A Return to Korean Crisis?

The Trump administration’s house of cards around its diplomatic engagement with North Korea has started to collapse. For months, senior U.S. officials, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, assured the world that the June 12, 2018, summit between President Donald J. Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un had resulted in an agreement that would see the “final, fully verified denuclearization of North Korea.” The day after that summit, Trump himself took to Twitter to declare that there was “no longer a Nuclear Threat” from North Korea.

But, of course, there is still a nuclear threat.

The Singapore agreement between Trump and Kim was a statement of principles. It did not include the phrase “denuclearization of North Korea” because that is not – and has never been – North Korea’s policy. Rather, Kim had agreed to “work toward the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.” That had been both his father’s and his grandfather’s preferred formulation. That has remained true since 1992, when South Korea and North Korea realized, for the first time, a joint declaration on “denuclearization.”

As 2020 begins, the administration’s fictions are crumbling. Even as Trump declared the end of a nuclear threat after Singapore, Kim’s centrifuges continued to spin, producing more highly enriched uranium for nuclear weapons. North Korea also pressed on with quantitatively and qualitatively improving its nuclear forces: it built more missiles to deliver nuclear weapons and it continued work on better missiles. For a while, that work was mostly carried out behind-the-scenes in the form of research and development, but in May this year, two months after the second Trump-Kim rendezvous in Hanoi, Kim began overseeing missile launches again.

The Hanoi summit was a turning point for the two sides. There, Trump learned that without sanctions relief, any larger and more specific deal with North Korea than what had been attained in Singapore would be impossible. For Kim, Hanoi was a wake-up call too – that this U.S. administration, while heterodox, would not acquiesce to Pyongyang’s negotiating demands. After Hanoi, the North Korean leader began charting a new path, leaving in place a deadline of the end of 2019 for the United States to change its negotiating position.

That change never came and now, as The Diplomat went to print, Kim was poised to take a dramatic step – potentially with a major missile or satellite launch.

As early as the first week of December, it was becoming apparent that a new crisis may be beginning. The epithets of “dotard” and “rocketman” that had become so famous during the 2017 crisis, when Trump and Kim regularly threatened each other, have found their way into official utterances again. Should North Korea pick up its old habits of long-range missile testing and potentially nuclear testing, 2020 could be a turbulent year with more in common with 2017 than 2018 and 2019.

If North Korea does return to the regular testing of strategic, nuclear delivery systems, the Trump administration is likely to instinctively fall back on its favorite tool of coercive statecraft: economic sanctions. The “maximum pressure” toolkit, which was largely suspended in practice after the March 2018 breakthrough of Trump accepting a summit in principle with Kim Jong Un, can be dusted off.

A second round of “maximum pressure” won’t be a walk in the park. Diplomatically, the United States is unlikely to find takers in Russia and China for new and enhanced sanctions for anything short of nuclear testing by North Korea. On Wednesday, China’s permanent representative to the United Nations delivered remarks effectively endorsing the framework that North Korea itself had taken to Hanoi, albeit in less specific terms. “It is imperative that the Security Council take action and invoke the reversible provisions in the DPRK-related resolutions as soon as possible in the light of the evolving situation on the Peninsula, and make necessary adjustments to the sanctions measures prescribed in those resolutions, especially in areas where the DPRK people's livelihood is at stake,” Zhang Jun, the Chinese envoy, said.

Zhang‘s comments should be understood in the context of broader repair to the China-North Korea relationship over the course of five summits between Kim and Chairman Xi Jinping. In October 2018, China’s Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs Kong Xuanyou, Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Igor Morgulov, and North Korea’s First Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs Choe Son-hui agreed in a trilateral meeting in Moscow to “adjust” the United Nations Security Council sanctions regime. Whatever awaits the Korean Peninsula in 2020, it is more likely than not that Beijing and Moscow will look to blame the United States for North Korea’s return to missile tests – even as those tests will continue to violate UNSCR 1718 (2006), which called on North Korea to “suspend all activities related to its ballistic missile program.”

Without support for new Security Council resolutions, there’s still plenty that can be done autonomously by the United States to crunch North Korea. The U.S. Treasury Department has no doubt spent most of 2018 and 2019 sitting on scores of foreign firms that could be targeted under secondary sanctions for facilitating illicit transactions for North Korea. U.S. allies and partners could continue and step up efforts at interdicting illicit ship-to-ship transfers by North Korea (Pyongyang can cope by conducting many of these transactions within Chinese territorial waters). Other areas, including tourism by non-Chinese foreigners to North Korea, could also come under unilateral U.S. sanctions.

What presents a particularly acute source of risk is that, unlike in 2017, Trump’s administration lacks policy guardrails. Individuals like Jim Mattis, Trump’s first defense secretary, are no longer able to slow-roll the president’s most dangerous policy guidance. In a renewed round of crisis with North Korea, this means that orders that might previously have evaporated in the Oval Office might end up seeing implementation. The second U.S.-North Korea crisis of the Trump administration, as a result, stands to be far more perilous than the first.