SEOUL, South Korea (AP) – Last year was a disaster for North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
He helplessly watched his country’s already battered economy deteriorate further amid pandemic border closures, as he brooded over the collapse of TV summits with former President Donald Trump who failed to lift his country’s crippling sanctions.
Now he has to start all over with President Joe Biden, who previously called Kim a “criminal” and accused Trump of chasing glasses rather than meaningful reductions of Kim’s nuclear arsenal.
While Kim has vowed in recent political speeches to bolster his nuclear weapons program, he also tried to give Biden an opening by saying the fate of their relationships depends on whether Washington renounces what he calls hostile US policies.
It’s unclear how patient Kim will be. North Korea has a history of testing new US governments with missile launches and other provocations aimed at forcing Americans back to the negotiating table.
During recent military parades in Pyongyang, Kim showed new weapons he could test, including solid-fuel ballistic systems designed to be fired from vehicles and submarines, and the north’s largest intercontinental ballistic missile.
A resurgence in tensions would force the US and South Korea to take a deeper account of the possibility that Kim will never voluntarily give away the weapons he sees as his strongest guarantee of survival.
Kim’s arsenal emerged as a major threat to the United States and its Asian allies after tests in 2017, including detonation of an alleged thermonuclear warhead and flight tests of ICBMs that showed the potential to reach deep into the American homeland.
A year later, Kim started diplomacy with South Korea and the US, but it went off track in 2019 when the Americans rejected North Korea’s demands for major sanctions relief in exchange for a fragmented deal that partially gave up nuclear capabilities.
North Korea is unlikely to be the top priority for Biden, who, while facing mounting domestic troubles, is also preparing for an attempt to return to a 2015 nuclear deal with Iran that blew Trump in favor of what he maximum pressure against Iran. .
The “ order of the Biden government’s policy focus will likely be: Get America’s own home in order, strengthen US alliances and align strategies with China and Russia, then address Iran and North Korea, ” said Leif -Eric Easley, a professor at Ewha University. in Seoul.
But North Korea never likes to be ignored.
Although Biden was vice president under Barack Obama, whose policy was to await North Korea and gradually increase sanctions, that method may not work because the North’s weapons capabilities have grown significantly in the years since.
While sanctions, border closures and natural disasters killing the crops have created the toughest challenges of Kim’s nine-year rule, he won’t be in a hurry to make concessions, Easley said. Kim’s government has a high tolerance for domestic distress and can expect extensive help from China, its only major ally.
North Korea’s first provocation under Biden’s government could possibly be related to submarine-launched ballistic systems, which Kim showed during recent parades.
Kim’s ambitions for longer-range ICBMs and reconnaissance satellites he expressed at this month’s ruling party congress could lead to a space launch that could serve as a test for long-range missile technology. That would be reminiscent of a 2009 launch that took place a few weeks after Obama’s first term.
″ (The North) is capable of running tests that the US and its allies cannot ignore, ”said Easley. “Kim will probably exploit this.”
North Korean leader is trying to move diplomacy toward arms reduction negotiations between nuclear states, rather than talks that would culminate in a complete surrender of its weapons, said Shin Beomchul, an analyst at the Seoul-based Korea Research Institute for National Strategy.
But North Korea likely won’t be testing weapons until after Biden’s State of the Union speech in February, where he could set the tone for its policy towards the North, Shin said. Kim may also want to see if the United States and South Korea continue with a major joint military exercise expected in March.
While the Allies have described their annual exercises as defensive in nature and have cut back much of their combined training activities under Trump to make room for diplomacy, North Korea has called for a complete halt to the exercises, describing them as invasion rehearsals and evidence of American hostility. .
“The North made it clear during the party congress that it has no intention of giving way first, but it is also interested in what the United States has to say,” said Shin, who served as a South Korean diplomat during the Obama years. .
“Biden will not inherit Trump’s top-down diplomacy, but you could expect him to be more flexible in work-level negotiations and offer to talk to the North Koreans anytime, anywhere,” he said.
Shin expects that Biden will eventually negotiate a deal with North Korea similar to the deal with Iran that Trump pulled out of 2018. It could offer North Korea some compensation for freezing its nuclear and missile capabilities at their current level.
While the United States is unlikely to give up on its long-term commitment to denuclearize North Korea, reducing the country’s nuclear capabilities to zero is not a realistic short-term diplomatic goal, he said.
But an Iran-style deal may not work with North Korea, which has much more advanced weapons and is unlikely to accept the verification steps baked into the deal with Iran, said Park Won-gon, a professor at Handong University. in South Korea.
However, one thing is clear, Park said: If North Korea tests its weapons, Biden will impose sanctions that will continue to push Kim’s economy to the brink.