SEOUL, South Korea (AP) – Last year was a disaster for North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
He watched helplessly as his country’s already battered economy collapsed amid the closure of the pandemic, brooding over the collapse of the summit for TV with former President Donald Trump not lifting crippling sanctions from his country not.
Now he has to start all over again with President Joe Biden, who previously called Kim a ‘thug’ and accused Trump of wearing glasses instead of a significant reduction in Kim’s nuclear arsenal.
While Kim has promised in recent political speeches to bolster his nuclear weapons program, he has also tried to give Biden an opening by saying that the fate of their relations depends on whether Washington throws away the hostile policies of the US.
It is unclear how patient Kim is going to be. North Korea has a history of testing new U.S. administrations with rocket launches and other provocations aimed at forcing the Americans to the negotiating table.
In recent military parades in Pyongyang, Kim has unveiled new weapons he may test, including solid-fuel ballistic systems designed to be fired from vehicles and submarines, and the North’s largest intercontinental ballistic missile.
A resurgence of tension will force the US and South Korea to take a deeper look at the possibility that Kim may never voluntarily give away the weapons he considers his strongest survival guarantee.
Kim’s arsenal tested in 2017 poses a major threat to the United States and its Asian allies, including an explosion of a suspected thermonuclear warhead and flight tests of ICBMs that have the potential to reach deep into the American homeland has.
A year later, Kim began diplomacy with South Korea and the US, but it derailed in 2019 when the Americans rejected North Korea’s demands for major sanctions easing in exchange for a broken agreement that partially surrendered its nuclear capabilities.
North Korea is unlikely to be the top priority for Biden, while facing growing domestic issues as it prepares to return in a 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, which Trump blew up in favor of what he pushes most against Iran. .
The Biden administration’s “order of policy attention is likely to be: order America’s own home, strengthen American alliances and align strategies with China and Russia, and then address Iran and North Korea,” Leif-Eric Easley said. a professor at Ewha University, said. in Seoul.
But North Korea never likes to be ignored.
Although Biden served as vice president under Barack Obama, whose policy was to wait out North Korea while the sanctions were gradually increased, the method may not work, as the North’s weapons capabilities increased significantly in the years that followed.
While sanctions, border closures and crop-killing natural disasters have posed the toughest challenges of Kim’s nine-year rule, he will not be in a hurry to make concessions, Easley said. Kim’s government has a high tolerance for domestic suffering and can expect extensive help from China, the only major ally.
North Korea’s first provocation under the Biden administration could possibly be related to the submarine-launched ballistic systems, which Kim demonstrated in recent parades.
Kim’s ambitions for long-range ICBMs and reconnaissance satellites, which he announced during the ruling party congress this month, could lead to a space launch that will double as a test of long-range missile technology. It would be reminiscent of a 2009 launch that took place weeks into Obama’s first term.
“(The North) is capable of doing tests that the US and its allies cannot ignore,” Easley said. “Kim will probably use it.”
The North Korean leader is trying to move diplomacy to a arms reduction talks between nuclear states, rather than talks that would result in a full surrender of his weapons, according to Shin Beomchul, an analyst at the Korean Research Institute for Korea in Seoul . Strategy.
North Korea will probably only test weapons after Biden’s state of the nation address in February, where he was able to set the tone for his policy toward the North, Shin said. Kim also wants to see if the United States and South Korea continue with a major joint military exercise expected in March.
Although the allies described their annual exercises as defensive in nature and reduced much of their joint training activity under Trump to make room for diplomacy, North Korea stopped calling the exercises in full and described them as invasion exercises. and a testament to American hostility.
“The North has made it clear during the party congress that it does not intend to emerge first, but it is also interested to hear what the United States has to say,” Shin said, referring to the Obama years as’ served as a South Korean diplomat.
“Biden will not inherit Trump’s top-down diplomacy, but you can expect him to be more flexible on job negotiations and offer to talk to the North Koreans at any time and place and about anything,” he said.
Shin expects Biden to eventually follow an agreement with North Korea that is similar to the agreement with Iran that Trump withdrew in 2018. This could provide North Korea with some compensation for freezing its nuclear and missile capabilities at their current level.
While the United States is unlikely to give up its long-term commitment to unleash North Korea, it is not a realistic long-term diplomatic goal to bring the country’s nuclear capability back to zero.
But an Iran-style deal may not work with North Korea, which has much more advanced weapons and is unlikely to accept the monitoring steps in the Iran deal, said Park Won-gon, a professor at Handong University of South Korea, said.
One thing is clear, however, Park said: if North Korea tests its weapons, Biden will call for sanctions that will continue to push Kim’s economy to the brink.