Evaluating the Legacies of Trump and Biden on North Korea
June 27, 2024
Posted in: News
As the first presidential debate gets underway, we decided to reflect on Trump and Biden’s policies on North Korea and how they’ve impacted U.S.-North Korea relations. Despite their seemingly varied approaches, neither administration succeeded in making progress with North Korea because fundamentally their tactics and goals have remained the same.
Arguably no other U.S. president has had a more wildly unpredictable and extreme relationship with North Korea than Donald Trump.
In his first year in office, Trump came dangerously close to triggering a nuclear war when he threatened North Korea with “fire and fury like the world has never seen” and pledged to “totally destroy” North Korea. Trump weighed a “bloody nose” strike on North Korea, which provoked Pyongyang to test what it said was a hydrogen bomb — its sixth nuclear test — and an ICBM capable of reaching the United States.
But with the election of pro-peace South Korean President Moon Jae-in in May 2017 and the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea created an opportunity for sports diplomacy. At the opening ceremony, North and South Korean athletes marched together carrying a One Korea flag, opening the door for talks between Pyongyang, Seoul and Washington.
What followed was a series of historic and unprecedented summits between North Korea and South Korea, and North Korea and the United States, that promised to transform relations and end seven decades of war on the Korean Peninsula. At the April 2018 summit at Panmunjom, Moon and Kim Jong Un committed to transform the peninsula from a war-torn land to one of peace. A couple months later, Trump met Kim in Singapore for their first summit. They signed the Singapore Declaration, which laid out a framework to achieve the normalization of relations between the U.S. and DPRK and towards a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula. This led to several positive developments, including North Korea releasing three detained Americans, repatriating U.S. service member remains, and self-imposing a moratorium on nuclear and long-range missile testing, which ended up lasting five years.
But the Trump administration did not, in kind, decrease the “maximum pressure” campaign of sanctions and isolation, worsening relations. A draconian sanctions regime intended to compel Pyongyang to abandon its nuclear program impeded crucial humanitarian aid and economic development, which may have caused nearly 4,000 deaths of North Koreans in 2018. Trump also instituted a ban on U.S. passport holders traveling to North Korea in 2017, preventing family reunions and people-to-people exchanges, and restricting humanitarian aid organizations. The Trump administration also put the brakes on inter-Korean reconciliation and cooperation, blocking joint Korean economic projects and halting an inter-Korean train project in its tracks.
The most damaging aspect of Trump’s legacy on North Korea was walking away from a potential agreement that could have laid the foundation for a formal end to the Korean War, normalized relations between the two countries, and a denuclearized Korean Peninsula. At the Hanoi summit, North Korea reportedly offered to dismantle Yongbyon — the heart of North Korea’s nuclear program — and formalize its nuclear and long-range missile test moratorium, in exchange for a partial lifting of sanctions that affect the civilian population. However, Trump adopted the all-or-nothing “Libya model” championed by National Security Adviser John Bolton, requiring North Korea to unilaterally give up its entire WMD program — a nonstarter for North Korea. In his memoir, Bolton wrote that he convinced Trump to walk away, which was a major embarrassment to Kim. Trump tried to engage him after Hanoi, but it was too late. Pyongyang disengaged with Washington, and at the end of 2019, Kim said North Korea was no longer bound by its self-imposed moratorium on nuclear and long-range missile tests.
President Biden’s term in office did little to advance U.S.-North Korea relations, and in fact actively eroded them by increasing militarization in the region and maintaining the prevailing U.S. strategy of seeking the complete, irreversible and verifiable denuclearization (CVID) of North Korea through tactics of isolation, pressure, and sanctions.
During the 2020 presidential debates, Biden signaled that he would reject Trump’s style of engagement with Kim, whom he labeled a “thug,” and instead apply more sanctions and pressure in order to “control” North Korea.
However, once in office, the Biden administration appeared to take a more conciliatory tone. In its North Korea policy review released in April 2021, the Biden administration called for a calibrated, practical approach to diplomacy. Sung Kim, the U.S.’s special envoy on North Korea, offered to meet officials from Pyongyang “anywhere, anytime, without preconditions.” But the administration’s continued emphasis on North Korea’s complete denuclearization — which experts contend is increasingly unrealistic — stymied its own efforts to engage. Instead, North Korea doubled down on its weapons development.
In 2022, North Korea conducted an unprecedented number of missile tests, including testing an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) that could potentially strike the U.S. mainland. North Korea passed a law lowering the threshold for a nuclear first strike, while the United States reaffirmed its nuclear first-use policy, despite Biden’s support for a no-first-use policy during his candidacy.
With the election of conservative hardline President Yoon Suk Yeol in South Korea in 2022, relations between the two Koreas have predictably worsened. After South Korea labeled North Korea an “enemy” and Yoon said South Korea may build its own nuclear arsenal, Kim responded by calling South Korea the North’s “invariable principal enemy,” and set out to completely remove “unification” from North Korea’s legal code.
Following Yoon’s visit to Washington, in 2023 the United States and South Korea established the Nuclear Consultative Group (NCG) to include a “nuclear operations scenario” in U.S.-R.O.K. war drills and to re-deploy U.S. nuclear assets to the Peninsula. In spring 2023, as the United States and South Korea were about to kick off joint war drills—the largest in five years—North Korea conducted submarine-fired cruise missiles tests. Biden also pledged to deploy nuclear-armed submarines to South Korea for the first time in 40 years and to involve South Korean officials in nuclear planning operations targeting North Korea.
In December 2023, after the second NCG meeting, the United States declared in a joint statement that “Any nuclear attack by North Korea against the United States or its allies is unacceptable and will result in the end of the Kim regime, and the US side reiterated that any nuclear attack by the DPRK against the ROK will be met with a swift, overwhelming, and decisive response.”
The United States, South Korea, and Japan continued to strengthen their conventional capabilities to deter North Korea, ramping up bilateral and trilateral war drills. The trilateral alliance between South Korea, Japan, and the United States, formalized in August 2023, part of Washington’s Indo-Pacific strategy against China, marked a return to the Cold War era and has led to deepening North Korea’s bilateral relations with China and Russia. The recent Kim-Putin summit and renewed mutual defense treaty between North Korea and Russia signal that North Korea regards meaningful engagement with the United States as a remote prospect.
Although Biden promised to “reunite Korean Americans separated from loved ones in North Korea for decades” during his candidacy, he has extended the Trump-era travel ban on North Korea each year he has been in office, cutting off crucial avenues for people-to-people engagement and family reunions.
Until Washington addresses the root cause of tensions by officially ending the Korean War and prioritizes the goal of peace and normalized relations, the 70-year-long-plus stalemate between the United States and North Korea is likely to lead to ever deepening militarization of the region and military confrontation with potentially disastrous consequences.