. The spectacular view of the San Francisco skyline, along with good steaks and California pinot noir, helped dissipate some of the tension between Chung and Yachi that had accumulated since the last meeting. South Korea’s renewed calls for atonement and compensation for the Japanese occupation’s crimes from 1910 to 1945, including its use of Korean “comfort women” as wartime sex slaves and forced labor in Japanese industries, had elicited a defensive response from Japanese leaders, who felt that they had atoned already for the crimes of previous generations. Matt could always be counted on for a humorous story to break the ice, and the dinner allowed us to catch up on each other’s families and build strong personal relationships important to the work we had before us. Chung and Yachi were statesmen. They respected each other and were able to transcend the latest tumult in the South Korea–Japan relationship. We held our trilateral meeting the next morning, after which I would depart so Chung and Yachi could have time together without me.
THE TRILATERAL meeting had three main purposes: first, to foster a common understanding of the precise nature of North Korea’s nuclear threat; second, to agree on principles we deemed essential to ensuring that the Kim regime no longer posed a grave danger to our security; and third, to identify mutually reinforcing actions our leaders and our governments could take to advance our collective efforts.
It was important that Chung, Yachi, and I agree on the North Korean regime’s motivations and intentions, because differences of opinion over the best approach to North Korea stemmed from divergent understandings of why Kim Jong-un wants nuclear weapons and advanced missiles. For example, those who argued that the least risky and least costly course of action would be to accept North Korea as a nuclear power and then deter its use of nuclear weapons assumed Pyongyang wanted the most destructive weapons on earth mainly for defensive purposes. As David Lai and Alyssa Blair wrote in August 2017, “facing continued hostility from the United States and its allies, Japan and South Korea, North Korea felt extreme concern about its national survival; as a result, it viewed nuclear weapons as a necessity.”9 Lai, professor at the U.S. Army War College, asserted that “in practice a North Korean nuclear capability to attack America would not threaten U.S. security” because “the North is looking for a deterrent to U.S. military action.” I disagree. The assumption that Kim wants nuclear weapons only for deterrence is based on mirror imaging of an adversary that is not “like us” and on simplistic historical analogies to nuclear deterrence against the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Chung, Yachi, and I agreed that we had to base our approach on the possibility that Kim’s family dictatorship wanted these weapons for more than defensive purposes.
Chairman Kim is the third in a succession of ultranationalist leaders whose legitimacy rests on the promise of “final victory.”10 It was important to at least consider the Kim regime’s own explanation for investing and sacrificing so much in pursuit of nuclear weapons and missiles. Kim Jong-un and his father both spoke of their planned nuclear arsenal as a “treasured sword” designed to cleave the alliance between the United States and South Korea and make the United States think twice about ever coming to South Korea’s aid in time of war. Because the United States would likely determine that the security of South Korea was not worth a nuclear holocaust on its own territory, nuclear weapons would help push U.S. forces off the peninsula as the first step toward “red-colored unification” (적화통일), or “final victory,” after which South Korea would submit to Kim family rule.11 After he assumed power, Kim Jong-un reportedly directed the military to come up with a new war plan so that the Korean People’s Army could occupy Seoul in three days and the peninsula in seven. The North Korean missile launches in 2016 and 2017 were meant to exercise the war plan, which included practicing nuclear airbursts over disembarkation airfields and ports in South Korea and U.S. bases in Japan.12
Moreover, if North Korea was concerned mainly with deterring South Korea and the United States, it did not need nukes. North Korea has a tremendous conventional deterrent capability with more than 21,000 artillery and rocket systems able to bombard the city of Seoul, which lies only thirty-one miles from the DMZ.13 And what was North Korea so eager to deter? Every act of aggression and violence against the United States, South Korea, and Japan since the invasion of South Korea in June 1950 was initiated by the North. North Korea directly attacked the South Korean leadership during the 1968 commando attacks of the Blue House and the failed assassination of President Chun Doo-hwan in Rangoon, Burma, in 1983, to set conditions for the ultimate objective of red-colored unification. And the North has not hesitated to employ terrorism against the innocent. In 1987, less than a year before the 1988 Seoul Olympic Games, two North Korean agents exploded Korean Air Flight 858, killing 113 South Korean civilians. One agent, who survived a suicide attempt, confessed later that the attack had been ordered by Kim Jong-il. North Korea has also abducted thousands of South Koreans and as many as a hundred Japanese citizens since the armistice.14 Testimonies from North Korean defectors suggest varying motivations, ranging from finding native language teachers for its spies to a long-term breeding project that sought to train the abductees’ children as secret agents.15
Rather than deter conflict, North Korea would likely become more aggressive and prone to initiate a war once the Kim regime had its desired weapons. Under the cover of nuclear capabilities, Kim Jong-un could increase physical attacks on South Korea and cyber attacks globally.16 Pyongyang would almost certainly try to extort payoffs and concessions from South Korea, Japan, the United States, and others.17 And if North Korea develops an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of carrying a nuclear warhead to the United States, it is easy to imagine Pyongyang issuing an ultimatum to Washington demanding that U.S. forces depart the peninsula. But even if Kim Jong-un really did want nuclear weapons for the less ambitious purpose of forestalling efforts to end Kim family rule, there are other reasons a nuclear-armed North Korea is a grave danger for which deterrence is an inadequate solution.
As with Iran and the Middle East, accepting and deterring a nuclear-armed North Korea would create strong incentives for the further proliferation of nuclear weapons in the region. If North Korea was capable of striking the United States with a nuclear weapon, thus raising further doubts about the willingness of the United States to keep South Korea and Japan under the protection of its “nuclear umbrella,” it could be only a matter of time before Japan and South Korea concluded they needed their own nuclear weapons. And soon enough, other countries across Asia and beyond might conclude they needed them, too.
Another factor is the North Korean regime’s record of selling every weapon it has ever possessed, including its nuclear and missile technologies. At the end of 2006, Israel Defense Forces intelligence chief, Gen. Amos Yadlin, concluded that a cube-shaped structure in the Syrian desert was a nuclear reactor intended to produce plutonium for military purposes.18 A few months later, Mossad (Israeli intelligence) agents broke into the Vienna hotel room of Ibrahim Othman, the head of the Syrian Atomic Energy Commission. The images they downloaded from his computer included photos of North Korean scientists and workers at the site. At 10:30 p.m. on September 5, 2007, Israel launched Operation Outside the Box as Israel Defense Forces (IDF) fighter jets streaked across the Syrian desert only one hundred meters above ground level. The fighters dropped seventeen tons of explosives on the facility, destroying it completely. Israel did not admit to the attack until 2018. And Syria, perhaps reluctant to divulge both the impotence of its defenses and the nature of its nuclear weapons programs, acknowledged only an intrusion of its airspace. Ten North Korean scientists are believed to have perished in the strike.19
North Korea has smuggled weapons to Houthi rebels in Yemen, militias in Libya, and armed forces in Sudan, all in violation of UN sanctions. The DPRK not only sold its nuclear program to Syria, but also assisted it with the production of chemical weapons used to mass murder civilians during the Syrian Civil War.20 North Korea has also shared its missile and nuclear technology with Iran. In return, Iran financed the Al-Kibar nuclear reactor in Syria and brokered a range of North Korean arms sales to Bashar al-Assad.21 Shifting its criminal and weapons-smuggling networks to the marketing and sale of nuclear weapons and facilities would be a simple task for Pyongyang. It is not unreasonable to envision North Korea selling nuclear devices to the highest bidder, even if that bidder is a terrorist organization. As with Iran, decisions concerning North Korea’s nuclear program should not be separated from the nature of its depraved leadership. Yachi, Chung, and I agreed that the stakes were high for our security and the security of all nations.
WE DEVELOPED three first principles. First, we would convince other nations to support the strategy of maximum pressure and resist the temptation to accede to weak initial agreements just to get to the negotiating table. In the past, weak deals, such as “freeze for freeze,” in which the United States and South Korea suspended military exercises in return for flimsy North Korean promises to suspend testing of nuclear weapons and missiles, gave North Korea what it wanted, alleviating sanctions and delivering payoffs that reduced pressure on the regime. These kinds of agreements should be nonstarters.22
Second, we could not view diplomacy and the development of military options as separate, sequential efforts. Successful diplomacy would depend on demonstrated will and capability to employ force against North Korea if necessary. Consistent with negotiation and mediation theory taught in business schools, we must make Pyongyang’s “best alternative to a negotiated agreement,” or BATNA, look bleak while making denuclearization look attractive based on economic benefits and assurances that the Kim regime would remain intact.
Third and most important, we would resist efforts to lift sanctions prematurely or to reward the DPRK government just for talking. Sanctions on the regime would remain in place until there was irreversible momentum toward denuclearization. I believe that adhering to those principles gave us the best chance to convince Kim that his family’s decades-old playbook no longer worked; he could no longer keep his nuclear weapons and missile programs going while extorting concessions. But events since our previous meeting in August 2017 were already testing our ability to maintain this nascent strategy.
IN LATE 2017, after the September nuclear test by North Korea, the effort to apply maximum pressure was beginning to take effect. The UN Security Council had approved unprecedented sanctions. American, South Korean, and Japanese armed forces trained and prepared for contingencies. Chairman Kim was isolated. In December, the United States and Canada announced that they would host nations from around the world in Vancouver in January to show solidarity against North Korea’s nuclear program. The Trump administration sanctioned more North Korean entities in eighteen months than the Obama administration did in eight years. Kim must have decided that it was time to make an overture and alleviate the pressure. His first move was to respond to President Moon’s invitation for an opening to the North.
On January 9, 2018, when North Korean officials met with South Korean officials at the DMZ for the first time since 2015, they announced that they would accept President Moon’s invitation to participate in the upcoming Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea. During the games in the following months, fawning coverage of the North Korean athletes, its cheerleaders, the joint North Korea–South Korea women’s hockey team, and especially the lead of the North Korean delegation, Kim Jong-un’s younger sister Kim Yo-jong, seemed to give Kim what he wanted. South Korea seated the U.S. delegation, Vice President and Mrs. Pence and First Daughter Ivanka Trump, directly in front of the North Korean delegation, which included Kim Yong-nam, the nearly ninety-year-old nominal head of state.23 President Moon no doubt hoped that the two delegations might break the ice and engage in conversation, but neither party spoke to the other. The good feelings that the Olympics generated, however, boosted support for a more conciliatory approach to Pyongyang, especially in Seoul. Old hopes were rekindled. Maybe participation in the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics was the start of Pyongyang’s transformation into something like the government in Hanoi.24
Moon, eager to pursue inter-Korean dialogue and reduce tensions on the peninsula, followed up the Olympics with a meeting with Kim at the demilitarized zone on April 27, 2018. The two leaders held hands as they dramatically stepped across the line dividing the DMZ and then held a conversation at the “Truce Village,” Panmunjom. The ill winds on the Korean Peninsula seemed to be receding.
After the Moon-Kim meeting, Chung and South Korea’s intelligence chief, Suh Hoon, traveled to the United States to brief me and Gina Haspel, acting director of the CIA, on the results of the meeting. I arranged for them to also brief members of the president’s cabinet in advance of an Oval Office meeting with President Trump. The main purpose of their trip was to communicate Kim Jong-un’s willingness to meet with President Trump, convey President Moon’s request that President Trump reciprocate, and to inform us of President Moon’s plans for sustained engagement with the North.
I was skeptical of a Trump-Kim summit because it was likely to alleviate diplomatic and economic pressure on Kim. Other nations, especially China and Russia, would probably become slack on sanctions enforcement. Moreover, the maximum pressure strategy was still in its nascent stages; some of the sanctions would not take full effect until the end of 2019. I believed that this was why Kim Jong-un had agreed to participate in the Olympics, met with Moon, and reacted positively to Moon’s proposal of a meeting with Trump. Kim needed a way to alleviate pressure, bolster his reputation, and break out of his isolation. Plus, engaging Seoul and Washington would make him more attractive to other world leaders. Chairman Xi, for example, would no doubt fear missing out on Pyongyang’s dialogue with us and the South Koreans, a dialogue that could produce an outcome inconsistent with China’s interests.
But I also knew that President Trump would say yes to a summit. He would find a historic first meeting between a North Korean leader and a U.S. president irresistible. His confidence in using relationships to solve problems, and in his own negotiating skills, would render ineffective any argument to wait until Pyongyang began to feel the effects of the maximum pressure campaign. Given the certainty of that outcome, our team worked with the State Department and others across the government to make the most out of a forthcoming summit while keeping the pressure campaign intact.
Despite my misgivings, I also believed that a summit with Kim would present an opportunity. Trump was unconventional, and the North Korea challenge had proven immutable to conventional approaches. A summit would drive a process that was more top down than bottom up, and that seemed positive. Bottom-up, protracted negotiations with North Korean officials who had no real decision-making authority and who were fully vested in the status quo, had in the past proven frustrating and futile. Although we knew that Kim Jong-un had a tremendous capacity for brutality, we did not know how he would respond to President Trump’s argument that denuclearization was in Kim’s interest. His background was different from that of his father and grandfather. He was quirky to say the least. He took his father’s interest in the National Basketball Association and, in particular, the famous Chicago Bulls championship teams of the 1990s to the extreme. Kim’s odd alliance with that team’s eccentric, much-pierced, and excessively tattooed defensive specialist Dennis Rodman (who had also appeared on Trump’s reality TV show, The Apprentice) revealed his tendency toward immoderation and maybe also toward making unexpected decisions.25 Moreover, in his first five years as “Great Successor,” Kim had created an unprecedented class of wealthy entrepreneurs, military officers, and party officials known as donju (돈주), loosely translated as “masters of money,” whose extensive access to smuggled goods and foreign currency helped the economy remain stable as sanctions tightened.26 Kim may prove reluctant to dash the rising expectations of the donju. Allison Hooker, who had traveled to North Korea several times and understood the country as well as anyone in the U.S. government, agreed that there was at least a slim chance of a breakthrough.
Our meeting with Yachi and Chung focused on how to take full advantage of the opportunities presented by the inter-Korean dialogue and the Trump-Kim Summit while minimizing risks and adhering to our principles. Keeping Korea, Japan, and the United States aligned would communicate resolve to North Korea and the world. After listening to Chung and Yachi, I summarized their comments around three points of agreement. First, while improvements in inter-Korean relations should reduce tensions, we remained committed to keeping sanctions in place until there was irreversible and verifiable progress toward denuclearization. Second, we would emphasize to Kim and others that obligations under UN Security Council resolutions were for North Korean action, not for U.S. or South Korean concessions. In particular, we should reject talk of a freeze for freeze or other preliminary agreements that would fail to address the problem and reduce pressure on the North. Finally, we would ask all nations, including China and Russia, to encourage Kim to take advantage of the opportunity for enduring peace and prosperity. I still had profound reservations about the summit, but Kim was enjoying the temporary alignment of an unconventional U.S. president willing to take risks and a South Korean president willing to pursue a fundamentally different relationship between North and South.
I departed the White House the following month, on April 9, 2018. My regrets at leaving the job as national security advisor were threefold, and all reflected in that earlier meeting in San Francisco. I would miss working with dedicated foreign counterparts such as Yachi and Chung. I would also miss my colleagues on the NSC staff, including Matt Pottinger, Allison Hooker, and Eric Johnson. And I would regret leaving unfinished our work on crucial challenges to our freedom and security. But I also realized that the toxic environment in Washington, in the administration, and the White House had hobbled my ability to make a positive contribution to the president and our nation.
By the time of the San Francisco meeting, I had already spoken with the president about the best time for me to transition to my successor. Yachi was aware of my departure, as the White House chief of staff’s office had already leaked rumors of it to the press. After our meeting, I sat with my friend in front of the large fireplace in the Marines’ Memorial Club library. When he expressed his and Prime Minister Abe’s hope that I would continue serving, I answered obliquely and told him how much I appreciated the opportunity to serve with him. I knew that there was no guarantee that maximum pressure would achieve denuclearization, but I would finish my tour of duty as national security advisor hoping that the strategy would survive and that we would not succumb to the tendency of returning to the failed pattern of past efforts.
TWO YEARS after my last meeting with Yachi and Chung, the threat from North Korea’s missile and nuclear programs continued to grow despite President Trump’s best effort to achieve a breakthrough. Although the first Trump-Kim Summit, in Singapore, ended on a positive note, with an ambiguous DPRK commitment to denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, the course of events that followed revealed that Kim’s and Trump’s definitions of denuclearization were incompatible. In the summer of 2018, perhaps as a gesture of good faith, President Trump even gave Kim something for nothing, postponing what he described in a tweet as “ridiculous and expensive” joint U.S.–South Korean military exercises.27 But Kim may have interpreted Trump’s gesture and other conciliatory actions and words—such as Trump’s overruling new Treasury Department sanctions on North Korea, or stating that he no longer wanted to use the term maximum pressure because “we’re getting along,” or stating that he did not want to impose more sanctions because of his relationship with Kim Jong-un—as an indication that Trump was returning to previous ineffective tactics like a freeze for freeze and premature alleviation of sanctions.28 In early 2019, President Trump reminded North Korea that there was a much better future awaiting should Kim denuclearize. A presidential tweet predicted that the hermit kingdom could become a “great Economic Powerhouse.” While the investment and real estate boom that would follow North Korea’s opening sounded good from a Western perspective, to Kim the prospect of opening North Korea to the world could mean the beginning of the end of his family dynasty. In the same tweet, Trump praised Kim as a “capable leader.”29
President Trump was trying to separate his relationship with Kim from the negotiations. At a rally in West Virginia soon after the Singapore Summit, Trump summarized their first meeting. He told his enthusiastic supporters that “I was really being tough, and so was he. And we would go back and forth. And then we fell in love. No, really. He wrote me beautiful letters.”30 President Trump even excused Kim for personal responsibility in Otto Warmbier’s death, stating that he would “take him at his word” that Kim knew nothing of the abuse and fatal injuries inflicted on the college student in his prison.31 Such excuses and professions of affection seemed to render Kim reluctant to criticize Trump personally, but they were insufficient to achieve a breakthrough with the North Korean leader.
North Korea was adept at cultivating hope. In May 2018, to clear the way for the Singapore summit, Kim released three American hostages, Tony Kim, Kim Hak-song, and Kim Dong-chul, to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. After the June 2018 summit, Kim dropped his most incendiary rhetoric, as did the DPRK’s state-controlled media. Meanwhile, Kim and Moon continued their inter-Korean dialogue. In September 2018, Moon and his wife, Kim Jung-sook, visited Pyongyang for three days, signing a “Pyongyang Joint Declaration” promising civilian exchanges, economic cooperation, family reunions, and the destruction of two missile facilities. During that historic visit, Moon gave a powerful speech in which he reported that he and the Great Successor had “agreed on concrete measures to completely eliminate the fear of war and the risk of armed conflicts on the Korean Peninsula” and instead “turn our beautiful territory from Baekdu Mountain to Halla Mountain into a land of permanent peace, free from nuclear weapons and nuclear threats, and to bequeath it to our future generations.”32 Moon, like Trump, promised prosperity as he shared a vision of “three Economic Belts” to connect the Koreas to each other and to their neighbors. He tried to create additional momentum and goodwill by removing land mines from the DMZ and excluding military aircraft from portions of the border region. He did his best to really, this time, jump-start the gradual transformation of the regime and erode its hostility. Sadly, as in the past, Moon, like Trump, was unable to achieve a breakthrough.
As noted earlier, strategic narcissism works both ways. The second Trump-Kim Summit, in Hanoi, Vietnam, in February 2019, exposed misunderstandings on both sides. One of Kim’s officials had watched the TV dramas The West Wing and Madam Secretary to understand how U.S. administrations made policy decisions.33 Kim Jong-un, perhaps advised poorly by Chinese officials as well as his television-watching aides, seemed to believe that President Trump was so eager for a foreign policy “win” in advance of the 2020 presidential election and so weakened by the Republican Party’s defeat in the 2018 midterm elections and the ongoing Mueller investigation that he would grant sanctions relief in exchange for the symbolic destruction of a used-up nuclear facility at Yongbyon.34 And President Trump, perhaps too confident in his own persuasive abilities and the irresistibility of economic incentives, may have overestimated Kim’s ability to abandon the regime’s Juche ideology, the ideas promulgated by Kim Il-sung that assert the self-reliance of the North Korean people, the primacy of their interests, and their purity. Juche celebrates deprivation as a sign of the North Korean people’s virtues and superiority. President Trump may have also underestimated the dictator’s willingness to discard the opportunity to improve the lives of North Koreans.
After the failure of the Hanoi summit, some argued that Trump had missed his shot at a deal with the DPRK because he refused to make concessions to Kim. But to have done so would have replicated the pattern of the 1994 Agreed Framework, during which sanctions were eased in exchange for the suspension of missile tests and energy assistance was promised in exchange for halting activities at Yongbyon. Remaining true to the principle of not lifting sanctions prematurely or rewarding the DPRK merely for talking kept alive the possibility of convincing Kim, maybe, at some point in the future, that he was safer without nuclear weapons than with them.
In 2019, the United States and South Korea both tried to keep the door open to the North, but Kim kept pushing it closed. President Trump continued to emphasize his positive personal relationship with Chairman Kim and even did a last-minute pop-in to the DMZ to meet Kim after a visit to the G20 Summit in Osaka, Japan, in June. Meanwhile, the regime picked up its aggressive rhetoric, calling National Security Advisor John Bolton a “human defect” and lashing out at Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for “fabricating stories like a fiction writer.”35 President Moon continued to offer humanitarian aid and cooperative efforts, such as joint quarantine of pigs to protect against swine fever. At the end of 2019, Kim Jong-un hosted the Fifth Plenary Meeting of the Seventh Central Committee. He seemed to reject flatly the vision of a prosperous, denuclearized North Korea, stating that “we further hardened our resolution never to barter the security and dignity of the state and the safety of its future for anything else.”36 It appeared that President Trump’s love had gone unrequited as Kim described the Trump administration’s engagement with him as “double-dealing behavior of the brigandish state in trying to completely strangle and stifle the DPRK through its provocative political, military and economic maneuvers.” He threatened to “shift to a shocking action to pay back for the pains that our people had to suffer.” In other words, back to the old cycle. And in contrast to his 2019 New Year’s address, in which he referred to the economy thirty-nine times and predicted that 2019 would be “full of hope,” while extending greetings to the “compatriots in the south and abroad who shared our will in writing a new history of reconciliation, unity, peace and prosperity,”37 Kim seemed in 2020 to predict more deprivation as “the DPRK-U.S. standoff has now finally been compressed to that between self-reliance and sanctions.” Still, in January 2020, President Trump sent Kim a warm birthday letter.38 Kim avoided insulting Trump personally, but his spokesperson accused the United States of deceiving North Korea over the past eighteen months of negotiations.
Meanwhile, North Korea showed no signs of slowing its nuclear or missile programs. Soon after the Hanoi summit, it tested a “tactical guided weapon” of an unknown quality and fired several short-range missiles into the Sea of Japan.39 In 2019, North Korea fired twenty-six missiles, the most violations of UN resolutions by the DPRK in a single year. However, Kim refrained from long-range missile tests or another nuclear test. But as prospects for improved relations faded, defensive mechanisms kicked in. Kim dismissed the humanist Moon as “officious” and “double-dealing” and did his best to dash hopes of opening to the South by stating that the South Koreans should “mind their own business.”40 After the novelty of their initial affections wore off, Kim may have felt stuck in his relationship with President Trump, and doubted whether the professions of love and promises of security for his regime were true.
President Moon’s and President Trump’s bold diplomatic foray might have been the beginning of a brighter and better future for the people of North Korea while removing a grave threat to the world. Having borne witness to a dramatic shift in a geopolitical landscape that many did not think possible in October 1989 along the East-West German border, I had permitted myself to at least hope. But Kim could not yet transcend his deep resentment of the South’s success nor his reluctance to open up to the world lest his people’s access to the truth expose Juche ideology as a fraud and reveal the Kim dynasty as neither superior nor virtuous.
IN 2020, as Kim Jong-un entered his ninth year as dictator and Donald Trump prepared to run for reelection, the strategy of maximum pressure was still intact but had not yet been achieved. Sanctions have been imperfectly enforced, with both China and Russia calling for sanctions relief. Both countries have also tried to renege on commitments to return North Korean “guest workers,” the estimated one hundred thousand North Korean citizens who work in Russia and China under conditions that border on slavery. Reports of Chinese evasion of sanctions increased, including evidence that China was providing components critical to North Korea’s production of transporter erector launchers (TELs) for its missiles, while ship-to-ship transfers of fuel imports as well as illicit coal exports grew.41 After it was clear that there would be no sudden breakthrough on denuclearization, it was time to increase pressure, including tougher sanctions enforcement, the exposure of human rights violations, cyber actions, and information operations.
The United States and its allies should penalize those nations that are failing to enforce sanctions and take a range of actions to improve enforcement. Secondary sanctions on financial institutions that facilitate illicit commerce with North Korea—as is alleged in the case of two of China’s largest banks—could be particularly effective. Thirty representatives of North Korean banks are stationed overseas in China, Russia, Libya, Syria, and the United Arab Emirates to help evade sanctions. North Korea also uses diplomatic privileges and property to generate more of the hard currency it needs for its weapons programs. A sustained campaign of fines, sanctions, and law enforcement actions could collapse North Korea’s evasion of sanctions. Cyber interdiction should complement these efforts; as should offensive cyber actions against DPRK state-sponsored cyber criminals, many of whom operate outside the DPRK. For example, defectors have testified that teams of North Korean hackers receive training and carry out cyber attacks in Shenyang, China.42 UN sanctions on North Korean overseas laborers should be enforced. The United States and like-minded countries should sanction countries and commercial entities that help the Kim regime evade sanctions and continue its nuclear weapons program through a form of slave labor.
Diplomatic efforts should focus on getting other nations not only to enforce sanctions, but also to go beyond those sanctions and do their part to impose greater cost on Pyongyang for continuing its nuclear and missile programs. For example, the U.S. State Department and its diplomats abroad have been effective in encouraging others to take action against North Korea’s extensive organized crime network.43 Those efforts should be intensified and adapted continuously as North Korea finds new ways to evade sanctions and engages in novel illicit activities such as cybercrime.
Some argue that sanctions have not been effective, but sanctions against North Korea have never been fully enforced. North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs are dependent on sanctions erosion, as none of the major components are manufactured in North Korea. Sanctions authorized in 2017, if enforced, would generate unprecedented pressure on the North. For example, forcing the return of North Korean guest workers from China and Russia would constrain further the regime’s access to hard currency and force tradeoffs between spending on its nuclear and missile programs and spending to improve the lives of North Koreans.
After promising an improved economy in his 2019 New Year’s speech, Kim returned to prioritization of military capabilities over quality of life, telling his people in 2020 that “it is our firm revolutionary faith to defend the country’s dignity and defeat imperialism through self-prosperity even though we tighten our belts.”44 After a period of rising expectations, not only the North’s vast peasant class, but also the privileged class in Pyongyang may begin to question the wisdom and effectiveness of the Great Successor. It seems likely that the severe restriction in trade associated with the coronavirus in early 2020 was bound to not only restrict the economy, but prove to be an unintended and unfortunate means of enforcing sanctions on North Korea.
U.S. diplomats should also work with other nations and international organizations to expose and sanction North Korea’s human rights abuses, including its abuse of overseas laborers. A UN special Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in the DPRK concluded in 2014 that “the gravity, scale, and nature of these violations reveal a State that does not have any parallel in the contemporary world.”45 In the ensuing years, the regime’s brutality has been undiminished. Some may argue that pressuring Pyongyang on human rights will diminish the likelihood of negotiations. But any negotiations, as seen during the Hanoi summit, are premature if Kim has not yet concluded that he could be better off without nuclear weapons.
U.S., South Korean, and Japanese militaries and the militaries of other nations play an important role in this pressure campaign. We should seek legal justification based on “reasonable grounds” to interdict and search North Korea–linked vessels, impound contraband, and sanction the offending ships and shipping companies. Military exercises and preparation for a swift and overwhelming response to North Korean aggression are also critical to convincing Kim that the United States and its allies possess the capability and, if faced with a potential nuclear strike, the will to impose denuclearization militarily without his cooperation. The success of coercive diplomacy in the form of maximum pressure depends in part on Kim’s belief that the United States and its allies are more motivated to achieve denuclearization than he is to hold on to nuclear weapons and missiles.46
Interlocutors with the Kim regime and its enablers should continue to emphasize that the removal of the Kim regime is not a goal of U.S. policy. But they might also communicate that the goal could change if Kim refuses to denuclearize and if leaders conclude that the risk of a nuclear-armed North Korea is greater than the risk of collapsing the regime. Of course, all must acknowledge that aggressive action against the North could precipitate an escalation to a costly war. Terms like limited strike are misleading because North Korea would have a say in what happened after such a strike. That is why it is worth the effort to test the thesis that the combination of maximum pressure, security guarantees, and the prospect of a prosperous North Korea can achieve denuclearization. Still, it is prudent for U.S. leaders to discuss with allies, especially South Korea and Japan, scenarios that might lead them to conclude that the only way to remove an unacceptable threat of nuclear blackmail or a catastrophic attack is to act militantly against the Kim regime and its forces.
Some will argue that even such a discussion would encourage Kim to keep his nuclear weapons at all cost for deterrence. Quite possibly, Kim views the example of Libya—in particular, Muammar Gaddafi’s decision to dismantle his program only to be overthrown and brutally murdered just one month before Kim took over from his deceased father—as a reason to hold on to nuclear weapons. But Gaddafi was overthrown by an internal uprising that was enabled by a NATO air campaign. If his own people or those around him conclude that Kim’s policies are failing, he should be much more worried about internal than external threats.
Due to the nature of the Kim regime and its developing nuclear capability, how can the United States, South Korea, Japan, or any of the DPRK’s neighbors be sure that a North Korean TEL rolling out of a tunnel and carrying a missile is on its way to a test rather than to an actual attack? And how could any of those nations know if the warhead it is carrying is inert, high explosive, chemical, or nuclear? The United States, South Korea, and Japan should expand surveillance and missile defense as well as land-, sea-, and air-based strike capabilities to deter and, if necessary, preempt a DPRK attack.
Diplomats should focus as much on allies as on North Korea and its enablers. Because of the grave danger to their people, South Korean and Japanese leaders must be full-time partners in developing ways to overcome the North Korea challenge. The relationship between the two U.S. allies deteriorated in 2019 over the South Korean Supreme Court’s verdict that the victims of forced labor during Japanese occupation deserved rights to reparations from Japanese firms. In response, Japan imposed trade restrictions on a number of Japan-made industrial products, such as chemicals and precision machine tools, that are deemed essential to South Korea’s high-tech firms.47 Seoul then nearly canceled the awkwardly named intelligence sharing agreement between the two countries, the General Security of Military Information Agreement (GSOMIA). Many South Koreans began calling for boycotts of Japan, a move that resulted in canceled travel plans and a refusal to patronize Japanese-owned businesses or purchase Japanese products. The rift was a gift to Beijing, allowing China to pose as a mediator. Xi hosted Moon and Abe in Beijing in December 2019. China used this and subsequent trilateral meetings between Moon, Abe, and Premier Li Keqiang to depict China as the most influential power broker in the region.
Mediating an entente and gradually strengthening the relationship between South Korea and Japan should be a top priority for the United States. Their relationship is important not only to ensuring a cohesive approach to North Korea, but also to convincing China and Russia to play a more positive role. Chung, Yachi, and I pledged that every North Korean provocation would be seen as pushing Seoul, Tokyo, and Washington closer together. Because the old San Francisco System of alliances is the opposite of what Beijing and Moscow desire, Xi and Putin might conclude that North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs are no longer serving their interests. Expanded South Korean and Japanese defense capabilities, such as in missile defense and medium-range conventional ballistic missiles, might drive home the point that the United States and its allies are becoming stronger in response to the threat from North Korea.
As always, information may be a more powerful instrument than even the best military or cyber capabilities. North Korea’s Ministry for the Protection of the State maintains a total blackout of all information other than state media and persecutes those suspected of ideological crimes. Policy debates over North Korea often revolve around whether to pursue opening up to DPRK or maximizing pressure. It is a false choice. South Korea in particular should build on previous efforts to reach the North Korean people through radio broadcasts, leaflets, CDs, and USB flash drives. We should also take advantage of new technology to penetrate the North’s information blockade. In 2015, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and scientists demonstrated such technological innovations, including compact satellite dishes designed by a pair of Korean American teenagers who partnered with a former Google engineer; smart balloons that can carry USBs to targeted areas; and a mesh network to distribute digital contraband through tiny, daisy-chained computers connected to peer-to-peer Wi-Fi.48
And if we breach the North’s information defenses, what should our messages convey to the North Koreans? We might first counter the regime’s narrative and the Juche ideology. Deprivation is not a sign of virtue, and it has not been inflicted on North Koreans from the outside. North Korea’s neighbors and the United States are not hostile to the North Korean people; nor are they the cause of North Koreans’ poverty and isolation. There is an alternative to living in their physical and psychological gulag. To the “masters of money” surrounding Kim and living in Pyongyang, we might describe an alternative future in which they and their families could be forgiven for past crimes and thrive. But most important, content delivered to North Koreans should expose them to alternative views so they might regain their ability to form opinions other than those approved by the regime.49 President Moon prioritized the removal of guard posts and mines along the DMZ, but it may prove a much more difficult, yet worthy, endeavor to begin to erase the psychological and perceptual lines that divide the two very different systems.
South Korea should take every opportunity to draw a stark contrast between its free and open society and the North’s failing, closed, authoritarian system. One way to do that is by publicizing the stories of North Korean escapees and ensuring that those escapees receive a warm welcome in the form of employment and educational opportunities. Those who flee North Korea may also form a cadre of experts whose knowledge would be vital to help North Korea transition after the collapse or transformation of the regime.50
Many North Korea scholars believe that the regime is unsustainable. It is not clear, however, that it would collapse or transform before Kim Jong-un presented an unacceptable danger to the world. What the United States and its allies and partners can do is prepare for a range of scenarios. The period following regime collapse could be violent and difficult. Estimates are that reunification would cost upward of $3 trillion. The two Koreas have grown apart not only economically, but also culturally and intellectually. Thus, what may prove most important to a post-Kim Korea are initiatives in education and efforts to manage the psychological trauma and humiliation among the North Korean people once they are faced with a relative lack of skills and social standing compared to South Koreans, who have built a successful society over multiple generations. However, as North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs progress, there is no time to wait for the regime’s collapse. In the near term, the strategy of maximum pressure should endeavor to convince Kim that he is safer, from both external and internal threats, without them.