The Biden administration is using an outdated script to justify doing very little about North Korea. As a consequence, it's blowing a unique opportunity to avoid a future crisis, stabilize the Korean Peninsula for the long term and rectify one of America's longest-running foreign policy mistakes.
On April 30, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki confirmed that the White House had concluded its months-long policy review on North Korea. There was no official rollout or fanfare, no glossy document with a government logo — just a brief verbal statement to reporters aboard Air Force One.
In this case, the low-key reveal was fitting, not just because the urgency of the North Korean nuclear issue pales in comparison to the others on Biden's plate, but also because the policy review apparently had nothing insightful to offer.
Psaki acknowledged that past approaches to North Korea had failed, though she offered no explanation for why. Was it because of too much pressure, or too little? Because the United States hadn't offered the right incentives to Pyongyang, or because there was nothing enticing enough to convince Kim to give up the ultimate weapon? Because the United States had been too patient in the past, or not patient enough?
An explanation for past failure is necessarily a guide to future policy. Without it, policy is either rudderless or blind to its own assumptions and risks.
Psaki's remarks were light on details, but she did say the Biden administration was going to distance itself from the approach of the Obama era, dubbed "strategic patience," as well as the grand-bargain approach that former President Donald Trump pursued during his fatuous summits with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un in 2018 and 2019.
Biden's way, pitched as a middle ground between two failed efforts, would be "a calibrated practical approach" in continued pursuit of the denuclearization of North Korea.
Kurt Campbell, the coordinator for the Indo-Pacific at the National Security Council, recently confirmed that Biden will honor the June 2018 joint statement Kim made with Trump during their first summit in Singapore.
"Our efforts will build on Singapore and other agreements made by previous administrations," Campbell told South Korea's Yonhap news agency in an interview last week. This is seemingly a positive signal, but the Singapore declaration simply reiterated in a watered-down way what the United States and North Korea had previously agreed to do. It involved no specific commitments, and the gesture of accepting precedent changes nothing on its own.
Biden's cautious approach shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone who followed Biden's presidential campaign statements.
In October 2020, he called Kim Jong Un a "thug" and indirectly compared him to Hitler. Throughout the campaign, moreover, Biden's talking points on North Korea were the most conservative among the leading presidential candidates.
Not only did he insist on the well-intentioned but practically impossible goal of denuclearization; he refused to entertain a summit meeting with Kim, distanced himself from proposals to officially end the Korean War — the warring countries only signed an armistice, not a formal peace treaty, in 1953 — and betrayed no willingness whatsoever to consider sanctions relief before North Korea made substantial concessions toward denuclearization.
There was a time when these positions would have been hailed as responsible and risk averse. But the circumstances have changed dramatically, and Biden's conservatism on North Korea has become dangerously problematic.
His emphasis on pressure and confrontation, mixed with gradualism and probing diplomacy, in pursuit of nothing less than an adversary's unilateral disarmament amounts to an unrealistic, do-nothing posture. Worse, it reflects an imperious mindset that dates back to what is often called America's "unipolar moment."
In the decade or two after the Cold War, the United States was militarily untouchable and acted as the global enforcer of international rules and norms.
The dramatic power imbalance between it and everyone else — not least North Korea — stunted its ability to appreciate how its enemies saw things and consequently made the United States pathologically incapable of accurately assessing the value of nuclear weapons to a regime like North Korea.
Political scientists dubbed this problem, "Goliath's curse." American dominance actually made it harder to influence its adversaries. US officials in Democratic and Republican administrations alike convinced themselves that, when it came to North Korea, they not only had might and right on their side, but time as well. America could keep up pressure on North Korea indefinitely and starve out the regime in Pyongyang, which would eventually capitulate to American demands.
Oh, how wrong they were. So wrong that after Trump took office in 2017, he shifted from strategic patience to the belligerent urgency of "maximum pressure," threatening war in the name of a goal — "complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization"— that had long since been overtaken by events.
As US sanctions and military pressure escalated, so did North Korea's defiance. America had failed to understand Pyongyang's strategic culture, which I have previously characterized as "pressure for pressure."
It was a failure that not only caused America to stumble into the worst nuclear confrontation since the Cuban Missile Crisis, but also accelerated North Korea's expansion of its nuclear and missile capabilities.
Enter Biden. With the US besieged by an economy in shambles, domestic political turmoil and a pandemic with a higher death toll than most wars, North Korea has been low on the priority list. His presidency deferred any meaningful action on North Korea until after a carefully considered policy review.
In the interim, US officials reached out to North Korean counterparts via the usual channels to probe their willingness to begin working-level talks aimed at denuclearization.
But they were rebuffed, likely because the context was unchanged from the unipolar hostility of the past: Biden had talked tough about Kim, sanctions remained firmly in place, ending the Korean War was not even in the conversation, and the United States and South Korea conducted a very routine joint military exercise in March — which North Korea predictably denounced — before the review was complete.
From Kim's perspective, there has not even been the smallest of signs that Biden would approach North Korea any differently than Obama did. So naturally, Biden's modest overture for working-level talks went nowhere.
What the Biden administration doesn't want to admit is that its "practical diplomacy"is strategic patience — just blandly rebranded. That's why Pyongyang panned Biden's policy review, saying that it"clearly reflects his intent to keep enforcing the hostile policy toward the DPRK as it had been done by the US for over half a century."
The statement from the North Korean Foreign Ministry — which used an abbreviation for the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, North Korea's formal name — added that the US "will face worse and worse crisis beyond control in the near future if it is set to approach the DPRK-US ties, still holding on the outdated policy from Cold War-minded perspective."
The solution to this vexing problem lies not in inflating or ignoring it, but rather in thinking about it in an updated way. America is not a unipolar power anymore. North Korea is no longer a nuclear aspirant, but rather a de facto nuclear state.
Pressure on the Kim regime has proven counterproductive on its own. And given the continued advance of its nuclear and ballistic missile programs, North Korea's ability to threaten US territory — and that of its allies — will only grow.
For decades, the United States has been willing to bear high levels of military risk to keep nuclear weapons out of North Korea's hands, but almost no diplomatic or political risk. This makes little sense on its face.
The possibility that Kim might betray any commitment he makes, or that his regime will pocket concessions from a negotiation without reciprocity, is far more tolerable than the possibility of nuclear war. Yet Washington risks the latter continuously while refusing to countenance the former.
North Korea will not give up its nuclear weapons under any foreseeable circumstance, so denuclearization cannot be the objective of any realistic strategy. But steps can be taken to cap North Korean nuclear capabilities from growing further, gradually reducing its inventory of warheads over time and even inducing restraint in North Korea's military posture.
This would require a genuine effort to undo US-North Korean rivalry through US military restraint, as well as broad-based engagement with North Korean hardliners in key institutions like the Korean People's Army, the State Affairs Commission, the Missile Guidance Bureau and the Reconnaissance General Bureau.
Officials at these organizations, who tend to be anti-American hawks with close ties to Kim, are positioned to nudge North Korean foreign policy in a more aggressive direction and to scupper any negotiating progress made by the Foreign Ministry.
As I argued in a report last fall for the US Institute of Peace, the only way for nuclear talks to meaningfully proceed is to at least engage the hardliners in parallel, possibly even relying on them as the primary interlocutors.
But diplomacy alone also won't achieve much, regardless of who the counterpart is. There must also be some form of at least symbolic sanctions relief, offered unilaterally.
Biden has to do something meaningful — ideally a number of things in concert — to prove he's not just Obama 2.0. Only then can he realistically pursue limits on North Korea's arsenal through arms control.
This is a uniquely apt time for pursuing a different path with North Korea, given the unqualified support for such an approach from South Korea.
The current government, led by the progressive President Moon Jae-in, has argued for a more conciliatory approach, most recently at a summit with Biden last week. Despite Moon's lobbying, Biden has so far shown no indication of a change of heart. But North Korea policy is a deeply partisan issue in Seoul, and with elections coming up next year, the progressives who control South Korean politics today may not be in power long.
When conservatives eventually come back to power, South Korea will likely readopt a more distrusting, hawkish, uncompromising policy toward Pyongyang. That means Biden has a very limited time window to try and put the North Korea situation on a more stable footing without experiencing blowback from the South.
If Biden is serious about practical diplomacy, he will have to recognize the situation for what it is. If he wants to ward off another nuclear crisis, and if he wants to reduce the risk of nuclear war, he will have to accept the political risk of deep compromises with an enemy.
The most practical step of all is to abandon old, failed habits in favor of proposals with much greater promise.
Van Jackson is author of "On the Brink: Trump, Kim, and the Threat of Nuclear War" (Cambridge University Press, 2018). He is also host of The Un-Diplomatic Podcast, a professor of international relations at Victoria University of Wellington, and an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security.
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