Biden’s opportunity? Some see opening for U.S. in warming North Korea-Russia ties

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Direct U.S.-North Korea diplomacy appears nearly nonexistent as Pyongyang rapidly deepens its military and political relationships with Russia, one of Washington’s leading geopolitical adversaries.

Those realities seem to eliminate any room for President Biden to negotiate with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, but some analysts say this moment may offer the administration a golden opportunity.

“I still believe Kim Jong-un has ambitions to drag the DPRK out of economic backwardness,” said John Delury, a professor of Chinese studies at the Yonsei University Graduate School of International Studies, referring to the North by the initials of its formal name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

“If the Biden administration showed up with serious willingness to let the DPRK prosper, I’m convinced Kim Jong-un would be interested and start movement in a direction we haven’t really seen,” Mr. Delury said Tuesday at The Washington Brief, a monthly forum hosted by The Washington Times Foundation.

Some analysts say the administration’s diplomatic approach to North Korea is unimaginative. The White House said Tuesday that Mr. Biden discussed North Korea during a phone call with his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, and “emphasized the United States’ enduring commitment to the complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.”

Mr. Biden has done little in public to counter a lengthy diplomatic freeze-out from Pyongyang in recent years. Conservative South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol has also rejected the previous government’s policy of trying to engage with the North.

The focus on denuclearization has been a hallmark of U.S. policy toward North Korea for years. President Trump held face-to-face meetings with Mr. Kim in the hopes of securing a deal to end Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons program in exchange for major economic sanctions relief and international investment into North Korea.

Since the Trump-Kim diplomatic dance fell apart without an agreement, specialists say it might be time to approach the situation differently. Mr. Delury argued that Washington may have an opportunity to capitalize on animosity and distrust between Pyongyang and Beijing and to use that as a carrot to draw North Korea toward negotiations.

“The distrust and dislike that pervades China-North Korea relations is a condition of possibility, of peace and normalization, and real improvement of relations between North Korea and the United States,” he said. “But this would require a pretty profound … shift in U.S. foreign policy thinking, which conceives of Beijing playing the role of helping to coerce North Korea into denuclearization.”

A growing number of foreign policy analysts and insiders argue that complete denuclearization on the Korean Peninsula may now be more of an impediment to diplomacy than a realistic policy goal. In the years since the Trump-Kim meetings, analysts say, the situation on the Korean Peninsula has grown more dangerous, with Pyongyang routinely conducting missile tests and seeking to diversify its platforms of weapons of mass destruction beyond its ground-based missile units. On Wednesday, North Korea said it tested a new hypersonic intermediate-range missile.

“I have become an advocate for recognizing reality and acknowledging, officially, [the North Koreans] have nuclear capabilities,” former Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper said at The Washington Brief forum in February. “Doing so doesn’t raise or lower the intrinsic threat that they pose one bit and plays to their need for face, for respect, and maybe puts them in a better mood to negotiate.”

The Russia question

The North Korea-Russia relationship, which has grown considerably over the past two years, hangs over any discussion involving Pyongyang. Wooed heavily by Russian President Vladimir Putin, North Korea has given Moscow badly needed arms and ammunition for its war in Ukraine.

In return, Russia appears willing to use its geopolitical leverage to help Pyongyang. Russia last week vetoed a United Nations Security Council resolution to continue a monitoring mission of U.N. economic sanctions tied to North Korea’s nuclear program.

Alexandre Mansourov, a professor at Georgetown University’s Center for Security Studies, who also spoke at Tuesday’s event, described the unfolding dynamic as North Korea’s “pivot to the north.”

“That pivot to the north is obviously a major new reality with which we have to deal,” he said.

Could North Korea’s pivot toward Russia also provide a diplomatic opening? Mr. Delury said the Pyongyang-Moscow relationship could offer a valuable topic of discussion in a theoretical U.S.-North Korea meeting and, ironically, could give Washington a bit of leverage.

“I do think strangely, paradoxically, this fairly recent real uptick in North Korea-Russia relations actually gives something for them to talk about,” he said. The U.S. side could ask whether there is a “way we could fill the gap” in what Russia provides to North Korea.

“And here’s where you start to put things like relief on [economic] sanctions enforcement” on the table, he said. “Opening them up in the other direction to sort of compensate essentially for the loss that North Korea would suffer from curtailing that developing relationship with Russia. So, I think there is an element there that could be used toward peace.”

Many observers say that kind of outside-the-box thinking is desperately needed in the U.S. approach to North Korea. Pyongyang has a long history of becoming a front-burner problem at inconvenient times.

The laserlike U.S. focus on denuclearization and the notion of “deterrence” toward the Kim regime have accomplished little outside the brief diplomatic progress of the Trump years.

“I have to wonder, when we say and have said we want to contain, we’ll have a policy of containing North Korea — and what?” said former CIA official Joseph DeTrani, who moderated Tuesday’s event. “We haven’t deterred North Korea from building nuclear weapons. We haven’t deterred North Korea from building more missiles to deliver those weapons.”