The Return of Rocketman?

On May 4, North Korea broke a 521-day streak in which it carried out no missile launches. On that day, Kim Jong Un oversaw the inaugural test-fire of a new type of short-range ballistic missile that has been code-named KN23 by the U.S. intelligence community. The missile was the first new missile North Korea had tested since the November 2017 test of the Hwasong-15 intercontinental-range ballistic missile – the country’s largest missile to date.

Kim didn’t stop there. On May 9, just days later, he oversaw the launch of two more KN23 missiles. Both exercises in May also involved long-range artillery units. These were a reminder of the old days before diplomacy began on the Korean Peninsula for the first time in the Kim Jong Un era. In the years prior, Kim had made sure to match the intensity of the U.S.-South Korea springtime military exercises with his own show of force.

In 2019, the United States and South Korea announced that they would be calling off the Key Resolve and Foal Eagle springtime exercises – a gesture that they hoped would be seen as a confidence-building measure by Kim Jong Un. Instead, they announced the inaugural edition of a new, more calibrated exercise: Dong Maeng. Kim, however, wasn’t having it. In the weeks leading up to his May missile tests, Kim clarified that he was less than content with the resumption of exercises.

In the broader context is the experience the North Korean leader endured in Hanoi, Vietnam, at the end of February. There, he met U.S. President Donald J. Trump for the second U.S.-North Korea summit meeting, hoping for results like he’d seen in Singapore the previous summer. In June 2018, Trump was content to call off the then-scheduled U.S.-South Korea joint Ulchi-Freedom Guardian exercises, which had been slated for August 2018. In Hanoi, however, not only did Trump not give Kim any concessions on allied exercises, but he ended up sending the North Korean leader home empty-handed.

The Hanoi summit revealed the fundamental gap between Washington and Pyongyang that had existed throughout 2018, even as the two leaders managed to agree to a vague set of measures at the Singapore summit. In Hanoi, Kim wanted Trump to agree to a large basket of relief measures from United Nations Security Council sanctions resolutions passed in 2016 and 2017 (i.e., the international sanctions that represented the bulk of economic pressure on the regime and punished Kim for the most audacious nuclear and missile tests since the sanctions regime began in 2006).

Trump refused. Kim had offered up a modest package of nuclear concessions in exchange, including an offer to shut down plutonium and highly enriched uranium production at Yongbyon. While not meaningless, that measure would have only frozen the production of fissile material across just a part of the North Korean leader’s arsenal.

Since Hanoi, matters between the United States and North Korea have taken a turn for the ominous. A total collapse may be around the corner, thrusting the two sides back to the dangerous nuclear brinkmanship of 2017. In April, during a speech to the 14th Supreme People’s Assembly in Pyongyang, Kim complained of the United States’ rigid negotiating position. He added references to a March missile defense test by the U.S. Missile Defense Agency against a target designed to simulate a North Korean intercontinental-range ballistic missile and to the Dong Maeng U.S.-South Korea military exercise. “These seriously rattle us,” he added.

What made May’s missile launches ultimately unsurprising, however, was Kim’s warning of “corresponding acts” for moves by the United States and South Korea in the aftermath of the Hanoi summit. “As wind is bound to bring waves, the U.S. open hostile policy toward the DPRK will naturally bring our corresponding acts,” he’d said. When the missile tests occurred, Kim wanted to be clear that the move was a tit-for-tat and not a capricious outburst.

The Trump administration’s reaction to the latest tests has been subdued. A day after the May 4 launch, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo responded to a news anchor by remarkably pointing out that the launches did not violate Kim Jong Un’s April 20, 2018, self-imposed moratorium on missile tests. Back then, Kim announced unilaterally that he would cease the testing of ICBMs. Pompeo made no reference, however, to international sanctions. United Nations Security Council resolution 1718 in 2006, imposed after the North’s first nuclear tests, barred Pyongyang from any and all developmental activity related to ballistic missiles, including testing. The May launches were yet another violation.

Meanwhile, Trump too played down the launches, describing them as “very standard.” He was right, on one level: These were the kinds of tests that North Korea used to regularly conduct before the diplomacy in 2018. In 2016 and 2017, as Kim tested longer and longer-range missiles, short-range ballistic missile tests would hardly have been registered as a major provocation. Between Trump and Pompeo’s reactions, the message being sent to Kim was that he was free to test missiles short of intercontinental-range – the ones that couldn’t strike the United States.

That has once again raised the specter of alliance decoupling. For South Korea, a U.S. ally, short-range missiles like the KN23 are a major concern – as are long-range rocket artillery units. Washington’s disinterest in these weapons that hold its ally’s territory at risk – not to mention U.S. servicemen, their families and dependents, and other citizens in South Korea – is deeply damaging. This stands to compound ongoing unease within the alliance, which continues to reel from last year’s acrimonious cost-sharing negotiations and a general lack of coordination on North Korea policy.

What Kim’s latest missile launches do not mean is the end of diplomacy. The North Korean leader had sought to make this clear in April, even as he threatened “corresponding acts.” He has given the Trump administration until the end of 2019 to take a “bold decision” in its approach toward diplomacy. After that, all bets are off and North Korea may look to resume the testing of intercontinental-range missiles, or even conduct its first satellite launch since 2016.

What May’s tests of the KN23 serve to do at this moment is underscore the seriousness of Kim’s threat to walk away from the negotiating table for good. Whether U.S. officials will receive that message remains to be seen.