North Korea’s recent public displays of new intercontinental and submarine-launched ballistic missiles have raised fresh concerns about the risks the regime in Pyongyang poses to the US mainland. As President Joe Biden’s administration reviews US policy towards the DPRK over the past four years and draws what lessons it can from Donald Trump’s nuclear summitry with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, it should consider a new arms-control approach.

The failure of Trump’s efforts should surprise no one. After all, prior US administrations’ initiatives to stop North Korea’s nuclear-arms program—including Bill Clinton’s ‘Agreed Framework’, the six-party talks during George W. Bush’s administration, and Barack Obama’s ‘Leap Day’ agreement—came to naught. Quite the contrary: North Korea withdrew from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 2003, and has failed to abide by a 1992 accord with South Korea pledging to keep the Korean Peninsula free of nuclear weapons.

All this diplomatic activity leading nowhere raises a fundamental question: Does nuclear-arms control have a future on the peninsula?

It does, but not as currently practiced. It should be clear by now that Kim will not abolish his nuclear arsenal, or permit a verifiable nuclear freeze, as some have called for. The reason is simple: as with all nuclear-armed countries today, nuclear weapons remain the regime’s ultimate security blanket. The bomb also provides Kim with leverage over South Korea. The challenge, then, is to ensure that North Korea never uses its nuclear arsenal.

Realising this aim will require a combination of classic deterrence and new diplomatic thinking—specifically, a normalisation of US–North Korea ties. America currently provides deterrence on the peninsula through its offshore air- and sea-based nuclear umbrella over South Korea, while nearly 30,000 US troops in the country supplement more than three million active and reserve South Korean troops.

But relying on deterrence alone against North Korea cannot assuredly prevent or manage missteps, because the country’s isolation from the rest of the world breeds unique perils. Seclusion promotes pathological insecurities that could fuel misunderstanding and miscalculation. To complicate matters further, Kim is prone to grandiosity, military posturing and bullying.

Normal diplomatic ties buttressed by deterrence have provided a path to nuclear peace in other bilateral relationships, including between China and the United States. As menacing as North Korea is today, Cold War-era China under Mao Zedong’s leadership posed a far greater threat to American interests. Mao intervened in the Korean War against the US, fomented the Taiwan Strait crises later in the 1950s, and encouraged wars of national liberation against Western powers. When President John F. Kennedy’s administration entered office in 1961, it regarded China as a rising nuclear bête noire and considered military action against it.

But America did not bomb away, and Richard Nixon’s subsequent opening to China and the normalisation of relations during Jimmy Carter’s presidency neutralised US concerns. Despite the absence of a bilateral nuclear-arms limitation treaty, China’s arsenal remains largely a low-level issue amid current Sino-American tensions.

Similarly, US diplomatic ties with the Soviet Union dating back to the 1930s proved their worth in the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. As the US ramped up its military readiness to compel the Soviet Union to withdraw its nuclear missiles, the interaction between Washington-based Soviet diplomats and US officials proved pivotal in ending the standoff. Likewise, US diplomatic influence over Pakistan, and its ties with India, helped slow the momentum towards nuclear war during the 1999 Kargil conflict and in the aftermath of the 2001 Jaish-e-Mohammad terrorist attack on the Indian parliament.

To be sure, the centrality of North Korea’s nuclear enterprise to the survival of Kim’s regime would complicate any effort to normalise diplomatic relations. Then there are questions about how to build a diplomatic relationship. Can or should the process begin with the opening of embassies, in the hope that this will engender confidence and enable the two countries to address substantive issues? Or can negotiators get down to details immediately?

Either way, two priorities stand out. North Korea needs relief from international economic sanctions, and the US needs to eliminate North Korea’s capability to strike it with intercontinental ballistic missiles.

Sanctions, domestic mismanagement, natural disasters and Covid-19 have left North Korea’s economy—by Kim’s own admission—in desperate need of repair. For America, which currently lacks effective ballistic-missile defences, the prospect of being in North Korea’s nuclear crosshairs is unacceptable. Could this point to a possible trade-off, namely the lifting of sanctions in exchange for the elimination of missiles?

Such a deal would leave North Korea’s theatre nuclear force untouched and help mend the country’s economy while reducing the risk of a pre-emptive American strike. It would also immunise the US against a possible North Korean ICBM attack, leaving it better placed to meet South Korean and Japanese security needs. And with diplomatic representation in each other’s countries, both sides would have reliable channels to address disputes and manage relations generally.

To determine whether Kim’s regime would be open to serious negotiation, the Biden administration could initially endorse so-called Track II diplomacy—former US government and non-government interlocutors meeting informally with North Korean officials in third-party countries. If the outreach sparked interest in Pyongyang, the door to formal talks would open. America’s default option is to return to tried-and-failed efforts to persuade North Korea to disarm. The challenge will be to convince leaders on both sides that diplomatic normalisation leading to an ICBM–sanctions trade-off is the best path forward.

In a midnight military parade to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the country’s rule under the despotic Kim family, North Korea revealed a new monster intercontinental ballistic missile—perhaps one of the world’s largest—on the back of an equally large transporter-erector-launcher vehicle. The new ICBM has nuclear-weapons analysts and North Korea watchers guessing at the missile’s capability and, more broadly, considering what it means for US – North Korea relations, with either a second Donald Trump administration or a Joe Biden White House.

The missile’s existence demonstrates that North Korea has been working assiduously on enhancing its nuclear-warfighting capabilities, even as Trump boasted that North Korea was no longer a nuclear threat to the US. It reinforces North Korea’s status as an effective nuclear-weapon state and suggests Pyongyang has no plans for eliminating its nuclear capabilities.

Trump may think that he and Kim Jong-un ‘fell in love’, but Kim has made it clear that the love is unrequited. Trump has been used. Most North Korea watchers predicted that nothing would come of Washington’s efforts to convince Pyongyang to accept comprehensive and verifiable nuclear disarmament. As expected, it’s back to square one.

North Korea’s new big stick is large—much bigger than the Hwasong-15 tested in 2017. It would potentially have sufficient throw-weight for multiple warheads, or a large, high-yield warhead and lots of penetration aids. It could hold at risk a range of targets across the continental United States, most likely large urban areas.

Either loadout would make it more difficult for US missile-defence systems in Alaska to counter this missile. It would be far more expensive for the US to add more interceptors than it would be for North Korea to simply build more of these large ICBMs and place more warheads on each of them. The cost–benefit advantage is definitely with Pyongyang, and this missile highlights the weakness of current interceptor-based missile-defence systems.

Such a large missile can’t be developed quickly, and its existence was alluded to by Kim back in January when he referred to a ‘new strategic weapon’. It was thought that it would be either a solid-fuelled road-mobile ICBM or a ballistic missile submarine. It seems highly unlikely that the missile is a fake; a mock-up could be quickly detected by the US intelligence community and would be counterproductive for the Kim regime’s credibility.

Alongside the new ICBM, the North Koreans showed the Pukguksong-4, which is based on the Pukguksong-3 submarine-launched ballistic missile. It could be an enhanced solid-fuelled SLBM, likely to be incorporated into a ‘Sinpo-C’ conventionally powered ballistic missile submarine as the basis for a second-strike capability, at least against a regional target such as Guam. Or, perhaps more worryingly, it could be a road-mobile solid-fuelled ICBM, which would be harder to monitor and disrupt before launch. That possibility was reinforced by the fact that the missile was displayed with a Korean People’s Army crew alongside. Also displayed were more advanced, solid-fuelled, road-mobile short- and medium-range missiles and battlefield rockets that extend North Korea’s ability to strike at targets deeper into South Korea.

These new missile capabilities will undermine any claims by Trump that his efforts towards summit diplomacy with Kim have been successful. If Washington doubles down on such diplomacy, the only outcome would be North Korean demands for concessions from the US. These would probably include a peace treaty designed to make the withdrawal of US forces from the Korean peninsula inevitable; the lifting of already weakened economic sanctions; and perhaps a pull-back of US nuclear-capable forces from the region. North Korea will give little in return, and certainly, with this missile being paraded about, denuclearisation isn’t likely to be on Kim’s agenda for any future summit. There would be little to gain from holding such a discussion when it’s clear North Korea is prioritising a nuclear weapons build-up.

At some point, Kim may decide to test the new missile, which would give him a new lever in any negotiations and, if the tests were successful, would add credibility to North Korea’s ICBM capability and cause a new round of tension with the US. Would a second Trump administration return to ‘fire and fury’, noting how close the crisis of 2017 came to war? Or, if Biden wins, might Kim decide to test the new administration by launching his new ICBM—perhaps over Japan?

A Biden White House will likely to focus on reinforcing and restoring confidence in US alliance structures, particularly with Japan and South Korea. Washington’s alliance with Seoul was seriously damaged by Trump’s efforts to extract greater financial payment for the hosting of US forces in South Korea and his constant suggestions that they could be withdrawn.

A Biden administration, in confronting a more challenging North Korean nuclear capability, must focus on reinforcing the US’s extended nuclear deterrence security guarantees to South Korea and Japan, or risk increased consideration in Seoul and Tokyo about options for developing independent nuclear deterrent capabilities.

Biden should also reinforce development of prompt-strike ‘left of launch’ options for the US to counter the threat of road-mobile ballistic missiles. The development of effective space-based surveillance and long-endurance unmanned aerial vehicles operating in ‘near space’ would enable the monitoring of North Korean road-mobile ICBMs and the ability to strike them while they’re being fuelled prior to launch. This could be done with hypersonic non-nuclear precision weapons and would strengthen deterrence by denial.

Of course, these developments can’t be viewed in isolation from the broader US–China strategic competition. Beijing ultimately wants US forces out of northeast Asia, and getting US forces off the Korean peninsula would be a first step in that process, a goal that naturally aligns with Kim’s interests. A Kim who could use his more capable nuclear weapons to provide leverage to act in ways Beijing doesn’t control wouldn’t be good news for Chinese leader Xi Jinping, however.

A Biden administration’s diplomatic approach to North Korea may be to restart a multilateral process, akin to the six-party talks, which China could then exploit to achieve its own objectives. If he becomes president, Biden will need to be wary of being played for a sucker by both Beijing and Pyongyang in the same way that Kim played Trump.

Like the leading character in a long-running television series, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un kicked off the latest crisis on the Korean peninsula with familiar theatrics. After cutting off all communications with South Korea earlier this month, the Kim regime blew up the building in which it had previously hosted South Korean diplomats. It redeployed troops into demilitarised border areas and issued renewed threats of violence against the South. Those displays of bombast followed Kim’s scene-stealing performance in May, when he announced that North Korea would boost its investment in ‘nuclear war deterrence’.

Yesterday, however, North Korean state media reported that the country’s Central Military Commission has decided to suspend ‘military action plans’ against South Korea. How long this interlude will last is anyone’s guess. The meeting, chaired by Kim, also reportedly considered documents outlining measures for ‘further bolstering the war deterrent of the country’.

Washington has so far ignored the latest episode, and for good reason. After two years of playing along with President Donald Trump’s made-for-TV summitry, Kim is convinced that the ‘bromance’ storyline has run its course, and that an older narrative will keep his ratings up.

Having banked his political gains from Trump’s fecklessness, Kim is now unambiguously asserting North Korea’s status as a nuclear power. To drive that point home, he promoted the general in charge of the nuclear program to serve as vice-chair of the Central Military Commission, while also rewarding 69 other generals who have contributed to the country’s strategic success in recent years.

Since the failed nuclear summit in Hanoi in February 2019, Kim has been consistent in both word and deed. Last April, he warned that Trump had until the end of last year to lift US sanctions on North Korea. Since then, the North has continued its short-range missile testing (chalking up noteworthy successes), expanded a missile production plant and built new support facilities for its missile program.

Clearly, Trump’s ‘maximum pressure’ campaign to choke off North Korea’s clandestine sources of income and trade has utterly failed to alter the course of the regime’s nuclear and missile programs. American officials acknowledged as much last month when the US Department of Justice indicted 28 North Korean and five Chinese officials and bankers for (successfully) circumventing the sanctions regime. Since 2014, the indictment alleges, the North’s global network of front companies has—with China’s help—funnelled US$2.5 billion into Kim’s nuclear weapon, missile and high-tech programs.

Kim has been no less consistent in expanding North Korea’s massive conventional military capacity. While its military hardware remains far inferior to the US-furnished armour and aircraft across the border, the North has nonetheless managed to upgrade both the accuracy and reach of its weapons. It has also placed 70% of its 1.1 million-strong army within 100 kilometres of the demilitarised zone, putting South Korea’s capital well within its sights. By one estimate, the North could rain down 25,000 artillery rounds on the Seoul metropolitan area—including a major US military compound—in the space of just 10 minutes.

To be sure, US and South Korean forces would have a major technological edge in an all-out war on the peninsula. But even a short-lived conflict would be devastating to Seoul, which is home to some 25 million people and accounts for half of South Korea’s population and 70% of its GDP.

Against this background, Trump’s effort to extort South Korea to quadruple its financial support for US forces stationed there is astonishingly irresponsible. Although negotiations to renew the expired US–South Korean cost-sharing pact remain at an impasse, a new stopgap deal at least ends the furlough of 4,000 South Koreans who work at US facilities. But with Seoul temporarily assuming the cost of these salaries, the deal will hardly improve Trump’s standing in the eyes of South Koreans.

Kim can take further comfort from the fact that Trump has also been browbeating Japan, demanding that it, too, boost its financial support for US forces within its borders. Though Japan is crucial to South Korea’s defence, the two countries have a rocky relationship. Last year, South Korea threatened to pull out of a bilateral intelligence-sharing arrangement before reversing course under US pressure. As in South Korea, most Japanese have no confidence in Trump’s handling of international affairs. Such factors inevitably will contribute to diplomatic disarray between the US, South Korea and Japan, all of which will benefit Kim.

In addition to undermining US alliances in the region, Trump is also doing Kim a favour by escalating tensions with China, which now will be less inclined to rein in its client state. With China accounting for over 90% of North Korea’s trade, Kim has been cultivating a closer relationship with Chinese President Xi Jinping, who visited Pyongyang last June. That meeting and others suggest that China has been neither surprised nor particularly concerned about Kim’s behaviour.

This is not to suggest that Kim has clear sailing ahead. Owing to US sanctions, limited food production and various reform failures, North Korea faces formidable challenges at home. Following a speech at the Workers’ Party of Korea’s annual plenum in December, public remarks issued by Kim in February and April suggest that he may have spent the first half of this year focusing on domestic priorities. By forcing the closure of the Chinese border, the Covid-19 pandemic has undoubtedly hurt the North’s faltering economy. And the fact that Kim has imposed tougher oversight on implementation of his previous economic reforms suggests that more domestic trouble may be on the horizon.

With or without economic problems, Kim is unlikely to deviate from his family’s well-rehearsed oeuvre. Like past performances by his late father and grandfather, his repertoire will continue to feature threats of violence, sensational provocations and potentially even military incidents like the shelling of South Korean islands a decade ago. All signs indicate more brinkmanship on the part of the North. The leading character in the Korean peninsula’s long-running psychodrama may still be new, but the play remains the same.

Japan’s relationship with South Korea is not amicable at the best of times. Yet in recent months it has entered a rapidly descending diplomatic spiral of unprecedented depth and scope. Mounting bilateral friction over the intractable ‘history problems’ is steadily bleeding into the economic and security realms of the relationship. The result is a bilateral trade war with potential repercussions for the global supply chain of high-tech devices.

On the surface, it appears that a series of contentious developments in their longstanding history problems drove Tokyo and Seoul to this crisis point. South Korean President Moon Jae-in reneged on a diplomatic accord in 2018 that was purported to ‘irreversibly’ settle the ‘comfort women’ issue. The South Korean judiciary is also growing increasingly incessant in demanding Japanese companies pay damages to the Koreans mobilised for wartime labour.

These bilateral developments are doubtlessly playing a central role in the deterioration of Tokyo–Seoul relations. Yet there are broader strategic parameters to this dispute that have also shaped the contours of diplomatic friction, and these are largely being overlooked.

In short, there has been a major divergence in Seoul’s and Tokyo’s strategic views towards North Korea. This began to develop in January 2018 when Seoul embarked on a rapprochement with Pyongyang, while Tokyo’s policy on North Korea remained fundamentally unchanged. This strategic divergence, which has continued to deepen with time, undermined the ability of Japan and South Korea to cooperate in the security realm. By extension, it also reduced their diplomatic incentives to manage their history problems.

North Korea’s belligerence throughout 2017 encouraged Seoul and Tokyo to contain their diplomatic problems. As North Korean leader Kim Jong-un rapidly advanced his nuclear program, his missiles were frequently traversing Japanese airspace. The continental United States also came under potential threat with Kim’s successful launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile. These events provoked a rhetorical war between Kim and US President Donald Trump that threatened to escalate to a de facto war. Indeed, media reports emanating from the US indicated that Trump was seriously considering a preventive attack—a ‘bloody-nose’ strike—against North Korea.

This precarious security environment provided strong incentives for Seoul and Tokyo to cooperate in the defence realm, and their strategic outlooks on North Korea were aligned closely. Both sides were in favour of strong sanctions, intelligence-sharing and trilateral military exercises with the US. Defence cooperation necessitated keeping their ever-present history problems in check, as collaboration in this sphere has always been tenuous. Against this backdrop, Moon expressed opposition to the 2015 comfort women agreement but remained ambiguous as to whether or not he would dissolve it.

Yet when North Korea initiated an about-turn in January last year, the strategic views of Seoul and Tokyo quickly began to diverge. Kim extended an olive branch to Moon in his 2018 New Year’s address, suggesting that the two Koreas jointly compete in the Winter Olympics. Moon seized upon this conciliatory gesture, ushering in an inter-Korean rapprochement and a round of regional summitry. To ensure that the diplomatic door remained open to Kim, Moon was reluctant to provoke him, meaning that trilateral exercises with Japan and the US became problematic.

Yet, from Tokyo’s point of view, little had changed with regard to North Korea. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was not prepared to risk political suicide by following suit with his South Korean and US counterparts. The issue of Japanese abductees takes precedence over the North Korean nuclear threat in Japan, and Abe’s domestic political success is explained in part by his hardline stance towards Pyongyang on that issue. Consequently, Tokyo became sidelined from the regional summitry.

Amid this growing strategic divergence, Moon unilaterally dissolved the comfort women accord in November 2018. In the same month, Tokyo announced that it would appeal to the International Court of Justice over a South Korean court ruling concerning Korean forced labourers. Relations took a further downturn in January, when the two governments disputed whether a South Korean navy destroyer had locked its targeting radar on a Japanese maritime patrol aircraft.

This downward spiral in Tokyo–Seoul relations is being compounded by their mutual US ally taking more of a backseat than usual in the dispute. Normally, Washington would be strongly encouraging its two key Asian allies to maintain their security cooperation despite their diplomatic issues. But this is now complicated by the fact that Trump supports—at least in practice—South Korea’s rapprochement policy towards North Korea and is thereby deepening the Tokyo–Seoul strategic divergence.

Although Pyongyang has now resumed missile testing, it’s doubtful that this development will provide an incentive to Japan and South Korea to repair their relations. Moon is likely to continue pursuing his rapprochement policy with North Korea, and there has already been too much bilateral damage done in the current dispute between Tokyo and Seoul.

There is no clear way out of this diplomatic crisis. But it’s evident that Seoul and Washington are likely to persist in engaging North Korea and working towards denuclearisation—at least for the foreseeable future. If Tokyo and Seoul wish to pave a foundation for mending their ties, they must recalibrate the strategic parameters of their relationship. Their relations will need to be predicated on mutual engagement with North Korea, rather than the mutual isolation of the past. To achieve this strategic convergence, Tokyo will need to try to end its longstanding impasse with Pyongyang.

North Korea set out on its quest to develop a nuclear-weapons capability (reliable nuclear explosive devices and the means to deliver them over medium and long distances) in the mid-1980s. Progress was slow and uneven. The DPRK lacked financial resources and technological capacities. All the countries that possessed the relevant technologies paid at least lip service to nuclear non-proliferation and had export controls on the core technologies, including China, through which the great bulk of North Korea’s trade has transited since the demise of the USSR.

Two major efforts were made to dissuade Pyongyang from proceeding with its nuclear program—a freeze agreed with the US in 1994, which was to be followed by the verified dismantling of the DPRK’s nuclear capabilities, and the six-party talks of 2003–2005, which had the same objective.

North Korea tested its first nuclear device in 2006, and five subsequent tests through 2017 confirmed its competence in making nuclear explosive devices. The testing was accompanied by what a surprisingly rapid mastery of building ballistic missiles capable of delivering nuclear warheads over distances as far as the west coast of the United States.

The blizzard of missile tests in 2016 and 2017 generated an acute sense of crisis that was abruptly defused at the end of 2017 when the DPRK used the Winter Olympics being hosted by South Korea to revive dormant channels of communication, first with Seoul and Beijing, and then with Washington.

North Korea’s achievement of a genuine nuclear-weapons capability was remarkable but, in a crucially important sense, not surprising. Indeed, it’s consistent with the pronounced belligerence that has characterised the regime since its emergence under the wing of the USSR shortly after World War II ended.

Its first leader, Kim Il-sung, began lobbying the Soviet leader to support the invasion of the South and bring the entire peninsula into the socialist camp. Stalin eventually agreed that it was an attractive idea, but insisted that the People’s Republic of China also agree to support the venture. Mao agreed and North Korean forces struck on 25 June 1950. The war ended more than three years later with an armistice agreement that is still in place.

North Korea, though economically depleted, maintained its aspiration to unite the two Koreas on its terms and set out to steadily increase its armed forces. A quarter of a century later—a period interspersed with acts of extreme belligerence towards the South in particular—they topped 1.1 million personnel, rendering the DPRK the most militarised state in the world but also among the poorest.

The subsequent commitment to nuclear weapons appears to have emerged from the assessment that, despite facing in the US an implacable enemy seeking a second chance to terminate it, the DPRK could not support the continual modernisation of such a massive force. For essentially all of this period, Russia and China have gone along with the DPRK, declining to compel or even encourage it to amend its national story and strive to coexist with its neighbours and the wider world in the normal way.

US President Donald Trump brashly agreed to meet his North Korean counterpart, Kim Jong-un, in Singapore in June last year and resolved to honour that commitment despite the North’s firmly resisting all efforts to flesh out what was at stake or how the parties might begin to address the issues between them. At the conclusion of the Singapore summit, North Korea raced to occupy the moral high ground, insisting that it had endured decades of US aggression and that the US had a major trust deficit to make up—particularly through easing the sanctions regime and transforming the armistice into a peace treaty—before the DPRK could even begin to consider reciprocal steps. The US went through the motions of asking the DPRK to draw up a baseline inventory of its nuclear assets and facilities as a prelude to joint development of a schedule to eliminate them, but the entire process fell flat very quickly.

A second summit will be held in Hanoi, Vietnam, later this week. There’s still little evidence of new flexibility on either side. Kim and Trump have corresponded since Singapore and the new US special envoy has spent some days in Pyongyang. This may point towards the painstaking incremental, action-for-action approach agreed in broad terms at the six-party talks in September 2005.

In addition, Kim met again with Chinese President Xi Jinping in mid-January 2019—their fourth meeting in less than a year after six years without any meetings. We have no visibility of how North Korea’s objectives and tactics may have been influenced by China. China did at several points lose patience with North Korea, especially when its actions threatened a full-blown crisis that could have spun out of control and prove costly to China’s long-term interests.

Broadly speaking, we can assume that China has reaffirmed its willingness to stand behind the DPRK economically and politically, provided Pyongyang remains receptive to China’s counsel on how best to manage the issue in a way that protects China’s primary interest—a US position in Northeast Asia that has been weakened rather than reinforced. Trump, meanwhile, has been highlighting the economic bonanza that denuking could deliver for the DPRK.

An even more important reason to be skeptical about a breakthrough at the Hanoi summit is that the main players continue to cling to very divergent narratives on how we got to where we are. The background rehearsed so briefly above—a few highlights from the ‘Western’ record—has been completely buried. We cannot expect a shared narrative.

Nor can issues of this kind be resolved through any kind of simple reckoning of past injustices. That said, however, it’s difficult to see how a meeting of the minds sufficiently strong and deep to reach and to implement a denuclearisation agreement can happen if the two principals clash so spectacularly on how and why the situation is in its current shape.