OPINION:
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Russian President Vladimir Putin will visit North Korea this week. This is unsurprising, given that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un visited Russia last September and met with Mr. Putin at the Vostochny Cosmodrome Space Launch Center.
What continues to be of concern, however, are the weapons — artillery shells, ballistic missiles — North Korea is providing to Russia for its war of aggression in Ukraine. In turn, Russia is probably providing North Korea with sophisticated technical assistance for its nuclear, missile and conventional weapons programs. It is also likely North Korea received Russian assistance with its successful satellite launch last November. This is all in violation of U.N. Security Council resolutions.
Mr. Putin probably views this enhanced relationship with North Korea as a positive development: help with weapons for the war in Ukraine and claiming an ally in his confrontation with the U.S. and NATO. For North Korea, it is an ephemeral victory. It is aligned with a revanchist Russian Federation and a leader who is bent on recreating the Russian empire. What that translates into is a Russia that will persist with wars of aggression and resultant alienation from the international community.
Is this the future that Kim Jong Un envisions for North Korea? Is the technical assistance Russia currently provides worth aligning with a revanchist Russian Federation?
Kim Jung Un’s grandfather Kim Il Sung met with former President Jimmy Carter in 1994. He made it clear that North Korea wanted a normal relationship with the U.S. Representatives from the U.S. and North Korea then met in Geneva and signed the Agreed Framework, halting North Korea’s nuclear reactor at Yongbyon and the construction of two new reactors, in return for two proliferation-resistant nuclear power reactors. Kim died later that year, and his son, Kim Jong Il, took over as North Korea’s leader, pursuing the goal of normalizing relations with the U.S.
In May 1999, former Defense Secretary William Perry visited North Korea as President Bill Clinton’s special coordinator for North Korea policy. After three days of meetings with political, diplomatic and military officials, Mr. Perry said his meetings were “very intense, extremely substantive, and quite valuable in providing insights into North Korean thinking on key issues of concern.”
The positive visit moved relations forward with the October 2000 visit of the vice chairman of North Korea’s National Defense Commission, the second most powerful official in North Korea, Vice Marshal Jo Myong Rok. Jo had a “positive” meeting with Mr. Clinton in the White House. The momentum continued with then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who later visited North Korea in October for hours of long and productive talks with Chairman Kim Jong Il. Discussions about establishing diplomatic interest sections in our respective capitals were discussed.
Over the next 19 years (2000-2019), negotiations with North Korea continued, with North Korean negotiators saying their ultimate objective is normal diplomatic relations with the U.S. The Six-Party Talks Joint Statement of Sept. 19, 2005, clearly stated that North Korea’s complete and verifiable dismantlement of all nuclear weapons and facilities was the path to the eventual normalization of relations.
I heard this often in official talks with North Korean interlocutors: North Korea wants a normal relationship with the U.S. This was repeated often in Track 1.5 meetings with North Korea’s vice foreign ministers and in the 2018 Singapore Summit of then-President Donald Trump and Chairman Kim Jong Un.
The problem was — and is — North Korea wants normal relations and acceptance as a nuclear weapons state like we managed the nuclear issue with Pakistan. North Korea was told that we would not accept them as a nuclear weapons state. They were told that complete and verifiable denuclearization is the path to normal relations.
Since the failure of the February 2019 Hanoi Summit of Mr. Trump and Mr. Kim, North Korea has refused to meet with U.S. negotiators and has raced to build more nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles to deliver these nuclear warheads. And since September 2023, when Mr. Kim met with Mr. Putin in Russia, there has been a flurry of senior-level meetings in Moscow and Pyongyang and continued North Korean weapons assistance to Russia.
This alliance with Russia may embolden Mr. Kim to do something provocative toward South Korea, which could escalate quickly. It has also emboldened Mr. Putin to persist with his war in Ukraine, with the prospect that he won’t stop with Ukraine, regardless of the outcome.
This is the Russia with which North Korea is aligned. This is not what Kim Jong Un’s father and grandfather envisioned for North Korea. It is not the future that will provide economic development assistance and greater security to North Korea and its people. It is not the future for North Korea that Mr. Kim was pursuing in his summits with Mr. Trump.
Indeed, this is the time for North Korea to reengage with the U.S. and continue to pursue the legacy of Mr. Kim’s father and grandfather — normalization of relations with the U.S.
This is the time for the U.S., unilaterally or with the assistance of China, to use the tools available to us to reengage with Kim Jong Un.
• Joseph R. DeTrani served as special envoy for the Six-Party Talks with North Korea from 2003 to 2006 and as director of the National Counterproliferation Center. The views expressed here are the author’s and not those of any government agency or department.
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