In the latest from the American Statecraft Program’s Pivotal States series, which examines alternative U.S. foreign policy approaches to the world’s key nations, senior fellow Stephen Wertheim discussed U.S. strategic alternatives to North Korea with Markus Garlauskas, director of the Indo-Pacific Security Initiative at the Atlantic Council and former U.S. national intelligence officer for North Korea; Ankit Panda, Stanton senior fellow with Carnegie’s Nuclear Policy Program; and Jenny Town, senior fellow and director of the North Korea Program and 38 North at the Stimson Center.
This Q & A was adapted from a transcript of the event and has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Stephen Wertheim: What are the most fundamental U.S. interests at stake when it comes to North Korea? How would you rank-order them and separate the “must haves” from the “nice to haves”?
Markus Garlauskas: We all too often consider North Korea in isolation from both what we’re trying to achieve vis-à-vis China or Russia and how we’re defending this larger idea of the rules-based international order. The United States should counter the threat that North Korea poses to the rules-based international order, by being one of its most flagrant violators, and recognize that anything we do at the strategic level—and anything North Korea does—has huge implications for dealing with China and Russia. We are in a new Cold War–type era, where China and Russia are adversaries,. That is where the United States has to start, rather than thinking of North Korea a separate category.
To be more specific, I think first and foremost the United States needs to prevent North Korea from initiating a war, particularly a nuclear war. War initiation in the region is so intertwined with what Beijing would do and what Pyongyang would do that I think that’s all one problem set.
The other thing we’ve forgotten about, which used to be a huge focus of our North Korea policy, is that North Korea could proliferate nuclear weapons technology or a nuclear weapon. If one country is going to proliferate a nuclear weapon or related technology to a third-party actor, such as the aspirational nuclear power of Iran, it’s going to be North Korea, not Russia or China.
Lastly, a more aspirational nice-to-have, but that really is in America’s interest, would be to foster a fundamental transformation in North Korea—to the point where systemic abuses of human rights are no longer the way the country is run. This would mean that North Korea, probably not under the Kim family, becomes a responsible member of the international community. The current South Korean administration would like to see the North unified with South Korea into one political entity.
Jenny Town: I question if we really accept the premise that we are in a Cold War era, or if we’re moving toward a Cold War era, but certainly all of these states are interconnected. North Korea has in recent years more firmly aligned with China and Russia. But whether we’re really to a point where China, Russia, and North Korea are acting like a unified entity that really opposes U.S. alliances—I don’t think we’re quite there yet, but we’re definitely moving in that direction.
One of the core interests that we need to grapple with is whether we want a Cold War alignment, and if not, how we better manage those relations across the board, including where we place North Korea in that policy. The United States needs to safeguard our allies—South Korea and Japan especially—from the threats that North Korea’s nuclear program poses to them. This has been the impetus for a lot of the enhancements of extended deterrence relations in nuclear cooperation with South Korea and the driving force of U.S.–South Korea–Japan trilateral security cooperation.
I think the proliferation risk is understated at the moment, especially if North Korea is building more of a military-industrial base as the basis of its economic policy, which right now it seems to be moving toward.
Ankit Panda: For forty-six years, the United States enjoyed an international environment in which only two adversarial countries possessed the ability to strike the U.S. homeland with nuclear weapons: Russia and China. In 2017, North Korea joined that club.
I don’t think it’s particularly controversial to say that the defense of the homeland against nuclear attack should be a primary consideration in the formation of U.S. policy. In fact, I think national defense strategies have put that very much at the forefront.
Since 2017, the North Koreans have done a lot to make their nuclear weapons capability much more survivable. Now we’re in this uncomfortable space where we have to contend with whether North Korea is starting to look like a nuclear problem for the United States in the category that Russia and China have traditionally occupied. Russia and China have nuclear forces that we recognize we cannot comprehensively disarm and therefore we and they are in a condition of mutual vulnerability, which governs the ways in which we manage our relationships with them. Are we in that place with North Korea? I would argue yes, this has started to happen. Even if Kim Jong Un doesn’t have the most survivable nuclear forces on Earth, he is pursuing survivability in remarkably capable ways.
This gets into a second consideration for U.S. grand strategy: the continued reliance we have on a network of allies and partners around the world, and specifically on Japan and South Korea. If we need to continue sustaining alliances to maintain a variety of comparative advantages in the international system, then Japan and South Korea are legitimately going to be asking some tough questions. The risk of proliferation by South Korea, and the provision of assurance and extended deterrence by the United States, become pretty important considerations.
The counterproliferation question is going to be a lot more salient. Initially, one of the big differences between Kim Jong Un and his father, Kim Jong Il, was that Kim Jong Il was more interested in putting missiles on ships and sending them to various places. Kim Jong Un focused on building up North Korea’s capabilities. But now his approach has changed. The Russians have gone shopping, and I think the world is starting to see that the North Koreans have a fairly capable kit that’s cost-competitive. So we need to be vigilant to the possibility that North Korean proliferation could start to create a significantly more dangerous world.
Stephen Wertheim: What does North Korea want from the United States at this point? Over the past three decades, Pyongyang has periodically returned to the negotiating table to seek security guarantees, sanctions relief, and economic aid, among other things, from Washington. But it’s not clear now that this cycle will continue, is it? North Korea has drawn closer to Russia and may have concluded that the United States will not alter its “hostile policy,” as Pyongyang calls it, given the failure of leader-level diplomacy in 2019.
Jenny Town: North Korea has no forever enemies and no forever friends. It constantly evaluates its relationships to find the greatest opportunity and to figure out how to better achieve its goals with the least amount of sacrifice and disruption. In the past, North Korea wanted to normalize relations with the United States. It liked to play the triangulation game among the United States, China, and Russia. It didn’t necessarily want to be tied to any one of those countries too closely; the Korean stance for centuries has been to how to play the big powers off each other to preserve its own sovereignty and interests.
What the North Koreans want now from the United States is respect. They’re trying to demonstrate that their country should be taken seriously, as an equal. I don’t know that the United States would ever see them in that way, but at the same time, they pose a formidable threat that does need to be taken seriously.
Beyond respect, I think they do still see value in building a relationship with the United States eventually, because they care about things like sanctions relief. But they don’t seem to have the same sense of urgency to get sanctions relief, and instead are cultivating relations with states that are willing to work with them despite sanctions. The United States is going to want certain things from North Korea that countries like Russia won’t require.
Stephen Wertheim: Markus, do you agree with that assessment? Do you think it’s more or less inevitable that North Korea will be increasingly aligned with Russia and China?
Markus Garlauskas: The great thing about being on a panel with Jenny is that we can agree on about 95 percent and then we can talk about the 5 percent of difference. Strategic culture in North Korea is basically the Kim family’s thinking in history; there’s not really that much strategic culture in the broader North Korean elite that affects decisionmaking. The Kim family does have this really effective history of playing great powers off against each other. Maybe they do have this framework of no permanent friends, no permanent enemies. At the end of the day, they can’t trust Russia and can’t trust China. But I don’t think they’ll ever get to the point where U.S. policy will satisfy them to nearly the degree that Russian or Chinese policy satisfies them. With Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin running the countries the way they do and with the interests that they have, the alignment is natural.
The Kim family may not want the United States to be a permanent enemy, but I think in point of fact it will always be a permanent enemy because the United States is not going abandon the role of it has played in the Indo-Pacific. That role may be reshaped, but I don’t think it’ll be abandoned, no matter who is in office in the United States.
In an ideal scenario for North Korea, there would be no U.S.–South Korea alliance, no extended deterrence commitments to South Korea, and no U.S. reports about how terrible North Korean human rights are. All these things, they’re fundamentally just not in the cards for the United States. The North Koreans are never going to get what they want from the United States, and so the relationship can only go so far.
Jenny Town: I tend to agree that U.S. policy is unlikely to change because U.S. values are unlikely to change drastically enough. And I think the North Koreans have also come to that conclusion. There’s a lot of policy prescriptions for how to create a really robust, friendly, open relationship between the United States and North Korea. I don’t think that’s what North Korea is looking for either. I think they’re really looking, at the end of the day, to be left alone.
How do we remove obstacles that stand in the way of North Korea’s own push for self-determination, for economic development? Pyongyang doesn’t necessarily want a robust relationship with the United States but does want sanctions relief so it can have a better standard of life and raise its economic standing.
Stephen Wertheim: Let me get Ankit to react to that. And is the North Korea–Russia partnership, cemented by the recent mutual defense pact, sustainable from the perspective of either country? If the war in Ukraine were to come to a halt over the next six or twelve months, would they suddenly not look quite so aligned as they did before?
Ankit Panda: Survival is the most important goal for the North Koreans. Kim Jong Un cares about a fourth round of the Kims’ succession to his progeny, and ideally a fifth. The Kim regime has been around longer than the People’s Republic of China, and it intends to continue being the world’s most successful Marxist-Leninist state in many ways. For anybody here steeped in international relations theory, North Korea is possibly the most archetypal state in the real world that models neorealist behavior. It sees a completely dangerous, anarchic international system where institutions and rules cannot save you and great powers are to be taken seriously.
To foot-stomp Jenny’s point about the North Koreans wanting to be left alone, the thing that really perturbs them is America’s insistence on compelling them to change. Denuclearization, economic reform, human rights—these are all ways in which the United States seeks to compel North Korea into changing the status quo that it wants for itself. At the Singapore Summit, the United States showed Kim Jong Un a very strange video of what a future North Korea under different economic terms might look like. But he wants to pursue economic development in his own way.
I think it’s wrong to describe the Russia–North Korea relationship either as purely transactional or as the most profound strategic partnership between two leaders that you might imagine. It’s somewhere in the middle. Kim and Putin genuinely do share some views about how the United States carries itself in the world, and that does bring a certain level of strategic convergence between the two of them.
Obviously, signing a mutual defense treaty that’s being subjected to legal processes in both countries does demonstrate a depth of seriousness. But at the same time, I think you’re right that a lot of this is a function of what’s happening in Ukraine. In my previous encounters in Russia, it was difficult not to sense this view among the Russian strategic elite that North Korea was not a serious country. The Russians in 2017 were even unwilling to acknowledge that the North Koreans had actually developed an intercontinental ballistic missile because “let’s be real, these are North Koreans, they can’t do something like that.”
Now with the Russians purchasing weapons and missiles from the North Koreans, we’ve seen a deep sea change. But the deeper strategic culture—the sense that Russia has of itself as a great power and the sense that North Korea has of itself—may make for a fairly unsustainable longer-term partnership. That said, I’m not going to recommend that the United States try to pluck North Korea and Russia apart because I just don’t think the United States is positioned well to do that. But over time, I think we will see a natural realignment.
The North Koreans are extremely good at hedging their bets with the major powers. We could see another Sino-Soviet split, which the North Koreans played expertly. One of the reasons they chose to engage with the United States in the 1990s was the collapse of the Soviet Union and the concern that if they didn’t engage the United States, they would have to put all their eggs in the China basket, which made them deeply uncomfortable. Similarly, today, having turned their back on the United States, they don’t want to put all their eggs in the Russia basket. They want to diversify as much as they can between China and Russia.
Stephen Wertheim: As you noted, one of the ways the United States has attempted to compel change in North Korea is to pursue the “denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula,” which has been a primary policy objective since the end of the Cold War. Is denuclearization a productive policy objective for the United States to take forward into the next administration?
Ankit Panda: There’s an obvious tension between treating North Korea as a nuclear deterrence problem for the United States in the category of Russia and China, and pursuing the objective of denuclearization, which aims at compellence, not deterrence, insofar as it seeks to change what is already happening. We do not try to denuclearize Russia and China. We pursue global nuclear disarmament with them.
Stephen Wertheim: The United States doesn’t use the term denuclearization in any context outside the Korean Peninsula.
Ankit Panda: We don’t.
If we value deterrence and a stable nuclear deterrence relationship with North Korea, then there is a case to be made to deemphasize denuclearization. It’s probably not a good idea to completely abandon denuclearization given the normative consequences for the global nuclear order and the messages that such a move might send to U.S. allies. But denuclearization has in many ways become today a straitjacket for the United States and its allies. It prevents us from having a more fulsome conversation in Washington, Seoul, and Tokyo about the many tools we have to deal with North Korea. So we should talk about it significantly less than we currently do. Denuclearization has started to look like Article 6 of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, in which the major powers of the five nuclear states committed to work in good faith toward negotiations on general nuclear disarmament. But we all know that the major powers aren’t about to get there anytime soon, and so we try to reduce nuclear risks.
The United States could have a similar understanding with the North Koreans. I’m not very optimistic that they would want to negotiate with us, but if the next president of the United States did indicate that denuclearization no longer was the guiding lodestar of our approach to North Korea, I think that would be a productive way to indicate to the North Koreans that the terms of our relationship might be able to change, and in a way that advances U.S. interests.
Jenny Town: I tend to agree. It isn’t useful to put denuclearization up front anymore because it’s not on the table on the North Korean side at the moment. But the bigger problem is, if we’re looking for the agenda beyond denuclearization, our objectives are unclear. What does the United States want with North Korea beyond denuclearization? I don’t think we’ve ever had really clear objectives.
Our objectives are largely focused on South Korea, the protection of our alliances, and the preservation of the rules-based international order. I think that’s what we’re grappling with now: If the goal isn’t denuclearization, what is it?
To go back to Russia quickly, I do think there is a deeper basis for the North Korea–Russia relationship than just the war in Ukraine. Ukraine creates the urgency and Russia’s desperation to get North Korean weapons. But when Russia talks about North Korea, it talks about multipolarization. It talks about common interests in resisting sanctions, and about a larger war against the West. Those goals are likely to continue beyond Ukraine.
Stephen Wertheim: What about the possibility of South Korea moving toward the development of its own independent nuclear weapons capability? Should the United States be trying to prevent this development through the strongest measures possible, as well as through reassurance? Some in Seoul who advocate for an independent nuclear capability have asked me why Washington would abandon its alliance commitment to Seoul, if it goes nuclear, because a nuclear-armed South Korea would enhance American security.
Markus Garlauskas: We have to proceed from the understanding that already exists in the Washington Declaration, in which the sitting U.S. administration and the sitting South Korean administration have committed to closing out this possibility. So I am reluctant to answer your question because I don’t think there has been a whole lot of analysis done on how things would play out—if South Korea were to develop and field its own nuclear weapons, how that would be managed in the alliance, what are the pros and cons—because the conversation essentially gets shut down before it gets started. We have intentionally not thought it through out of a fear of even discussing the possibility and what it would mean.
Personally, I think that fear is misplaced. And frankly, we’re giving the Chinese and the Russians a pass because it’s their empowering and enabling of North Korea’s nuclear weapons that could cause South Korea to choose to field its own nuclear weapons, say after President Yoon Suk-yeol leaves office. Clamping down on that possibility in such a way that we won’t even talk about it actually is just doing Beijing’s and Moscow’s work for them. If South Korea were to go nuclear, that would be bad for Pyongyang, Moscow, and Beijing, and it would be because of what North Korea has done.
I know that’s a nonanswer, but I think it’s my favorite analyst answer: It’s complicated and it depends.
Stephen Wertheim: I think that’s somewhere between an answer and a nonanswer.
Jenny Town: This whole attitude of “we don’t want to talk about South Korean nuclear weapons and don’t want to game it out” has led to such high acceptance of nuclear weapons in South Korea. If we don’t talk about what are the actual consequences and trade-offs of going nuclear, then what we get is a pretty free-flowing narrative in South Korea about why nuclear weapons make sense without any discussion of the costs of doing so.
At the beginning of this year, when Yoon commented that nuclear weapons are an option for South Korea to pursue in the future, the United States was forced to start to take the issue seriously. As a result, some of the consequences of going nuclear—automatic sanctions, adjustments to the alliance, the impacts on South Korea’s nuclear energy industry, the reputational hit that South Korea would suffer—are starting to infiltrate the discussion in South Korea, and there is starting to be more variance in public acceptance rates of nuclear weapons.
Given the costs and risks to South Korea of acquiring an indigenous nuclear weapons capability, what military benefit does it bring, especially given U.S. extended nuclear deterrence? Really the only difference is that South Korea would gain command and control over nuclear weapons. Part of the reason South Koreans want nuclear weapons is that they want nuclear weapons, because North Korea has nuclear weapons and because of the prestige of being part of the nuclear club. Some also question U.S. credibility in the long run.
In the 1970s, when South Korea had a clandestine nuclear weapons program, it faced a clear-cut choice: Seoul could either have nuclear weapons or have the alliance with the United States, but not both. I just don’t think that’s a credible ultimatum anymore. So we should talk about what it would mean if South Korea were to go nuclear and how the alliance would react.
Ankit Panda: There are two camps in South Korea that express interest in nuclear weapons: those who are trying to bargain with the United States and true believers. I think we are heading to a place where there are more true believers.
I don’t think South Korea possessing nuclear weapons would solve its security problems with North Korea. South Korea has the deep misfortune of sharing a peninsula with a country that is very risk acceptant and that’s willing to do things like send trash-filled balloons across the military demarcation line and launch missiles. These are fundamentally behaviors that cannot be deterred by the possession of nuclear weapons or advanced conventional weapons. South Korean nuclear weapons, like U.S. nuclear weapons, would be very good at deterring large-scale war that poses an existential threat to South Korea, but all the other things Pyongyang does won’t be deterred.
Stephen Wertheim: I’m hearing from all of you that the next administration should take a hard look at North Korea policy and question the assumptions that have guided it for some time. But what are the constraints that have kept U.S. policymakers from making changes over multiple decades? Why don’t we change even when our policies are not necessarily succeeding?
Ankit Panda: The simple answer is rooted in political costs. A president would have to expend political capital to recognize that the Korean Peninsula matters to U.S. security interests and matters disproportionately compared to many other issues we are currently dealing with in the world, from Ukraine to the Middle East to strategic competition with China. That recognition is unlikely to happen in the near term, unless we have a major crisis. Moreover, we would have to have a very tough conversation with our allies, because the United States is not going to unilaterally rock the boat on the Korean Peninsula.
That said, more and more people within the establishments of the United States, South Korea, and Japan are coming to grips with many of the hard realities we’ve been talking about. So we may see change happen in the next five to ten years. But I fear that by that point it will be far too late to address North Korea’s nuclear weapons and geopolitical alignments.
Markus Garlauskas: It’s all about risk. Policymakers have a sense that anything that we do to fundamentally change our policy to North Korea is just too risky. They also underestimate the risk of allowing things to continue.
I think of the North Korean nuclear problem essentially as a growing tumor. You can get rid of it only with surgery, and there’s a chance that the surgery will cause the patient to die. So instead of picking a moment to say, “Hey, we need to get rid of the tumor,” we’re just going to keep letting that tumor grow until the results are catastrophic. It’s going to take a crisis, I think, to cause change, or a president who has a fundamentally different risk calculus.
Jenny Town: It is increasingly risky for us not to adapt our policy to the current realities because at the end of the day, North Korea’s risk tolerance toward the United States and South Korea is incredibly higher than the U.S. risk tolerance toward North Korea. Pyongyang is always going to be pushing the envelope in order to upend the status quo.
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