U.S. to consult allies on North Korean problem

The Biden administration’s still-evolving policy for dealing with the North Korean nuclear threat will loom large and may get some clarity as Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin make a first visit to Japan and South Korea next week.

While officials say rallying regional democracies in the face of China will be the major theme of the trip, the focus in Tokyo and Seoul is expected to center on how the U.S., South Korea and Japan can better align on efforts to draw North Korea back into nuclear talks that have now been stalled for more than two years.

Mr. Biden’s team clearly hopes to keep North Korea on the back-burner for now as they work their way through other priorities, but history suggests Pyongyang doesn’t bide its time when a new administration takes power in Washington. And Mr. Biden takes office at a time when America’s traditional alliances need some short-term maintenance work as well.

A key goal for the Blinken-Austin visit is for “the South Koreans and the Japanese to come together more cohesively on the North Korea issue after their relationship really fell apart during the Trump years,” said Joseph DeTrani, a former CIA official and longtime U.S. diplomatic specialist on the region.

Analysts say alliance cohesion is a must before Mr. Biden can take on North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and his troubling nuclear programs.

“Trilateral cooperation is a must for any successful outcome on the Korean peninsula,” said David Maxwell, a former U.S. Special Forces officer and North Korea analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “… I expect the secretaries will push for that.”

Longstanding cultural and historical spats between Japan and South Korea have become inflamed in recent years as South Korea has risen as an economic rival to Japan. Seoul nearly scrapped a key intelligence-sharing pact with Tokyo in 2019, exposing a potentially dangerous crack in America’s security architecture in the region.

The friction has appeared to ease more recently, and the Biden administration appears keen to keep it that way, seeing the nurturing of alliances as an early underpinning of its foreign policy doctrine.

Moon’s goals

Mr. Blinken and Mr. Austin will meet with counterparts in Japan before heading to South Korean during their March 15 to 18 trip. Although no trilateral meeting is slated to occur, Mr. DeTrani said the trip will likely improve coordination.

“I think the Biden administration will get the Japanese and the South Koreans to agree that the U.S. will take the lead in reaching out to Pyongyang to try and resume negotiations,” Mr. DeTrani told The Washington Times.

However, he cautioned that South Korea’s pro-engagement President Moon Jae-in is likely to push for leeway to engage in his own direct outreach to Pyongyang, one that may include controversial aid-based or economic incentives.

“The Moon government wants to ease sanctions to get the North Koreans to come back to talks,” Mr. DeTrani said, adding that there “should be pushback to the idea of offering incentives like that for the North Koreans because we’ve tried that before and haven’t been successful.”

There is speculation an emboldened Moon government will push the conciliatory approach toward Pyongyang because the South Korean president’s single five-year term in office ends in 2022. Seoul’s relationship with the newly inaugurated Democrat administration in Washington has so far been positive.

The Biden and Moon administrations quickly resolved this week what had been a grinding dispute under President Trump over Seoul’s payments to help underwrite the cost of some 30,000 American military personnel stationed on the divided peninsula.

The U.S. troops are critical to sustaining the American security architecture against China and North Korea, but Mr. Trump repeatedly demanded that Seoul dramatically increase its contribution to the costs of maintaining them, even threatening to remove the U.S. troops if South Korea refused pay more.

“He wanted to make a profit off our sons and daughters in uniform,” said Bruce Klingner, a former high-level CIA official in Korea now with the conservative Heritage Foundation, who argues the Biden administration’s swift resolution of the issue has injected “normalcy” back into the Washington-Seoul relationship.

“It’s just getting back to the status quo, which is a huge improvement over what it’s been for the last few years,” Mr. Klingner said Wednesday.

But analysts caution the Biden administration has yet to articulate a strategy for trying to draw North Korea’s Mr. Kim back to the negotiating table.

Nuclear talks have been stalled since the historic Hanoi summit between Mr. Trump and Mr. Kim ended in failure. Mr. Trump walked out of the February 2019 summit claiming Mr. Kim had demanded sweeping sanctions relief in exchange for only a partial abandonment of the North’s nuclear programs.

More recently, Mr. Kim marked the end of the Trump administration by threatening to expand Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missile programs unless the Biden administration dialed back America’s “hostile” policies.

With his country’s economy suffering under sanctions and the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, Mr. Kim said his regime intended to pursue a policy of boosting ties with China, its biggest ally and economic lifeline. He also slammed South Korea for continuing to hold joint military drills with U.S. forces and for modernizing its military.

Shunning summits

Analysts say it’s highly unlikely that 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 so-called “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.

One major question, according to Mr. Klingner, is whether the Biden administration will push to impose and enforce the full slate of sanctions currently authorized by U.S. law, including against hundreds of North Korean entities, as well as several Chinese banks, that U.S. officials have identified for sanctions violations.

Mr. Blinken has said increased sanctions remain an option with North Korea, Mr. Klingner said that may not be enough to pressure Pyongyang back into talks.

The past several U.S. administrations, including the Trump administration, talked a big game about exerting maximum pressure on the North Koreans, only to hold back from fully enforcing congressionally authorized sanctions, Mr. Klingner said.

“Under Obama it was the idea that we didn’t want to irk China because we wanted their assistance on North Korea and climate change,” he said. “Under Trump, it was that he didn’t want to undermine his relationship with Kim Jong Un.”

A separate behind-the-scenes debate is underway in the U.S. over whether to keep Mr. Trump’s demand of complete, verifiable and irreversible dismantling of North Korea’s nuclear programs as the diplomatic goal, or whether to adopt a step-by-step approach.

Mr. Klingner said there are indications Mr. Biden may push for more of an “arms control” approach to negotiations that could be used to lure Pyongyang back into talks by setting smaller goals that can be pursued on a gradual basis, but he expressed skepticism with the approach.

“I don’t think you abandon the end goal just because you are unlikely to achieve it,” he said. “I also don’t think you give someone a door prize just to get them into the negotiation room.”

Mr. Maxwell noted that, “if we shift to arms control-style negotiations, we allow North Korea to have nuclear weapons — that’s what that means.”

“Arms control negotiations really only work between two sides that really can have mutually assured destruction and that’s not the case with North Korea,” Mr. Maxwell added. “We don’t want to be in a position where they keep their nuclear weapons and we actually have to negotiate away some of ours, because North Korea is not the only threat we are dealing with.”