Kim Jong Unchained

Whatever happened to the North Korea peace process, which in 2018 looked so promising?

We have been here before, in broad terms. So let us begin with some background.

Since the Korean War ended in 1953 – with an armistice only, no peace treaty ever followed – after three bloody and hugely destructive years, the peninsula has known a tense peace for two-thirds of a century. That peace, underpinned by allied deterrence, has been punctuated by regular crises – especially in the 30 years since North Korea’s nuclear ambitions began to be apparent, transforming the DPRK’s threat from a local to a global one.

In 1994, the Korean Peninsula came perilously close to a new war. The Kim regime defied the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) by removing spent fuel from its nuclear reactor at Yongbyon. That plutonium could have made half a dozen nuclear bombs. Then-U.S. President Bill Clinton took this threat so seriously that he considered a military strike, but drew back because the risks and casualties would have been unacceptably high. Instead, after ex-President Jimmy Carter’s semi-unauthorized visit to Pyongyang, Clinton switched to a peace process. That October, the United States and DPRK signed a detailed Agreed Framework (AF) for denuclearization.

This lasted several years, with Yongbyon sealed and monitored by the IAEA. But Kim Jong Il cheated, pursuing a second covert path to the bomb using highly enriched uranium (HEU). That in turn prompted Clinton’s more hawkish successor, George W. Bush, to terminate the AF and related bodies such as the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization (KEDO). And yet Bush, too, ended up reverting to dialogue, mainly in the framework of the multilateral Six Party Talks (6PT), incorporating both Koreas, the United States, Japan, Russia, and China (the host).

Lessons From the Past

This brief trip down memory lane offers several pertinent lessons. In no particular order:

First, the North Korean nuclear crisis is longstanding. It has seen many twists and turns.

Second, the risk of war is ever real. Jeffrey Lewis’ speculative novel, The 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against the United States, is a chilling warning of how horrendous that would be today – lest anyone be tempted to make light of the dangers.

Third, the political weather on the peninsula can change rapidly between storms and sunshine – and back again. The barometer has rarely stayed set to fair for very long.

Fourth, one reason for the constant shifting is regime change – not in Pyongyang, as neocons fondly hope, but among its democratic interlocutors, chiefly the United States and South Korea. These countries regularly elect new leaders who may change policy to renege on or backtrack from previous agreements. Besides George W. Bush, as cited above, there’s the example of Lee Myung-bak, who after his election as South Korea president in 2007 never implemented the economic cooperation projects that his predecessor, Roh Moo-hyun, had agreed to at that year’s inter-Korean summit with Kim Jong Il.

Fifth and relatedly: With no policy consensus on how best to handle Pyongyang, politicians on left and right alike tend to fall back on ideology (Clinton is an exception). In both Washington and Seoul, hawks and doves – or strange hybrids like Trump – take their turn with pressure or dialogue, to no lasting avail. Neither approach has succeeded in denuclearizing North Korea.

Sixth, the Kim regime under three successive leaders has shown great skill and cunning, while giving scant reason for confidence that it can ever be trusted to keep its word or abide by any agreement it may sign. Indeed, to be blunt, the DPRK has won, and the rest of us have lost.

Three Contrasting Years

Against this backdrop, the last three years have an air of déjà vu. Each one has been quite different, resulting in a bewildering rollercoaster. 2017 was “fire and fury,” in Donald Trump’s much-relished phrase. Kim Jong Un tested ever bigger and better missiles, to which the newly elected Trump responded by threatening to “totally destroy” North Korea. He and Kim traded playground insults as well: “little rocket man” and “dotard.” The risks of escalation appeared worryingly real.

To the world’s surprise and relief, 2018 was different: seeming to put the peninsula on a path to peace. An earlier article in issue 45 of The Diplomat Magazine analyzed this process as of August 2018: With hindsight, perhaps the high point of what turned out to be an all too brief parting of the clouds. The progress seemed momentous at the time.

I’m not talking only about the Kim-Trump show, which predictably gained the most attention. Granted, the first-ever meeting of sitting leaders of the United States and DPRK was a big deal; indeed, no previous U.S. president would have offered it so cheaply. But as we noted in 2018, nothing solid or binding was agreed. This was a big win for Kim, gaining him massive (and largely uncritical) global media attention as a responsible statesman – or at least a strongman who had seen the light and was coming in from the cold to make peace.

The inter-Korean rapprochement appeared far more substantial. There had only ever been two previous North-South summits, in 2000 and 2007. So when Kim met South Korea’s President Moon Jae-in three times in just five months in 2018, it really seemed a step-change toward normal relations. Buttressing that view were two meaty accords they signed, at Panmunjom in April and Pyongyang in September. These envisioned wide-ranging exchanges and cooperation: reconnecting road and rail links, regular family reunions, health cooperation, and much more. The Pyongyang declaration also had a military annex, which instituted confidence-building measures (CBMs) at and near the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). These included disarmament within the Joint Security Area (JSA), which has improved the atmosphere at Panmunjom.

Inter-Korean Relations: Full Steam Astern

And then everything stopped.

As 2018 ended, Kim Jong Un apologized to Moon for not yet visiting Seoul, but pledged to meet “often” in 2019. He lied. They would have just one more brief encounter: at Panmunjom on June 30, with Moon visibly sidelined – in his own country – while Kim and Trump held a barely longer meeting, their last to date. This was humiliating.

We must disentangle the different strands here. Importantly, the general view that all was on track until the debacle of the second Kim-Trump summit in Hanoi in February is wrong. Even before that, Pyongyang had started blanking Seoul. For chapter and verse, see my survey of inter-Korean relations in the May 2019 issue of Pacific Forum’s online journal Comparative Connections (where I have been tracking South-North ties three or four times a year ever since 2001).

Inter-Korean relations get less attention, especially in Western media, than those between the United States and DPRK. That is understandable, given the importance of the nuclear issue. Yet I would argue that to answer the fundamental twin questions du jour – what went wrong in 2019 and what does Kim Jong Un really want – the best clues are found on the peninsula. Kim’s volte-face toward Moon, from embrace to contempt, gives the game away. Or so I shall argue here.

To be clear, the change was absolute. The U.S.-DPRK dance may still have some shades of grey, though fading fast. By contrast, inter-Korean ties have gone straight from white to black. In 2018, the two Koreas engaged with unprecedented intensity. Much happened, much more was promised, everything seemed possible. Then all of it stopped dead, clearly by order from the top.

No doubt, as some argue, the North was frustrated – though it can hardly have been surprised – that plans to reconnect roads and railways, like other proposed economic collaboration, fell foul of UN sanctions. But that is not the whole story. Take family reunions. September 2019’s Pyongyang Declaration pledged to expedite these, both face-to-face and by videolink. South Korea obtained the requisite exemptions to sanctions to do so. Yet no reunions have been held since August 2018. That was an early warning of the North’s duplicity; many more would follow.

Already in February 2019 Pyongyang was blanking Seoul, not replying to messages. By April this had become the norm. Emblematically, agreed joint digging for MIA remains and mine-clearing in the DMZ ended up being done by the ROK army alone, on its side of the Military Demarcation Line (MDL). Joint teams for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics? Impossible now. That will not help their vaunted joint bid to co-host the 2032 Games, always the longest of shots.

In 2018, Kim thrice embraced Moon. In April 2019 he called him “a meddlesome ‘mediator.’” (That is rich: without Moon’s good offices as go-between, Kim would never have gotten to meet Trump.) By July, DPRK media dismissed Moon as “an impudent guy.” Pyongyang’s pettiness knew no bounds, some of it self-defeating. Both Koreas, the North first, were hit by African swine fever – yet Pyongyang refused to share data, much less accept Seoul’s help. In October, forced to host a FIFA World Cup soccer qualifier in which the two Koreas were posed against each other, the North would not let it be televised or allow in any Southern fans – nor indeed local ones. The stadium was almost empty, and the DPRK players went in hard.

It gets worse. Thae Yong-ho, a former senior DPRK diplomat who defected from London in 2016, is not normally alarmist. Yet in an interview with the JoongAng Ilbo, Seoul’s leading daily, published on January 15, Thae claims that Kim Jong Un has changed his approach to the ROK more drastically still. According to him, when the Central Military Commission (CMC) of the ruling Workers’ Party (WPK) met on December 21 – a week before the Central Committee (CC) plenary held from December 28-31 – “North Korea revised its military strategy toward the South … from ‘invade and rule’ to ‘wipe out.’ This means it plans to reduce South Korea to rubble instead of trying to take over it.” He explained further: “Since South Korea is a powerful country, Kim has assessed it would be impossible to take over. Instead he has decided to wipe it out. This is why North Korea focuses on conducting artillery drills and missile tests.”

No source is given for this claim, which sounds far-fetched. The North, even with all the new weapons systems it tested last year, is in no position to “wipe out” South Korea – which if attacked would, of course, hit back hard, even under Moon Jae-in. Wiping out cuts both ways. But even if exaggerated, on other evidence this correctly nails Kim’s real attitude to the ROK. Belying last year’s smiles and hugs, he is biliously hostile. Moon’s own goodwill, seemingly bottomless and unfazed by anything the North says or does, is absolutely not reciprocated.

When will the penny drop in Seoul? In some quarters it has. The ROK right never trusted the DPRK a priori, but is in disarray. The last two conservative presidents, Park Geun-hye and Lee Myung-bak, are serving long jail terms for corruption (in separate cases). Ironically, on April 15 – Sun’s Day, founding leader Kim Il Sung’s birthday, in the North – South Koreans will elect a new National Assembly. Incumbents often face a mid-term backlash, yet polls suggest the opposition Liberty Korea Party (LKP) is not gaining much from Moon’s travails.

A new system for transferable votes adds to the uncertainty. Yet just like the lackluster ROK economy – which is most voters’ priority, as everywhere – North Korea is definitely doing Moon no favors. Which is puzzling, for no other ROK leader has ever worked so hard on the DPRK’s behalf. Kim may yet come to regret his new harsh line. Even Moon must eventually give up hope. And in any reading of the events (or non-events) of 2019, there can surely be no basis for any future South Korean leader ever to trust the North again. That is depressing.

No More Hanois

If the tragic trajectory of recent inter-Korean ties is clear-cut, U.S.-DPRK relations by contrast still have room for ambiguity – if not much. With Washington, Pyongyang played a different game. Endorsing denuclearization in the abstract, Kim batted away all efforts to pin North Korea down to concrete steps, or even proper working-level talks that could lead to those (as seen in the 6PT era). Blowing up the Punggye-ri nuclear test site in front of journalists (but without verification by independent experts), or partly dismantling the Sohae missile site only to rebuild it later, are mere gestures, falling far short of serious disarmament negotiations like the 6PT or AF.

Over all of this hangs one big counterfactual. Might Hanoi have turned out differently? What if the United States had offered partial sanctions relief, as Moon Jae-in for one expected, enabling inter-Korean roads and railways to be relinked? Might this have led to virtuous instead of vicious circles? We shall never know. As it was, by following John Bolton’s advice and demanding total surrender of all weapons of mass destruction (WMDs)  – nukes, chemical and biological weapons, missiles, the whole lot – Trump merely ensured that while Singapore (though shallow) had been win-win, Hanoi was lose-lose for both him and Kim. On January 11 Kim Kye Gwan, former lead nuclear negotiator in the 6PT, warned that the DPRK will never again waste time thus: “We have no desire to barter something .. like traders.” This of course is disingenuous. Such horse-trading is precisely what he and Christopher Hill were engaged in back in the day, and what the nitty-gritty of any detailed negotiation entails.

Precedent suggests that in any event the DPRK would have played hardball, and cheated as in the AF era. More generous souls may demur. Writing last month at 38North, Leon V Sigal, for whom hope springs eternal, called obituaries for nuclear diplomacy premature, even if his optimism rings a bit hollow: “Without further negotiations, how can anyone know for sure?” In December at the same site, the tireless Glyn Ford – who has made 50 trips to Pyongyang! – claimed that Kim Jong Un’s 2019 New Year Address contained, as he headlined it, “missed signals and opportunities.”

Maybe so. But Occam’s razor, and the totality of 2017-19, suggest a simpler if more cynical hypothesis: Kim Jong Un never seriously intended to denuclearize, nor expected talks to lead anywhere. But after six years of seeming hermitude – in fact busy securing his and the WPK’s power base at home – it was high time to venture out into the world with a splash, on his own terms, and maximize the DPRK’s advantage.

Kim’s Master Plan

Kim planned that process meticulously, in three parts. Seduce Seoul; tempt Trump; square Xi.

The last, it is now clear, matters most – though downplayed in Western media besotted by all the razzmatazz with Trump and Moon. Rapprochement with China has endured, as intended, while the rest has fallen by the wayside – also as intended. Having been four times to China (after six icy years, remember), last June Kim got his reward: a return visit by Xi Jinping. Diplomatic support has its economic counterpart, too. Beijing has cut imports as sanctions demand, but this leaves a large deficit whose funding is unclear. As ever the PRC needs the DPRK, and will do what it takes to keep it afloat. (Some in Washington find this obvious truth oddly hard to grasp.) This includes a joint call with Russia in December for easing of UNSC sanctions, including on inter-Korean projects. That proposal may not fly, but it is a telling sign of how “maximum pressure” is dead – even though North Korea has yielded up none of its WMDs.

Kim Jong Un also gains from unforced errors by his foes. A worrying asymmetry has opened up in the “two triangles” that during the Cold War confronted each other at the DMZ. Back then North Korea had the USSR and China, while South Korea had the United States and Japan. (Not that either of those “hads” was ever smooth or straightforward, what with the Sino-Soviet dispute and fraught ROK-Japan ties.)

Today’s picture is less neat, given South Korea’s newer ties with Russia and China, the latter its top trade partner. Yet diplomatically the old pattern is re-emerging, only with ominous cracks on one side. Not only has Kim mended fences with China and Russia – he finally met  Vladimir Putin in Vladivostok last April – but Moscow and Beijing are themselves cooperating ever more closely, not least militarily. (Each has tested ROK air space in recent months.)

Meanwhile the “free world” camp is in disarray, on two fronts. The chronic, tragic failure of South Korea and Japan to build a future-oriented relationship is plumbing new depths, with no end in sight. And Donald Trump’s prejudice that most allies are freeloaders risks serious harm to the U.S.-ROK alliance. If Trump persists in demanding an outrageous fivefold rise in Seoul’s payment toward hosting U.S. troops, many South Koreans will start to ask, as they rarely had hitherto, whether the game is worth the candle. In an increasingly Hobbesian region and world, with the gravitational pull of nearby China growing ever stronger, the erosion or even collapse of the post-1945 alliance structure in northeast Asia is no longer unimaginable. All wider considerations apart, that could only redound enormously to North Korea’s benefit.

Trump and Moon: A Duo In Denial

But let us return to Kim’s diplomatic master-plan. Seducing Seoul and tempting Trump have both proved stunning successes. North Korea read its enemies well and put on a very convincing show of telling each what they wanted to hear. Bracketing them may seem unfair: Moon has a noble vision of peninsular amity, Trump merely a monstrous ego. Virtue and vice alike were deceived – and astonishingly, remain so. Even now, after almost a year in which Pyongyang has made it plain by its actions (or inaction), and increasingly too with harsh and mocking words, that there is absolutely nothing doing, delusions on the other side persist. On January 15, while signing a partial trade deal with China, Trump said of U.S. relations with North Korea: “It's all a very, very beautiful game of chess, or game of poker.” The beauty is not obvious. Rather clearer is who is winning.

Illusions of a bromance in Washington, and of peace in Seoul, specifically enabled Kim Jong Un in May to launch an intensive program of testing advanced new shorter-range ballistic missiles (BMs) and other weapons systems, such as multiple rocket launchers (MLRs), with complete impunity. Because they were not ICBMs, Trump dismissed this as “routine stuff.” That was ignorant as well as complacent. On the contrary, many of these appear to be new or improved weapons, which significantly increase the North Korean threat to South Korea and Japan.

Yet Seoul also downplayed this. Initially the ROK Joints Chiefs of Staff (JCS) eschewed the word missile, merely dubbing these “projectiles.” Seoul now calls a spade a spade, but still barely protests: the tone is feeble regret, not condemnation. Only in November, when Kim personally oversaw (as he often does) a technically far less advanced coastal artillery drill, did South Korea lodge a sharp protest – as this violated the September 2018 inter-Korean military accord. Such contrasting reactions make one wonder about comparative threat perception in Seoul currently – or at least, threat admission. The ROK military, ever wary of a left-leaning leader like Moon, may well be keeping its own counsel for the time being.

South Korean presidents serve for a single five-year term, and Moon is into his second half; he must leave office in May 2022. If the ROK’s conservatives can get their act together and recapture the Blue House, Kim Jong Un will face a more robust and less indulgent South (he may then wish he had been nicer to Moon). One particular worry is that calls for the ROK to develop its own nuclear weapons – which public opinion has long supported – may burgeon if the DPRK threat grows while the United States appears ever less reliable (especially if Trump wins a second term). Even if Moon clings to his tattered peace process, it will surely not outlast him.

Prospects for 2020 and Beyond

Not the least of Kim Jong Un’s skills is seizing the initiative and controlling the narrative. As 2019 wore on with nothing happening on the denuclearization front, who was to blame? North Korea was clear: The fault was all the United States’ for failing to change its policy, rather than the DPRK’s for failing to do anything – except test new weapons. Somehow it was Pyongyang’s version that came to frame perceptions and reporting, especially given Kim’s end-of-year deadline. (Media like a countdown: it’s simple and makes good copy.) North Korea milked this, garnering more attention by threatening a “Christmas gift” that never materialized.

Instead, the DPRK marked the holiday season – spoiling it, for the Korea commentariat – by holding a major meeting. Preceded by the above-mentioned CMC session, the 5th Plenum of the 7th WPK CC, which sprawled over the last four days of 2019 – they are usually shorter –  featured a seven-hour speech by Kim Jong Un. (In view of the speech, this year Kim did not give his usual New Year address.) As widely expected, he formally abrogated the DPRK’s two-year moratorium on nuclear and ICBM tests. Kim had harsh words for the United States, but none whatever about South Korea (or China for that matter). In this dyadic worldview, there is ultimately only David and Goliath: nobody else counts.

Hardline and somber in his general tone – he warned of more “belt-tightening,” which seven years ago he had assured North Koreans was over – Kim also in effect reinstated the byungjin policy, if not in so many words. A renewed focus on WMD means economic development is no longer the sole top priority. Kim boasted that “the world will witness a new strategic weapon to be possessed by the DPRK in the near future”; this may be a submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM). He also threatened to “shift to a shocking actual action to make [the U.S.] pay for the pains sustained by our people … and for the development [foregone].” (Interesting that although byungjin in effect means “guns and butter,” Kim does here acknowledge a trade-off.)

We have been warned. Once again North Korea has the initiative. Yet in the current turbulent state of global politics, it is hardly – to Kim’s chagrin, perhaps – the sole or even chief center of attention. Having chosen to kill Iran’s top general, the United States can expect in the coming months to be even more preoccupied in the Persian Gulf and the wider Middle East. One question is how Kim will factor that in. It may embolden him, if he deems Trump too bogged down in west Asia – and too keen to win re-election – to respond to any provocation by Pyongyang. On the other hand, Qassem Soleimani’s fate also dispels any idea that Trump is all mouth and no trousers, which may counsel prudence. “Decapitation” is known to be part of the Pentagon’s scenario planning for conflict in Korea. Whether or not U.S. drones could penetrate DPRK air defenses, this thought may not help Kim to sleep easy.

Timing is another issue. Following past form, North Korea might time any big bang to mark its own significant dates. Those include Kim Il Sung’s birthday on April 15, and this year the 75th anniversary of the WPK’s founding on October 10. It also likes to rain on others’ parades, as in 2017 when its very first ICBM, the Hwasong-14, was launched on the Fourth of July. For that matter, it did not go unnoticed in Seoul that last November’s KPA coastal artillery drill,  itself harmless, was on the ninth anniversary of the shelling of nearby Yeonpyeong island, which killed four South Koreans. The North does not do coincidences. In that light, the upcoming 10th anniversary of the sinking of the ROKN corvette Cheonan on March 26, with 46 fatalities, may be a date to watch – although the DPRK has never admitted responsibility.

Conclusion: Naught for Our Comfort

The broader picture could hardly be bleaker. Of all the states in the world that one would not want to have nuclear weapons, plus the means to deliver them, the DPRK tops the list. A true rogue state, with a long history of contempt for international law and malfeasance on many fronts, the Kim regime enters 2020 stronger than it has ever been. True, its economy is hardly thriving. But as successive reports by the UN Panel of Experts (PoE) have shown, it is adept at evading sanctions – or simply engaging in cyber-robbery, which the PoE reckons has netted Pyongyang a cumulative $2 billion to date.

Belying predictions of its collapse, the DPRK is here to stay. The same applies to Kim, if he looks after his health. Turning 36 last month, he may be in charge for decades to come. Xi Jinping too, though older, has no plan to leave the stage. While these dictators soldier on, in Seoul, Washington, and elsewhere elected leaders will come and go. Those yet to come will confront a North Korea more powerful and cocksure than ever – hopefully without illusions.

As hitherto, what Kim actually does will be constrained by deterrence, which will become even more important in the years ahead. It is safe to assume he will do whatever he thinks he can get away with. Too often, when North Korea has pushed, others have failed to push back. Nuclear concerns apart, three years ago this month Kim’s half-brother Kim Jong Nam was murdered with a nerve agent in broad daylight in a crowded airport in the capital of a friendly state – which not only failed to punish his killers, but is keen to resume normal ties with the DPRK. Kim Jong Un may well think he can get away with murder, because he has.

It is hard to say more, because there are too many unknowns. For sure, this year Kim Jong Un will revert to provocation. What exactly he does, and where and when, will in turn pose the dilemma for those affected – be it Trump, Moon, or others – of how to react. With Moon, we can expect caution – unless there is a new Cheonan-like attack. But with Trump, who knows? If reality ever sinks in that the bromance is over, and was always one-sided, the beauty of the chess game may soon be forgotten. In these strange times, in Korea as elsewhere (only more so), anything is possible. That is not a comforting thought.