On tense Korean peninsula, playing a game of ‘Waiting for Trump’

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North Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s appetite to make a major diplomatic deal with the U.S. seems all but dead.

Could it suddenly spring back to life in January?

Robert A. Manning, a distinguished fellow at the Stimson Center’s Reimagining U.S. Grand Strategy program, said at an online forum Tuesday that a second Donald Trump term in the White House could deliver a spark to the moribund relationship between Washington and Pyongyang — though he stressed it’s unclear whether such a course would lead to the best long-term policy outcome.

“I think, in a sense, Kim may be waiting for Trump,” Mr. Manning said at The Washington Brief, a monthly forum hosted by The Washington Times Foundation.

The Biden administration’s efforts to revive denuclearization talks with the North have gone nowhere.

“Trump considers himself a deal-maker above all. He still brags in his campaign speeches about his relationship with Kim. And I think he would be tempted to try again,” Mr. Manning said. “I don’t think there’s much potential for it, but I think we could get dragged into a not-defensible deal with Kim, not for total nuclear disarmament, because Kim has taken that off the table with everything he’s done, but an attempt to try a nuclear freeze or something like that, which in theory is not a bad idea.”

“I think we may try, but I think it’s a very problematic situation,” said Mr. Manning, adding that the lack of transparency around North Korea’s nuclear program makes any type of “freeze” difficult to verify.

Olive branches

Mr. Trump, the presumptive Republican Party nominee for president poised for a rematch with President Biden in November, could see a second term in the White House as an opportunity to once again offer a diplomatic olive branch to Mr. Kim, as he did when the two men came face to face for a historic 2018 meeting in Singapore.

Mr. Trump held two more meetings with Mr. Kim in hopes of securing a deal to end Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons program in exchange for the kinds of economic sanctions relief and international investments that Mr. Trump said would transform North Korean society.

The two men failed to reach an agreement. The situation on the divided, heavily armed Korean Peninsula has grown more dangerous in the years since, analysts said. Pyongyang routinely conducts missile tests and seeks to diversify its platforms of weapons of mass destruction beyond its ground-based missile units.

Persuading Mr. Kim to end his nuclear program entirely seems unlikely, but Mr. Manning said the U.S. could open the door to other arrangements in a second Trump administration.

In one possible outcome, the U.S. and the international community could essentially offer to “legitimize” North Korea’s nuclear program.

“In other words, they want to be like Israel, Pakistan,” said Mr. Manning, referring to nations known to possess nuclear weapons. “If Kim could get that and get sanctions dropped, I think he would be tempted.”

The broad notion of recognizing the nuclear reality on the Korean Peninsula has supporters in some U.S. national security circles.

Former Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper said recently that the best U.S. course of action might be to withdraw demands for “denuclearization” and instead recognize that North Korea is a nuclear-capable state.

“I become an advocate for recognizing reality and acknowledging, officially, they have nuclear capabilities,” he said during The Washington Brief forum last month. “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.”

Next steps

Former CIA official Joseph DeTrani, who moderated the event Tuesday, said the door may still be cracked open, albeit slightly, to a normalization accord between the U.S. and North Korea. Still, he said, Mr. Kim’s recent embrace of Russian President Vladimir Putin and support for Mr. Putin’s war in Ukraine have greatly complicated the situation.

Mr. Kim has deepened his strategic ties with Russia over the past two years. North Korea has provided Moscow with arms and ammunition for the Ukraine campaign in violation of international sanctions. Many suspect the Kremlin is offering Mr. Kim access to more sophisticated Russian weaponry and to Russian markets in exchange for his support.

“I think there’s still that prospect there that Kim Jong-un has not walked away from a normal relationship with the United States and the international community. Unfortunately, now he’s embraced Vladimir Putin,” said Mr. DeTrani, a columnist for The Washington Times.

“That has made it very, very difficult for North Korea to sort of pivot back to a more normal relationship with the international community, the United States,” he said. “However, I think that’s still there. I don’t think we should walk away from that.”

North Korea’s string of recent missile tests and embrace of Mr. Putin, along with Mr. Kim’s increasingly hostile rhetoric toward South Korea, have left specialists openly wondering whether the Korean Peninsula faces its most dangerous moment since the Korean War of the 1950s. Indeed, the subject of the panel discussion Tuesday was: “Is Kim Jong-un preparing for war?”

The consensus was that war isn’t imminent. If Mr. Kim were planning to launch a military offensive against South Korea, analysts said, it’s unlikely he would be shipping major quantities of arms to Russia for use in Ukraine.

“The types of indicators we would expect to see on the eve of a North Korean attack, simply, we have not observed them,” said Alexandre Mansourov, professor at Georgetown University’s Center for Security Studies.