A version of this article appeared in the daily Threat Status newsletter from The Washington Times. Click here to receive Threat Status delivered directly to your inbox each weekday.
SEOUL, South Korea — Monday was business as usual on the Korean Peninsula as North Korea, flouting U.N. Security Council resolutions, test-fired a trio of short-range ballistic missiles into the East Sea/Sea of Japan a day after the top U.S. diplomat arrived for a summit in South Korea.
Pyongyang launched its latest missiles the morning after Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrived to speak at the third Summit for Democracy, a signature Biden administration initiative that wraps up on Wednesday.
At the summit, Mr. Blinken talked up the dangers of disinformation warfare, and the office of South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol released a statement noting that Mr. Blinken “said the United States will always be with South Korea to respond firmly to North Korea’s provocations and for peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula.”
Yet analysts said the failure of the U.S. and its regional allies to halt North Korea’s weapons of mass destruction programs illustrates their lack of leverage over the regime of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. Without economic, diplomatic or political ties with Pyongyang, and with few channels of communication to the regime, the democracies’ ability to change North Korea’s behavior is minimal.
The fallback for the U.S., South Korea and Japan has been a policy heavily reliant on deterrence. Those who worked with previous Seoul governments and who have direct experience in and with North Korea suggest that another form of leverage exists: military drills.
Offering the carrot of a suspension of joint U.S.-South Korean military drills could lure North Korea back to the negotiating table, they say. It has been done before with the approval of top U.S. military officials.
“Deterrence is a given. Nobody argues against the importance of deterrence — but it only works until it doesn’t,” said Choi Jong-keun, deputy minister of foreign affairs under Mr. Yoon’s immediate predecessor, Moon Jae-in. “To protect it, you need the wisdom of diplomacy.”
Relying on deterrence is especially dicey for South Korea. Its capital lies just 35 miles from the border, where North Korean long-range artillery is dug in. The Seoul-Incheon-Suwon metropolitan area is home to half of South Korea’s 51 million people and is almost entirely lacking in civil defense preparation.
North Korea’s capital, Pyongyang, home to 3 million people, lies 130 miles north of the Demilitarized Zone — beyond artillery range.
“We have an asymmetry of vulnerabilities between North and South,” said Moon Chung-in, a scholar who has advised all Seoul governments that engaged with Pyongyang. “There is no way to defend, our damage would be so high, and that is why I stress preventative diplomacy.”
Stepped-up drilling
No diplomacy is underway now, and both sides are instead stepping up military drills. Last week, Mr. Kim oversaw an artillery drill and an armored drill. His daughter Kim Ju-ae accompanied him for a landing drill by paratroopers.
South of the DMZ dividing the peninsula, joint U.S.-South Korean Freedom Shield 24 military exercises wound up last week, but more drills are on tap. A joint water crossing exercise is slated for Wednesday.
North Korea routinely criticizes the joint spring drills as rehearsals for a potential invasion. Seoul and Washington insist that their war games are defensive in nature.
Former members of the Neutral Nations Supervisory Commission, which oversees the Korean War armistice, told The Washington Times that the drills are “not entirely” defensive in nature. They conclude with counterattacks, these members noted.
Moreover, Pyongyang, which follows Soviet and Russian doctrine, has reason to fear the drills. Moscow’s forces used exercises to disguise troop movements ahead of invasions of Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2022.
Agreeing to a pause in the military exercises has attracted Pyongyang’s interest in the past. Mr. Moon cited 1992, when President George H.W. Bush suspended the drills. The same thing happened under President Trump in 2018. Both times opened windows for engagement.
Even the U.S. military got behind the pause in 2018. Gen. Vincent Brooks, commander in chief of U.S. Forces Korea, said the exercises and the publicity surrounding them could be scaled down “depending on what is needed to create traction diplomatically.”
If drills are scaled back again, perhaps under the next U.S. administration, “it could send a good signal,” Mr. Moon said.
Complicating variables
Mr. Moon cited two variables that complicate predictions of how a suspension of military drills would be received.
“Inter-Korean relations have hit bottom and North Korean hostility is very high, so they may not accept the gesture,” Mr. Moon said. “President Yoon Suk Yeol is not in a position to scale down exercises because of April’s general election. He would lose support of his [conservative] constituents.”
Mason Richey, a U.S. international relations scholar who teaches at Seoul’s Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, noted that the halt of drills in 2018 “happened with a constellation of Trump being experimental and Moon being on a peace and charm offensive. Mr. Yoon, he said, “is not willing to do that.”
President Biden has shown little interest in reviving diplomatic efforts toward Mr. Kim since taking office in 2021. Mr. Richey reckons that Mr. Trump may seek to rekindle his personal relationship with Mr. Kim if he returns to the White House after the election in November. His term included three personal meetings that ultimately failed to produce the denuclearization deal Mr. Trump wanted.
With most North Korean experts saying Pyongyang will never fully give up its nuclear arsenal, Washington would have to shift from its long-held stance to arms control, offering a de facto recognition that North Korea is a nuclear state.
“It is not impossible that Trump comes round to the idea that a nuclear North Korea is out of the barn and you will never get the horse back in, so let’s double down the focus on China, and one way to do that is build detente with their ally,” Mr. Richey said. “I can see a world in which Trump is no longer restrained by the chiefs of staff and the national security adviser and the secretary of state and is either left to his own instincts or has people far more willing to think outside the box than the establishment.”
Such radical moves might shake Capitol Hill, but Mr. Choi, the former foreign secretary, said engagement should be explored despite the risks.
Committed diplomacy with Pyongyang “requires courage of the top leaders in Seoul and Washington,” he said.
• Andrew Salmon can be reached at asalmon@washingtontimes.com.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.