Personnel moves offer hints to Joe Biden’s approach to North Korea

President Biden has yet to name a new special envoy for North Korea policy, leaving open a major personnel hole on a national security matter that had garnered front-burner attention during the Trump administration.

While Mr. Biden has begun filling out his National Security Council and State Department Asia policy teams, sources familiar with both say the new administration has yet to even begin a much-anticipated review of policy toward Pyongyang, and is still weighing possible candidates for the job.

The position had been held for the past three-and-a-half years by Stephen E. Biegun, a former Ford Motor Company vice president who won respect from both sides of the aisle, as well as from allies and adversaries in Asia, as a calming presence within the Trump administration’s often confrontational approach to foreign policy.

Mr. Biegun, who also was deputy secretary of state for the past two years, left the State Department on Jan. 20. While it remains to be seen who will replace him, the Biden administration has quietly named a handful of key Asia policy officials in recent days.

There was no formal announcement by the administration, but former CIA analyst Jung H. Pak tweeted this week that she has “joined [the State Department] as Deputy Assistant Secretary for East Asian Pacific Affairs.”

Ms. Pak, most recently a senior fellow with the Brookings Institution’s Center for East Asia Policy Studies, has been an outspoken critic of Mr. Trump’s attempt to redefine U.S. policy toward North Korea through top-down summits with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.

Kurt Campbell, a high-level diplomat of the former Obama administration, has already been named head of Indo-Pacific policy on the National Security Council.

Mr. Campbell, who is perhaps best known as the architect of the so-called U.S. “pivot” to Asia during Mr. Obama’s first term, will likely hold significant influence of U.S. policy on both China and North Korea.

Separately, the Biden administration has tapped Sung Kim, the current U.S. Ambassador to Indonesia and veteran U.S. nuclear negotiator, to shift indefinitely into the role of acting assistant secretary of state for East Asian affairs.

A career U.S. diplomat who worked closely with former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on a visit to Pyongyang in 2018, Mr. Kim was a key organizer of the 2018 Singapore summit between North Korea’s Mr. Kim and Mr. Trump.

Michael D. Quinlan, an official at the U.S. Embassy in Indonesia, told the Seoul-based American publication NK News this week that Ambassador Kim is leaving for a role “during the Biden administration’s period of transition.”

North Korea has made no obvious overt shifts in policy since Mr. Biden took over, but earlier this month Mr. Kim leveled a fresh threat to expand his regime’s nuclear weapons and missile programs unless the U.S. dialed back its “hostile” policy toward North Korea.

Mr. Kim declared that the U.S. remains his country’s “biggest enemy,” despite the three meetings he had with Mr. Trump, and many Korea watchers expect a significant new weapons test or other military display early in Mr. Biden’s term.

Analysts rate it highly unlikely Mr. Biden will pursue the kinds of high-stakes direct meetings with Mr. Kim that Mr. Trump favored. The new administration is instead expected to return to the policy of “strategic patience” embraced during the final years of the George W. Bush administration and throughout the Obama era, when Mr. Biden was vice president.

The approach will likely revolve around efforts to continue isolating Pyongyang through U.S. and United Nations sanctions while taking care to avoid rewarding the Kim regime with any major diplomatic overtures.

South Korean President Moon Jae-in, entering the last year of his term in office, has been a major proponent of engagement with the North and recently told South Korean journalists there had been both successes and failures in Mr. Trump’s approach to Pyongyang, but there were elements of his policy the Biden team could build on.

Ms. Pak, has suggested that she would view such a new North Korean missile test as an opening for the Biden administration to rally regional allies into a new and more effective multinational front to constrain the Kim regime.

“A nuclear or ICBM test by North Korea would provide an opportunity for the new administration to highlight the threat that the Kim regime poses and try to build some consensus or agreement with our allies on a coherent North Korea policy,” Ms. Pak told Reuters in August.

“That is, don’t let a good crisis go to waste,” she said.