US North Korea Policy: The More Things Change...

When U.S. President Donald J. Trump was still a president-in-transition, he showed little interest in intelligence briefings on matters of foreign affairs.

That's partly why some analysts took notice when reports emerged that he had specifically requested early and detailed briefings on North Korea. It turned out that the seemingly intractable problems posed by Kim Jong-un and his ballistic missile and nuclear programs interested Trump, who had been told by his predecessor in the Oval Office that the North Korean issue would become the defining foreign policy challenge for the incoming administration.

Then, shortly after his inauguration, the Trump administration, with Michael Flynn still on the National Security Council, began a review of North Korea policy. This continued for months, wrapping up eventually just days ahead of a highly anticipated visit by Chinese President Xi Jinping to Trump's Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago.

Throughout this time, Trump did not shy away from repeating an assumption on North Korea that was both a mainstay of his presidential campaign and even appeared in his books and tweets before he ran for president. The assumption was that, if it only wanted to, Beijing could solve the North Korean issue overnight.

This led Trump down a dangerous path eventually with Xi. After Xi departed, Trump suggested that he had offered the Chinese leader a more favorable trade agreement in exchange for cooperation on the North Korean issue. Unlike his predecessors, Trump had chosen to link the strategic and economic agendas in U.S.-China relations like never before.

In the meantime, however, the administration has failed to clarify the result of its policy review. So far, instead of clarity, both Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and U.S. Vice President Mike Pence, during their respective visits to Northeast Asia, have declared that the era of "strategic patience" is now over. Tillerson, a novice in the world of foreign policy, declared that "new approach" would be imminent.

When the Obama administration entered office, the multilateral Six-Party Talks process had all but crumbled. From there on, apart from a brief attempt in 2012 at a short-lived “Leap Day Deal,” the administration hewed to the position that came to be known as "strategic patience."

According to that policy, the United States was ready to talk to North Korea as soon as it acknowledged that denuclearization would be goal of talks and showed some bona fide intent to denuclearize. Until that day, the administration would remain "patient," but keep up punitive economic sanctions. (There were some exceptions to this, including a more conciliatory backchannel that fell apart after North Korea went ahead with its fourth nuclear test in January 2016.)

By the final days of 2016 – a year featuring two nuclear tests and 24 ballistic missile launches by North Korea – both critics and supporters of the Obama administration came to reckon with the policy's failures in convincing North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons, which Pyongyang sees as the only guarantee against coercive regime change.

On the latter point, the Kim regime has made no change. Even Obama's director of national intelligence, speaking at a think tank event in the final months of 2016, conceded that North Korea was unlikely to ever denuclearize, regardless of other concessions offered.

Pyongyang carefully underlined that point on April 15 when it staged a major military parade, carefully showing off what appeared to be a considerable nuclear warfighting force. North Korea revealed missile systems designed to carry nuclear warheads to U.S. bases in the Northeast Asian theater and Guam in a first counterforce strike and longer-range intercontinental systems, which would presumably serve to deter U.S. retaliation in the event of a war. (North Korea released a video days after its parade showing one of its missiles striking what appeared to be San Francisco to make that point clear.)

Also after the parade, North Korea's deputy foreign minister emphasized that Pyongyang's conditions for a first strike would hinge on it observing any credible signs of the United States and South Korea mobilizing against it in a first strike.

What is clear is that North Korea takes its nuclear program and ballistic missiles very seriously. The Trump administration, however, hasn't fully appreciated this or articulated any coherent policy toward the Korean peninsula.

The month of April, in particular, was chock-full of mixed signaling. First, erroneous statements from the president himself, combined with poor strategic communications from U.S. Pacific Command, spurred anxiety about a U.S. carrier strike group preemptively heading to the Korean peninsula. North Korea itself believed that news, according to a report in its state media. Given the already-high tensions and North Korea's continuous fear of a surprise first attack by the United States, this was a dangerous moment.

Second, for all of Pence and Tillerson's intent to suggest that "strategic patience" is over and that "all options" are on the table with regard to North Korea, U.S. actions sure don't convey that. For instance, Pence – shortly after his trip to South Korea, where he traveled to the demilitarized zone to show the North Koreans the "resolve on his face" – said that negotiation with North Korea was no longer a U.S. goal.

That in itself suggested that "all options" were never on the table for this administration. Certainly, the Trump administration, obsessed with keeping up appearances of strength and resolve, does not appear to be on the cusp of considering even "talks about talks" with North Korea, as so many experts in the nonproliferation community have begun to recommend. (Presumably, denuclearization would remain the long-term U.S. objective in any such talks, but in the short term, Washington would seek to prevent the expansion of North Korea's arsenal.)

All of this leads to a rather pessimistic conclusion about the prospect for anything changing in the trajectories that either the Trump administration or Kim Jong-un will pursue. Even if the administration considered engagement with Pyongyang, its proven duplicity and likely high demands for concessions would stop any deal in its tracks. (North Korea may demand a complete withdrawal of U.S. forces from Northeast Asia, for example.)

None of this is to suggest that war is imminent or a likely option for the Trump administration. Rather, reality is more mundane. The reality for now suggests that despite the calls for a "new approach" and triumphant declarations of the end of "strategic patience," the United States' new North Korea policy is simply the old North Korea policy.