North Korea's Missed Opportunity: The Unique, Dovish Moment of the Overlapping Trump and Moon Presidencies
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The Korean Journal of Defense Analysis
Vol. 33, No. 1, March 2021, 23－42
DOI: https://doi.org/10.22883/kjda.2021.33.1.002
North Korea’s Missed Opportunity: The Unique, Dovish Moment of
the Overlapping Trump and Moon Presidencies*
Robert E. Kelly and Arius M. Derr**
Pusan National University, Busan, Republic of Korea; Australian National University,
Canberra, Australia
This paper argues that North Korea’s unwillingness to seriously negotiate during
the 2018–2020 period of dovish outreach by American President Donald Trump
and South Korean President Moon Jae-in will return the North Korea policy debate
to the pre-Trump status quo of containment, deterrence, sanction, and isolation,
while also opening that debate to more hawkish options. North Korea failed to
grasp a historically unprecedented three-year window of two overlapping dovish
presidents governing its primary geopolitical opponents. Trump and Moon both
aggressively sought a major inter–Korean breakthrough; they represented a unique
opportunity in the long Korean stand-off for North Korean leader Kim Jong Un to
press his peninsular claims. Yet Pyongyang offered no serious concessions in the
2018–2020 window, and the politico–military situation on the ground in Korea is
essentially unchanged today. We argue that this failure will, at minimum, encourage
the reemergence of establishmentarian, status quo policies under the new American
administration of President Joseph Biden. Further, North Korea’s recalcitrance in
this unique dovish period will likely push the “Overton Window” of acceptable
counter-North Korea policy options rightward. Harsher measures will be considered
in the wake of engagement’s failure.
Keywords: North Korea, South Korea, Donald Trump, Moon Jae-in, United States,
Summit, Korean domestic politics
*
An earlier version of this paper was presented at a conference of the Korean Association of
Military Studies.
**
E-mail: robertkelly260@hotmail.com; ariusderr@gmail.com
ISSN 1016-3271 print, ISSN 1941-4641 online
© 2021 Korea Institute for Defense Analyses
http://www.kida.re.kr/kjda24 Robert E. Kelly and Arius M. Derr
Introduction
This paper argues that the past three years, 2018–2020, of dovish engagement with
North Korea (the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, DPRK) by American
President Donald Trump and South Korean (Republic of Korea, ROK) President Moon
Jae-in was a unique opportunity for the North to press its peninsular claims. The long-
standing leftish–dovish argument for an inter–Korean breakthrough via summitry
including the U.S. president was realized at last. Both Trump and Moon were more
aggressively solicitous of a deal than any of their predecessors and met DPRK
leader Kim Jong Un repeatedly. Yet Kim failed to capitalize on this singular political
alignment, likely the best chance in North Korea’s history for a balance–positive deal.
We argue that this was a unique and large missed opportunity for the North. Its
failure will push the U.S.–ROK debate on North Korea back toward the pre-Trump
status quo of containment, deterrence, sanctions, and isolation.1 Further, given the
extraordinary solicitousness of the Trump–Moon effort, we argue that future policy
debate will open to more hawkish options as analysts conclude that the North is
disinterested in a deal under even very generous circumstances. The “Overton
Window”—the rhetorical space of normatively acceptable policy options to tackle a
problem2—of the North Korea policy debate will shift rightward.
Since 2018, Trump and Moon have positioned themselves as the most dovish
presidents ever in their countries’ respective histories regarding North Korea. This
was a historically unique constellation of overlapping dovish leadership in the
DRPK’s primary international opponents. Together, Moon and Trump were a natural
experiment of the proposition that a preconditions-free, U.S.–DPRK or U.S.–DPRK–
ROK summit, including, critically, the U.S. president for the first time, could forge
breakthroughs impossible at lower, more bureaucratized levels of diplomacy. A leader-
level meeting offers a chance to resolve large issues with dramatic gestures in the place
of the sluggish, mid-level talks so characteristic of past U.S.–DRPK–ROK interactions.
Curiously however, North Korea did not grasp this unique moment in its relations
with its primary opponents. Trump and Moon were likely the North’s best chance
ever to strike a deal on good terms. Trump defended engagement with the North to the
point of hinting at the withdrawal of U.S. forces from the Korean Peninsula if it would
broker a deal. Moon defended Kim against aggressive conservative/hawkish domestic
criticism and advocated for sanctions relief and other concessions from United Nations
Command allies. Despite this, Pyongyang offered no serious concessions in the 2018–
2020 window, and notwithstanding all the summits, high rhetoric, and deep personal
commitment from Moon particularly, the politico–military situation on the ground in
Korea is essentially unchanged today.3
We argue that this failure under highly conducive circumstances will convince the
incoming U.S. administration of President Joseph Biden that North Korea will not
respond positively to high engagement. Condition-less summitry will be seen as aNorth Korea’s Missed Opportunity 25
fool’s errand which does nothing but legitimize the DPRK with high-profile, widely
televised meetings for no counter-benefit. That Kim balked despite the best negotiating
circumstances in North Korea’s history will move the Overton Window in the North
Korea policy debate towards traditional hawkishness. Multilateral containment
strategies will re-emerge.4 Harsher measures, such as a quarantine on Northern
shipping to prevent proliferation under the now-forgotten Proliferation Security
Initiative, will be considered in the wake of engagement’s failure.
The remainder of this paper is as follows: We outline the uniqueness of the moment
for North Korea in the overlapping dovish presidencies of the United States and South
Korea. We then sketch how this dovish window opened an exceptional opportunity to
try alternative approaches to the inter–Korean stand-off which have traditionally been
foreclosed by the hawkish and establishment policies of the past. We then elaborate on
our claim of Trump’s dovishness; we term him an “operational dove” on North Korea,
despite his Republican partisan affiliation and generally bellicose international rhetoric.
We then discuss why this unique window of opportunity returned so little, conceding
that while Trump’s unpreparedness bode ill for the success of his summits with Kim,
the larger and most obvious explanation for the failure of these meetings is that
North Korea has no intention of surrendering any of its missiles or nuclear warheads,
regardless of how dovish the overture from the United States or ROK. This is powerful
evidence that dovish approaches do not in fact catalyze a breakthrough: North Korea
gave up nothing meaningful despite the extraordinary solicitations of Trump and
Moon. That, in turn, drives our conclusion that the foreign policy establishment in
Washington—traditionally hawkish on North Korea already—will consider yet tougher
options in the future.
A Unique Moment
For the past three years, from 2018 to 2020, North Korea has enjoyed a uniquely
generous geopolitical environment. Both of its primary international opponents—
South Korea and the United States—have been led by doves, either by conviction or
operationally, on the issue of relations with the DPRK. Moon Jae-in pushed further
for outreach and conciliation with the North than any of his predecessors. Donald
Trump broke with the long-standing presidential precedent against meeting a North
Korean leader.5 He praised and exchanged intimate correspondence with Kim Jong
Un, characterized joint U.S.–ROK military drills as “war games” or “provocative,”
and repeatedly suggested U.S. Forces Korea (USFK) might withdraw from the Korean
Peninsula.6 Further, the Moon and Trump presidencies overlapped. This created a truly
unique, dovish moment in North Korean diplomatic history.
While their motivations were fundamentally different, the overlapping Moon and
Trump presidencies were a singular window of opportunity for North Korea to press26 Robert E. Kelly and Arius M. Derr
its many claims and concerns, such as formally ending the Korean War, securing
sanctions relief, unlocking economic aid, or even establishing formal diplomatic
relations with the United States and ROK. That both Moon and Trump occupied their
respective presidential offices simultaneously dramatically enhanced the prospects of
that window for Pyongyang. Previous South Korean dovish presidents faced skeptical
American ones. For example, President Roh Moo-hyun (2003–2008) overlapped with
the hawkish U.S. president George Bush (2001–2009). Their disagreements strained
the alliance and undercut joint approaches to Pyongyang; a U.S.-ROK misalignment
was not a problem under Trump and Moon.7
This extraordinary window of opportunity opened the possibility of deals and
swaps more balance–positive for North Korea than ever before. Never previously
were its major opponents led by presidents this solicitous and this interested in game-
changing negotiations on the order of, for example, the 1978 Camp David Accords
which dramatically reset relations between Israel and Egypt. Even better, these U.S.
and South Korean presidents were publicly aligned in pursuit of such a breakthrough
and promoted the idea for years. This was new and is unlikely to happen again.
Yet despite the blandishments and kind words of the ROK and U.S. presidents, Kim
made no serious concessions, nor paused his country’s nuclear and missile program
for anything but brief hiatuses.8 The six summits between Moon, Kim, and Trump
returned exciting, even moving, visuals. For a brief moment, a breakthrough seemed
to be forthcoming. But this was illusory, and in fact, virtually nothing has changed
empirically on the Peninsula.
Kim proved singularly unwilling to countenance meaningful concessions on nuclear
warheads and long–range missiles—the primary security concerns of the United
States and the international community. There has been no significant retrenchment
by either side along the military demarcation line. Nor has the North improved its
much-lamented human rights situation. On the U.S.–ROK side, Trump, disdainful of
precedent and unconcerned with substance, was so ill-prepared and unimaginative in
his meetings with Kim that he offered little beyond sanctions relief and vague promises
of modernization aid.9 Moon, for his part, was unable to bridge the differences between
these two, and he could not proceed far with his peninsular détente plans, given the
constraints of United Nations (UN) sanctions and the enduring popularity of the U.S.
alliance with the South Korean public.10 Moon, understandably, was not willing to risk
a major breach with the United States or UN by going it alone with the North.
In the end, the Korean status quo has reasserted itself.11 Despite all the photographs
and soaring rhetoric, the stand-off persists. The leftish–dovish claim that a leader-to-
leader-level meeting could break through decades of ossified hostility appears to have
failed. Skeptics of dovish outreach are likely to pick up on this abortive three-year
experiment as evidence that North Korea is unwilling to bargain seriously or make
even minor concessions even under very generous circumstances.North Korea’s Missed Opportunity 27
The Leftist–Dovish Theory of Inter-Korean Change
The right–left cleft on North Korea policy is quite deep in South Korea.12 South
Korean doves particularly seek a different approach from America’s generally hawkish
tone.
The hawkish position on North Korea is traditional.13 It harkens to the Cold War,
reading North Korea as the last hold-out of that epochal struggle. Hawks ultimately
sought the defeat of communism, not mutual co-existence, so their overarching
strategy during the Cold War was containment.14 Containment included tools such as
the deterrence of direct military threats, isolation of communist states from the wider
global economy, and sanctions to punish bad behavior such as the sponsorship of
terrorism and subversion.
Even though North Korea is only vaguely communist or Marxist today,15 this
basic package—containment, deterrence, sanction, and isolation—persists as the
American establishment and South Korean right’s primary approach to Pyongyang:16
it is a communist state to be waited out, only transactionally engaged, and certainly
not recognized. Under South Korea’s military dictators and elected conservative
presidents, Seoul adopted this basic strategy too. There were talks and meetings with
the North here and there; halting efforts at détente were made, just as the West tried
in the 1970s with the Soviets. But the overarching containment frame remained firm.
Today this is still the basic approach of the South Korean right, and the United States,
particularly its national security community.17
The South Korean left, however, has never accepted this consensus. 18 Its
intellectual roots lie in resistance to South Korea’s dictatorial regimes and a rejection
of their policies, including North/South contestation.19 Just as European leftist parties
equivocated on NATO membership and the Soviet threat, or flirted with notions
like Euro-communism, the South Korean left too has been far more comfortable
with Marxism and sought much deeper engagement with North Korea than the
transactional, limited détente of the South Korean right.
To the left, North Korea is not an enemy to be defeated (or contained until it fails);
rather it is a brother Korean state, one driven into paranoia by relentless U.S. hostility.20
North Korea is a “mouse backed into a corner” by foreigners—lashing out violently
to defend itself.21 Foreign hostility—what DPRK media call America’s “hostile
policy”22—explains the North’s destabilizing behavior and provocations, up to and
including nuclear weapons attainment. North Korea is almost to be pitied as a victim
of Japanese colonialism and the ensuing division of the Peninsula by greater powers.23
Indeed, were it not for existential threats to its sovereignty—most obviously, South
Korea’s constitutional claim that North Korea is actually an errant part of the ROK
and not a real country at all—then North Korea would not have become the orwellian
tyranny it is, much less have developed nuclear weapons out of fear of conquest.24 It
might have been a more moderate communist state like united Vietnam or the former28 Robert E. Kelly and Arius M. Derr
Eastern European Soviet satellites. It certainly would not be as it is now.25
In this worldview, South Korea too has been abused by foreign interlopers; it is a
“shrimp among whales.” The Southern left is cynical about the U.S.–ROK alliance and
its security commitments, seeing them as sovereignty surrendered to a semi-occupying
power. Indeed, there is almost a grudging admiration for the North, the brothers and
sisters who have held firm in the face of global imperialism and continue to do things
their own (Korean) way.26 The South, by contrast, submits to U.S. demands. The
left would much rather handle these peninsular issues as “Korean” without external
interference.
Peace on the Peninsula therefore requires recognition of North Korean sovereignty
and the allaying of its existential fears that South Korea and the United States mean
to destroy the North and see it absorbed into the South. These fears drove it to nuclear
weapons, and pressure on the regime, through sanctions and threats, will only make
things worse.27 The first step toward peace is an apex meeting between the U.S.
president and the supreme leader of the DPRK instead of the usual mid-level foreign
ministry or UN meetings.
These top decision-makers can act definitively to sweep away ossified structures
of hostility and build something new. The low- and mid-level deals which have
characterized U.S.–DPRK engagement since the 1990s, such as the Leap Day Deal
of 2012, do not reach high enough. They are easily sidetracked or bogged down
in bureaucratic morass. Too many players without enough authority contest over
minor details, and over time, momentum is lost. Negotiations mired in the depths
of foreign ministries devolve into petty hair-splitting, while the core issues—North
Korean security assurances, ending the Korean War, diplomatic recognition, military
retrenchment, USFK—go untouched.28
An apex summit, by contrast, offers the possibility of major breakthroughs by
sovereign leaders on big issues. North Korea’s regime is structured so that negotiators
have no real power anyway; they are unable to pivot away from the parameters laid
out by the “Dear Leader” beforehand. Thus, doves argue to bypass the diplomats
entirely: put Kim Jong Un in a room with his U.S. presidential counterpart, and
together they can arrange definitive solutions. The obvious template is the 1978 Camp
David Accords, where the top leaders of Israel, Egypt, and the United States forged
a binding deal on large issues which dramatically reset the long-contentious Israel–
Egypt relationship.29 That peace has now lasted forty-two years. Moon evidently hoped
that trilateral diplomacy in Korea could do the same.30
The dovish option of summitry is appealing, because it offers an alternative to the
seemingly endless status quo of containment. Hawks contend that big-bang deals with
North Korea are simply impossible.31 The ideological and strategic gaps between the
two sides are too large, and the risks of North Korean cheating are too high.32 Also,
a summit involving the U.S. president and a DPRK leader is a concession in itself,
because such a meeting effectively signals U.S. recognition of North Korea. It mustNorth Korea’s Missed Opportunity 29
therefore be earned by Pyongyang via behavioral changes first. A summit must have
preconditions.
Doves retort that such preconditions ensure serious negotiations never occur.33
Hawks offer nothing but more of the same grim hostility—at seventy years and
counting—until the DRPK implodes as if it were the Soviet Union. But if North Korea
is more stable than the Soviet Union—it has certainly outlasted it, and there has never
been a popular revolt in North Korea’s history—then the hawkish course is a cul-
de-sac of never-ending confrontation. Only dynamic, risk-taking apex leaders at a
conditions-free summit can break the bonds of this frozen, bureaucratized stand-off.
Hence Moon’s push for regular summits.
Trump as an ̒ Operational Dove̓ on North Korea
The United States has always been more hawkish on North Korea than democratic
South Korea.34 ROK leaders have generally accepted, however grudgingly, co-
existence, especially as the inter–Korean stand-off has solidified and South Korea has
become wealthier. The willingness to risk all that South Korea has achieved since its
modernization is, understandably, low. North Korea is not a primary concern for most
South Korean voters, especially young South Koreans.35 Thus, despite the formal
unificationist strictures of its constitution, the ROK is effectively a status quo power
tolerating mutual coexistence.36
By contrast, the United States has never quite embraced mutual coexistence with
North Korea.37 Trump, for example, faced intense domestic backlash when he spoke
gently of Kim Jong Un, as he himself admitted at his Hanoi summit with Kim in
2019.38 Not only is the DPRK the last vestige of a communist bloc the United States
contained for decades, but its nuclear weapons program is now a direct challenge to
U.S. deterrence, anti-proliferation, and credibility in East Asia. Further, the DPRK is
so uniquely orwellian and its human rights record so terrible, that the United States
has long treated the North as a rogue state outlier even by the standards of twentieth–
century Marxist dictatorships. U.S. mainstream media and popular culture have long
reflected this disdain by portraying North Korea and its leaders as bizarre, psychotic,
or absurd.39 Distance too made U.S. hawkishness more feasible than for ROK elites.
Until North Korea’s most recent missile advances, the U.S. mainland was secure from
DPRK retaliation, allowing U.S. leaders to threaten North Korea with less concern for
the consequences.
Moreover, U.S. leaders of both parties have regularly spoken in tough, Cold War
language about North Korea.40 Where there is a deep hawk–dove split in the South
Korean political and foreign policy elite over how to deal with the North, there is
no such cleavage in the United States. There are few prominent American doves,
especially in Congress, where even the Democrats are North Korea hawks.41 Previous30 Robert E. Kelly and Arius M. Derr
Democratic President Bill Clinton nearly launched a war against the North, while
Democrat Barack Obama supported sanctions, Treasury seizures, and complete,
verifiable and irreversible denuclearization (CVID) as a prerequisite for talks. Unlike
Moon’s Minjoo Party in South Korea, U.S. Democrats are unconvinced of the utility
of an apex summit; they widely condemned Trump’s outreach to North Korea as
appeasement, claiming that he was fawning over Kim and giving away too much.42
Trump broke dramatically with this long-standing, bipartisan U.S. hawkish
consensus. He met Kim personally three times, repeatedly praised him, and even
walked around briefly inside North Korea. This created strange bedfellows: an
American Republican president effectively became a dove on North Korea and aligned
himself with the South Korean left.
Initially, this seemed unlikely. Trump boosted U.S. defense spending and routinely
spoke in bellicose, unilateralist language. In 2017, the first year of his presidency,
Trump declaimed as an archetypal American and Republican hawk on North Korea.
He insisted Pyongyang would not be allowed to develop nuclear weapons. Notoriously,
he threatened “fire and fury” which would “totally destroy North Korea.” 2017 saw the
serious discussion of a “bloody nose” strike and even war.43
Yet Trump was never an orthodox Republican, nor was he much connected to
the foreign policy community in Washington. Trump famously loathes expertise and
enjoys acting unpredictably. He had little concern for the opinions of “the blob,”
former National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes’ term for the U.S. foreign policy
community, and its inertial effect on U.S. foreign policy. Trump went even further;
the blob was actually a “Deep State,” preventing him from re-orienting U.S. foreign
policy.
In remarkable similarity to the South Korean left’s push to elevate negotiations
above the “blob” of sluggish mid-level bureaucrats, Trump framed the Washington
foreign policy community as an obstacle to be overcome for peace with North Korea.
He launched a détente process in 2018 with almost no support from or consultation
with this community or even his own administration. He exploited the president’s wide
latitude over U.S. foreign policy to pursue an idiosyncratic North Korea outreach.
This dramatic turn-around from “fire and fury” does not appear to have sprung
from any deep conviction. Trump is not a dove by nature. Indeed, his political persona
is aggressive and bullying. Trump frequently frames negotiations as zero–sum, winner-
take-all battles for dominance. Internationally, Trump was little interested in traditional
liberal or dovish approaches. He scorned disarmament, international organizations, and
allies. NATO, the United Nations, and the World Trade Organization were unnecessary
handicaps to American material power.
Accordingly, Trump’s North Korea outreach appeared to stem from his own
mercurial, disruptive personality. He clearly admires dictators; he does not much care
about traditional U.S. foreign policy commitments or restraints; and he deeply craves
attention and media coverage. The reason for his three summits with Kim appears,North Korea’s Missed Opportunity 31
at this point, to simply be personal grandstanding, as evidenced in his long-running,
behind-the-scenes effort to win a Nobel Peace Prize for the summitry.44 Trump
clearly enjoys the profile of a man of action tackling big issues. He also appears to
have boundless confidence in his own ability to strike deals, as evidenced in his most
famous book, The Art of the Deal, and in his best-known television identity on The
Apprentice. A breakthrough with North Korea likely appealed to Trump’s sense of
dynamism, theatricality, and deal-making skill.
Whatever the reason, Trump’s decision to embrace conditions-free summit
diplomacy with North Korea effectively placed him on the left in the North Korea
debate, particularly in the United States. We believe it is therefore accurate to refer to
Trump as an ‘operational doveʼ on North Korea. Obviously, he does not share Moon
and the South Korean left’s philosophic convictions on outreach to the North. In 2017,
for example, he called Moon an “appeaser,” and Trump’s speeches and commentary on
North Korea—such as “falling in love” with Kim, analogizing the Demilitarized Zone
(DMZ) to his proposed border wall with Mexico, or describing the launch zones of
North Korean missiles as great locations for condominiums—strongly suggest Trump
never took Korean issues seriously. Nevertheless, his North Korea politics in their
actual effect in 2018–2020 did align him with the dovish left.
Indeed, Trump’s outreach was so unprecedented, that he was virtually alone in
the serious U.S. commentariat on North Korea policy from 2018 to 2020. Given
the paucity of U.S. dovish voices on North Korea, the Washington foreign policy
community—not to mention his own White House—was deeply skeptical, if not
openly hostile, to Trump’s summits with Kim. Nor did Trump make a serious effort
to win over his many critics. Instead, it was South Korean progressives who rallied
behind him in a curious transnational, right–left alignment.
Why Did this Unique Opportunity Fail?
The six summits of Trump, Moon, and Kim (in various combinations) ultimately
returned little and at this time, can fairly be judged a failure. Given the centrality of a
U.S.–North Korean deal, the analytic focus has fallen on Trump and Kim.45
Despite Moon’s enthusiasm and Trump’s unprecedented American dovishness,
Kim’s best offer was the lifting of sanctions in exchange for the closure of the aging
Yongbyon nuclear center, the North’s most well-known nuclear site. As even Trump
perceived, this was an unbalanced deal in Pyongyang’s favor.46 Kim never offered
anything better—a surprise given Trump and Moon’s clear desire for a breakthrough.
Given how little information we have on North Korean decision-making, we
will likely never know why specifically Kim offered so little. But an obvious, if
hawkish, inference is that Kim will not trade away the North’s weapons under any
circumstances.32 Robert E. Kelly and Arius M. Derr
Trump also carries blame for the negotiation failure, and we know much about his
erratic course on North Korea.47 Critically, he failed to groom a domestic coalition
to support his détente efforts, which badly undercut his ability to offer a range of
concessions to a widely distrusted counter-party. Trump could not offer much to
Kim—for a better concession than just Yongbyon—because Trump had so little
support at home, particularly in Congress, which needs to approve any permanent
treaty or foreign financial obligations.
Trump made no effort to win over the many skeptical hawks in Congress and
throughout the foreign policy community via a major policy review. He gave no
serious policy speeches on the North to explain his radically different views. No white
paper was released; the one National Security Strategy his White House wrote speaks
of the North in the traditional manner as a threatening, nuclear rogue state.48 Trump did
not try to rally American elites to radically alter their perception of North Korea from
a tyranny to a country “we could do business with.” He all but ignored ROK elites
and public opinion, and only sporadically mentioned détente to the U.S. public at his
political rallies. Americans, long accustomed to enemy imagery of North Korea, were
suddenly told that the U.S. president was “in love” with Kim. This discontinuity was
jarring, and Trump made little focused effort to overcome it. Throughout his outreach,
he faced massive resistance on U.S. editorial pages. He was freelancing almost alone.
As the first summit in Singapore in 2018 approached, few in Washington seemed
enthusiastic. Trump continued to make no effort to lay out a strategy or structure for
engagement. He never committed much personal time or energy in the run-up. He did
not prepare for his meetings with Kim. He resisted briefings and reading. He did not
consult with the South Korean government beforehand. He seemed to believe his own
claims to be a wheeler-and-dealer who, simply by sheer force of personality, could spin
Kim into a balance–positive deal once they actually met.
Trump also launched his détente with the wildly unrealistic, upfront demand
of CVID while offering North Korea little in return. Throughout spring 2018,
commentators noted that this was akin to asking the DPRK to unilaterally disarm.49
CVID might be the ultimate goal, but as an all-or-nothing proposal, Pyongyang would
obviously reject this maximalist demand and sink the summit. This is indeed what
happened at Singapore that summer.
Trump, not having prepared for the summit, had nothing left to offer or negotiate.
The summit’s ensuing “Sentosa Declaration” was aspirational and nonbinding, as were
so many previous agreements between the DRPK and the United States or ROK. All of
Trump’s presidential foibles—erratic implementation, lack of preparation, outlandish
rhetoric, the obsession with television coverage, the demand for validation—were on
display.
Nearly identical problems undercut the other two summits, in Hanoi and at the
DMZ in 2019. At the former, Trump once again arrived unprepared and with only
one, take-it-or-leave-it proposal: CVID for sanctions relief, in that order. This wasNorth Korea’s Missed Opportunity 33
wildly unbalanced in the United States’ favor. Kim counter-proposed an analogously
unbalanced, pro-North Korean swap—total sanctions relief for the dismantlement of
Yongbyon. There was nothing else discussed; no smaller concessions were floated
around the table; Trump displayed no mixed or flexible thinking about what he could
reasonably request and what North Korea might reasonably concede. Curiously, it
appears Kim did not come prepared to counter-offer either. The divide between the two
sides remained as wide as ever, and Trump simply walked out as he had nothing left to
deal or swap after Kim’s rejection.
Predictably, the third and final summit, at the DMZ in the summer of 2019, was
again over-exposed and under-prepared by both leaders. Trump briefly stepped over
the border and walked inside North Korea, an historic moment, followed by an hour
of talks with Kim. But nothing came of it. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and
Stephen Biegun, the State Department’s North Korea envoy, traveled to the Korean
Peninsula several times to jump-start talks, but once Kim had met Trump personally,
the North refused to deal seriously with a lower official.
In the end, the talks simply faded away, much like previous Korea initiatives by
Presidents Jimmy Carter (to remove U.S. forces from South Korea) and Bill Clinton (to
halt North Korea’s nuclear weapons program in exchange for civilian nuclear reactors).
Trump could not rouse or focus himself enough to mobilize a serious government
effort to re-think the relationship. He appears to have thought that the act of simply
meeting Kim would be enough. Moon did his best to hold things together, but his own
summits with Kim were sharply constrained by the U.S. alliance and UN sanctions.
Moon cannot proceed against American wishes on North Korea without massive
conservative resistance at home, nor can he evade UN sanctions to which South Korea
is legally committed as a UN member.
The Coming Hawkish Shift
Right and left will draw different lessons from these 2018–2020 failures, but the
hawkish case is likely to be more persuasive to centrists, especially in the United
States. Doves—mostly the South Korean left and the coalition behind Moon—will
come away undaunted. They will likely make two claims against an interpretation of
failure:
First, they can claim, with some justification, that Trump was never serious about
the process, and so his failure with Kim does not invalidate the argument that inter–
Korean peace should be sought via big-bang, conditions-free summitry. The 2018–
2020 disappointment is awkward for the left’s position, but doves can reasonably pin
it all on Trump, who never seemed to take détente seriously. He entered his meetings
with the North Korean leader grossly unprepared and seemed far more interested in
the imagery and media attention afterward.50 Trump also apparently expected no less34 Robert E. Kelly and Arius M. Derr
than a Nobel Prize just for showing up, regardless of what he actually delivered. By
contrast, the Nobel Prize-winning Camp David Accords did, in fact, durably reset
the Israel–Egypt relationship. The dovish theory behind an apex summit assumes a
serious, adept U.S. counterparty in the negotiations; Trump was clearly not that person.
In a related second claim, doves will pin the failure more broadly on the United
States, not North Korea: a stubborn attachment to sanctions and the constraints of the
U.S. alliance on Seoul undercut Moon’s peace moves. Doves can claim that Moon
could have struck deals with North Korea, even without Trump, if only the Americans
had gotten out of the way. Indeed, America inhibiting Korean peace by blocking joint
Korean initiatives has been a common theme in the South Korean security debate for
several years now.51 In the wake of his failure with Kim, Trump gave Moon no room to
move independently on North Korea to find other possible deals or arrangements. The
United States refused to budge on sanctions, and a unilateral Southern outreach to the
North would have jeopardized South Korea’s relations with the United States, which
would have likely backfired on Moon given the popularity of the U.S. alliance with
Southern voters. In the end, doves can claim the failures of 2018–2020 are the failures
of Trump. Moon was tripped up by forces beyond his control––but that elusive inter–
Korean deal is still out there.
Policymakers in Washington and many outside Moon’s government in Seoul will
draw a much more direct lesson, consistent with the long history of North Korean
(bad) bargaining behavior: Pyongyang is not genuinely interested in dealing on core
strategic issues like nuclear weapons, or political issues like human rights.52 As Andrei
Lankov writes, “North Korea is not going to change––no nuke deal, no regime change,
no reform.”53 The 2018–2020 evidence here is persuasive, because it is so direct: North
Korea had a fantastic bargaining opportunity, unique in the seventy-five-year history of
Korean division, with these two, overlapping dovish presidencies. Yet the regime made
no meaningful concessions. This was the North Koreans’ best chance, probably ever,
to grasp a balance–positive deal, and they passed it up.
Moon and especially Trump made a massive, legitimizing concession to Kim
by having the summits at all. After decades of North Korean isolation and a global
reputation as a bizarre, backward tyranny, the summits gave Kim a priceless
opportunity to pose as a serious statesman from a normal country engaged in high
diplomacy with no less than the U.S. president. This symbolic recognition of orwellian
North Korea by the world’s superpower had been explicitly rejected by every previous
U.S. president, barring significant North Korean prerequisite concessions. Yet Trump
gave up this huge concession for nothing from Kim in return. Trump also signaled
repeatedly and desperately that he wanted a deal, if only for re-election and publicity
reasons.54
Yet Kim made no daring, or even serious, proposals on the core issues—nuclear
warheads and missiles. His Hanoi offer of sanctions relief for Yongbyon was so
obviously balance-negative for America that even Trump, anxious for a deal, feltNorth Korea’s Missed Opportunity 35
compelled to reject it. Kim never seemed to grasp how desperately Trump craved
media spectacle and approval, or that Trump would have settled for much less than his
predecessors if only Kim had offered a deal Trump could plausibly defend back home.
Contrary to the dovish interpretation that Trump’s incompetence made him a poor test
of summitry for peace, Trump’s disinterest in the issues and lust for media recognition
actually made him an easy negotiating partner for both Moon and Kim, because
Trump’s instinct was to give up a lot in order to secure a deal and a Nobel Prize. Yet
Kim would not cough up more.
Consider, for example, the imagery of several North Korean transporter erector-
launchers rolling across the DMZ into the hands of ROK and U.S. forces. This would
presumably have been a small fraction of North Korea’s arsenal and have done little to
reduce readiness, but it would have been a huge “win” for Trump in the media. Trump
cared deeply about such perceptions and images, and a small strategic concession like
this would likely have greased the wheels for more serious U.S. concessions.
The regime did not take Pompeo’s trips to Pyongyang seriously either, nor
apparently viewed them as a foundation on which to fill out the broad strokes from the
summits. Rather than bargain with Pompeo, Pyongyang read his visit as a prestige-
taking gimmick, insisting that Kim would only seriously negotiate with Trump, leader-
to-leader.
In the United States, always more hawkish on the North, the above narrative is
likely to be convincing: Kim had his best shot ever, and he blew it. Instead of seeing
Trump as a weak negotiator and easy mark, fawning over Kim as his “friend” and
disinterested in details so long as he could market a deal as a success back home, the
North chose to push Trump extremely hard. It brought an unrealistic proposal to Hanoi
on which it refused to budge, gave U.S. negotiators the cold shoulder throughout
2018–20, and made no face-saving gestures, even as both Trump and Moon endured
years of withering hawkish and conservative criticism at home. The foreign policy
community’s criticism of Trump over his photo-op diplomacy in search of a Nobel
Prize was relentless, and eventually Trump just gave up under all the pressure. This
was a huge, inexplicably missed opportunity for Pyongyang.
Moon, too, is subject to such an analysis. No other South Korean president has
been so willing to accommodate the North. Moon repeatedly vouched for Kim’s
integrity. He broadcast images of himself and Kim as close comrades building Korean
peace together. He called for a unified “peace economy” with North Korea.55 South
Korean conservatives and anti-DPRK North Korean defectors routinely accuse
Moon’s administration of violating their civil rights.56 Moon cracked down on anti-
DPRK leafletting. He has appointed to his government controversial figures with pro-
North Korean sympathies.57 He pushed through a military deal with North Korea. He
spent three years trying to slip free of UN sanctions to launch inter–Korean projects
and has repeatedly petitioned Western governments to give him greater space for such
interactions. In the words of one member of the Korean foreign policy community, it36 Robert E. Kelly and Arius M. Derr
is shocking the “extent to which Moon administration officials are willing to forsake
South Korea’s national security interests in the name of preserving a Sisyphean peace
with the North.”58 And yet, North Korea has done nothing to help Moon against this
criticism, just as it gave nothing to Trump to quieten his hawkish critics. Another huge
missed opportunity.
The upshot, we predict, is a coming shift to the right of the “Overton Window”
—the space of normatively appropriate policy rhetoric—of the North Korea policy
debate, especially in the West. Importantly, this coincides with the default policy
preferences of the Biden administration and the traditionally hawkish “blob” with
which the Biden team has strong ties. The failures of 2018–2020 will delegitimize
dovish options outside of the South Korean left. The left will have to work harder
to defend future summitry: if Pyongyang refuses to negotiate seriously when even
deal-hungry doves like Trump and Moon are in power, then why have summits? The
obvious conclusion for many will be that North Korea is unserious about diplomacy.
The old playbook—containment, deterrence, sanction, isolation—is the obvious
fallback.
Doves may be initially encouraged that Biden is a ‘seriousʼ U.S. president who
might deal in earnest with the North before Moon is lame-ducked next year. However,
Biden has already signaled a tougher, more traditional U.S. line on North Korea,
centered on the U.S.–ROK military alliance.59
As Van Jackson points out, Biden has a long history as a hawk on North Korea.60
As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and as Obama’s vice
president, he endorsed tightening the sanctions regime around Pyongyang. When the
North defected on the Leap Day Deal of 2012, Biden accused North Korea of using
détente to squeeze the United States and others for aid with no intention of establishing
a permanent peace: “We will not countenance North Korea’s pattern of provoking a
crisis and then insisting they be rewarded in order to cease and desist from the actions
they are taking. We’ve been there before, only to find that once they’re [sic] gotten the
space or the aid they need, they return to the same provocative, dangerous behavior
and continue their nuclear march.61” During the 2020 presidential campaign, Biden
attacked Trump from the right on North Korea, echoing widespread hawkish criticism
of Trump’s no-preconditions summitry: “What has he done? He’s legitimized North
Korea, he’s talked about his good buddy, who’s a thug, a thug. And he talks about how
we’re better off, and they have much more capable missiles, able to reach U.S. territory
much more easily than ever before.” Biden has also comfortably called Kim a “dictator,”
a point Trump avoided.62
Biden has indeed said he would meet Kim, but only if denuclearization is seriously
at issue. This means a summit is unlikely given the wide strategic gaps between
the two sides which Trump’s own summitry graphically illustrated. This effectively
ends conditions-free summitry, which doves long argued was the fastest way to a
breakthrough. U.S.–DPRK negotiations will be pushed back down into the bureaucracyNorth Korea’s Missed Opportunity 37
of the relevant ministries and the morass of detail. In short, Biden represents a return to
form, to traditional U.S. hawkishness on the North.63
But further hawkish policy space will likely open up as well. The failure of Trump’s
outreach and of Moon’s extraordinary solicitousness will likely validate hawkish
beliefs that North Korea will not negotiate its weapons under even the most generous
diplomatic conditions.64 As Victor Cha argued at the time of the Trump–Kim summits,
the risk of summitry is that if it fails, there is no obvious diplomatic next step. If apex
leaders cannot broker a deal, then the only obvious alternative is more confrontation.65
Options previously considered too extreme or too risky will gain new visibility as the
Overton Window of legitimate North Korea debate moves rightward, which one can
already see in John Bolton’s stinging memoirs of Trump’s North Korea diplomacy.66
The most likely forthcoming policy option is cutting North Korea off even further
from the rest of the world, in order to prevent its proliferation of nuclear and missile
technologies, and to cut hard currency flows funding the lavish lifestyle of the Kim
court.67 Previous efforts to severely isolate the North were kept in check by the larger
need to maintain good relations with China, the North’s benefactor. It is widely
thought, for example, that North Korean illicit monies are stashed in Chinese banks.
But with Sino–U.S. relations now in decline, there is less reason to hold back.
Similarly, multilateral arms trafficking regimes, such as the Proliferation Security
Initiative (PSI), shelved earlier to avoid tensions with China, will likely reemerge.
This fits Biden’s preference for both multilateralism and greater toughness on North
Korea. He has promised to launch a “Summit for Democracy” to build a “united front
of U.S. allies and partners” to address non-proliferation and other issues and “mobilize
collective action” on global threats.68 Applied to East Asia, this sounds like the PSI. If
North Korea continues apace to build nuclear warheads and missiles, then there will be
growing hawkish pressure to prevent the outflow of these technologies to other rogue
states and terrorists for cash payments. A quarantine against water-borne shipping, in
conjunction with allies in the Indo–Pacific, could be in the cards under the guise of the
PSI or a similar scheme.
Stopping North Korean ships on the high seas obviously raises the possibility
of violent altercations at sea, a risk that the United States and allied states will
increasingly be willing to run if there is no other way to halt proliferation. If the North
will not deal, even with desperate Donald Trump, then it faces the increasing likelihood
of draconian isolation. Tougher proposals will receive greater consideration in the
expanded hawkish policy space opened up by North Korea’s failure to deliver in the
2018–2020 window.38 Robert E. Kelly and Arius M. Derr
Notes
1. Michael Mazarr and Michael Johnson, “Contain, Deter, Transform: A Winning Strategy on
North Korea,” RAND, August 9, 2017, https://www.rand.org/blog/2017/08/contain-deter-
transform-a-winning-strategy-on-north.html (accessed February 17, 2021).
2. Mackinac Center for Public Policy, Overton Window, https://www.mackinac.org/
OvertonWindow (accessed February 17, 2021).
3. Chung-min Lee and Kathryn Botto, “Korea Net Assessment 2020: Politicized Security and
Unchanging Strategic Realities,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, March 18,
2020, https://carnegieendowment.org/2020/03/18/korea-net-assessment-2020-politicized-
security-and-unchanging-strategic-realities-pub-81230 (accessed February 17, 2021).
4. Joseph Biden, “Why America Must Lead Again,” Foreign Affairs 99, no. 2 (March/April 2020),
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2020-01-23/why-america-must-lead-again
(accessed February 17, 2021).
5. Tessa Berenson, “Why Trump's Predecessors Did Not Meet with North Korea,” Time, March 8,
2018, https://time.com/5192579/trump-meets-kim-jong-un-north-korea/ (accessed February 17,
2021).
6. This was a plausible outcome had Trump won a second term. See Alex Ward, “America First,
But on Steroids: What Trump’s Second-Term Foreign Policy Might Look Like,” Vox, Aug 26,
2020, https://www.vox.com/2020/8/26/21368750/republican-convention-trump-foreign-policy-
second-term (accessed February 17, 2021).
7. Don Oberdorfer provides an excellent account of the wide differences between Roh and Bush in
“United States and South Korea: Can This Alliance Last?” NAPSNet Policy Forum, November
17, 2005, https://nautilus.org/napsnet/napsnet-policy-forum/the-united-states-and-south-korea-
can-this-alliance-last/ (accessed February 17, 2021).
8. Kim Jin-myung and Yan Seung-sik, “U.S. Army Report Details Threats from North
Korea,” Chosun Daily, August 19, 2020, http://english.chosun.com/site/data/html_
dir/2020/08/19/2020081901107.html (accessed February 17, 2021).
9. See John Bolton, Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir (New York, NY: Simon &
Schuster, 2020), ch. 4.
10. William Gallo, “Poll: South Koreans Oppose Trump’s Cost-Sharing Demands, But Support
Alliance,” Voice of America, November 6, 2019, https://www.voanews.com/east-asia-pacific/
poll-s-koreans-oppose-trumps-cost-sharing-demands-support-alliance (accessed February 17,
2021).
11. Robert Kelly, “Persistent Status Quo with North Korea: Why Has So Little Changed since
2017?” Korean Journal of Defense Analysis 31, no. 3 (2019): 399–418.
12. Clint Work, “South Korea’s Domestic Political Divide on North Korea,” Diplomat, February
16, 2018, https://thediplomat.com/2018/02/south-koreas-domestic-political-divide-on-north-
korea (accessed February 17, 2021); Chung-min Lee, “A Peninsula of Paradoxes: South Korean
Public Opinion on Unification and Outside Powers,” Carnegie Endowment for International
Peace, May 13, 2020, https://carnegieendowment.org/2020/05/13/peninsula-of-paradoxes-
south-korean-public-opinion-on-unification-and-outside-powers-pub-81737 (accessed February
17, 2021); and Nicholas Anderson, “The Secret to North Korea’s Nuclear Ambitions,”
Australian Institute of International Affairs, May 29, 2017, https://www.internationalaffairs.org.
au/australianoutlook/north-koreas-nuclear-ambitions/ (accessed February 17, 2021).
13. Victor Cha, Impossible State (New York, NY: Ecco Press, 2013).
14. Gaddis, “Hanging Tough Paid Off,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 45, no. 1 (January 1,
1989): 11–14.
15. B. R. Myers, The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters (New
York: Melville House, 2011), ch. 2; and Andrei Lankov, Real North Korea (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2014).
16. Jeffrey Bader, “Why Deterring and Containing North Korea Is Our Least Bad Option,”North Korea’s Missed Opportunity 39
Brookings, August 8, 2017, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2017/08/08/why-
deterring-and-containing-north-korea-is-our-least-bad-option (accessed February 17, 2021); and
Victor D. Cha and David C. Kang, Nuclear North Korea: A Debate on Engagement Strategies
(New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2005), 16.
17. Hal Brands, Peter Feaver, and William Inboden, “In Defense of the Blob,” Foreign Affairs,
April 29, 2020, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2020-04-29/defense-blob
(accessed February 17, 2021).
18. This is nicely illustrated in the chapters by David Kang in Cha and Kang, Nuclear North Korea
or in the advocacy work of Women Cross the DMZ, https://www.womencrossdmz.org/.
19. Lee Nam-hee, Making of Minjung: Democracy and the Politics of Representation in South
Korea (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007). Resistance to South Korea’s military
strongmen also spilled over into anti-Americanism, as dictators Park Chung-hee and Chun
Doo-hwan ruled with consent from Washington. See Tim Shorrock, “Struggle for Democracy
in South Korea in the 1980s and the Rise of Anti‐Americanism,” Third World Quarterly 8, no.
4 (October 1, 1986): 1195–218.
20. Bruce Cumings, North Korea: Another Country (New York, NY: The New Press, 2004); Selig
Harrison, Korean Endgame: A Strategy for Reunification and U.S. Disengagement (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003); and Cho Joo-hyung, “Comrade, Move Forward!
Comrade, Struggle! Conservatives, ‘It’s Shocking!’” Ilyo Seoul, July 31, 2020, http://www.
ilyoseoul.co.kr/news/articleView.html?idxno=411736 (accessed February 17, 2021). [in
Korean]
21. Cho Hun-jung, “A Pastor Weighs in on the Bible and Balloon Launches,” The NK News
Podcast, August 25, 2020, https://www.nknews.org/category/north-korea-news-podcast/
(accessed February 17, 2021).
22. Victor Cha and Marie DuMond, “What Hostile Policy?: North Korean Views of the United
States,” CSIS Beyond Parallel, June 8, 2018, https://beyondparallel.csis.org/hostile-policy-
north-korean-views-united-states/ (accessed February 17, 2021).
23. Hwang Eui-gak, Search for a Unified Korea: Political and Economic Implications (New York,
NY: Springer-Verlag, 2010), 1–12.
24. Anderson, “Secret to North Korea’s Nuclear Ambitions.”
25. Cumings, North Korea.
26. Lee Seung-ook, “Production of Territory in North Korea: Security First, Economy Next,”
Geopolitics 19, no. 1 (January 2, 2014): 206–26; and “Interview with Cho Hun-jung,” The NK
News Podcast, https://www.nknews.org/category/north-korea-news-podcast/latest/a-pastor-
weighs-in-on-bible-and-balloon-launches-nknews-podcast-ep-143/891589 (accessed February
17, 2021).
27. David Kang, “Kim Jong Un Is Not a Freakish Buffoon,” The New York Times, July 5, 2017,
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/05/opinion/kim-jong-un-north-korea-sanctions.html
(accessed February 17, 2021).
28. Victor Cha nicely illustrates this problem in his coverage of the Six Party Talks in The
Impossible State, ch. 7.
29. Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter suggests a direct meeting with the North Korean leader in
his retrospective commentary on the Camp David Accords. See “Camp David 25th Anniversary
Forum,” September 17, 2003, 49, https://www.cartercenter.org/resources/pdfs/peace/conflict_
resolution/camp_david_forum_03.pdf (accessed February 17, 2021).
30. Kim Bum-soo, “Moon Urges Washington to Officially End Korean War amid Nuclear
Stalemate,” KBS World Radio News, October 8, 2020, http://world.kbs.co.kr/service/news_
view.htm?lang=e&Seq_Code=156764 (accessed February 17, 2021).
31. Robert Kelly, “Why a Series of Small Nuclear Deals with North Korea Could Work,” The
National Interest, October 8, 2019, https://nationalinterest.org/blog/korea-watch/why-series-
small-nuclear-deals-north-korea-could-work-86491 (accessed February 17, 2021).
32. Leon Sigal provides a helpful review of North Korean cheating in “Lessons from the Unhappy
History of Verification in North Korea,” 38 North, https://www.38north.org/2018/07/40 Robert E. Kelly and Arius M. Derr
lsigal070918/ (accessed February 17, 2021).
33. John Delury, “Inter–Korean Talks Are More than Just a ‘Good Thing,’” Foreign Affairs,
January 7, 2018, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/north-korea/2018-01-07/inter-korean-
talks-are-more-just-good-thing (accessed February 17, 2021); and “South Korean Can Save the
Nuclear Talks,” Foreign Affairs, March 7, 2019, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/north-
korea/2019-03-07/south-korea-can-save-nuclear-talks (accessed February 17, 2021).
34. Daniel Wertz, “U.S., North Korea, and Nuclear Diplomacy,” National Committee on North
Korea, October 2020, https://www.ncnk.org/resources/briefing-papers/all-briefing-papers/
history-u.s.-dprk-relations (accessed February 17, 2021).
35. Thomas Dolan et al., “Generational Differences in Attitudes toward Korean Unification,” Korea
Economic Institute of America Academic Paper Series, May 8, 2014, http://keia.org/sites/
default/files/publications/kei_aps_dolan-christensen-gill_4-8_final_final_paper.pdf (accessed
February 17, 2021).
36. On status quo and revisionist powers in international relations theory, see Jonathan DiCicco and
Jack Levy, “Power Shifts and Problem Shifts: The Evolution of the Power Transition Research
Program,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 43, no. 6 (December 1, 1999): 675–704.
37. Cha nicely captures this in his chapters in Cha and Kang, Nuclear North Korea.
38. “I could’ve signed an agreement today, and then you people would’ve said, ‘Oh, what a terrible
deal. What a terrible thing he did.’” Remarks by President Trump in Press Conference, The
White House, February 28, 2019, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-
president-trump-press-conference-hanoi-vietnam/ (accessed February 17, 2021).
39. For example, in movies like Team America: World Police (2004) and The Interview (2014), as
well as websites such as https://kimjongunlookingatthings.tumblr.com. See also Barry Neild,
“Kim Jong Il’s Bizarre Life as a Pop Culture Icon,” CNN, December 20, 2011, https://edition.
cnn.com/2011/12/19/world/asia/north-korea-leader-culture/index.html (accessed February 17,
2021).
40. David Nakamura, “Obama Visits S. Korea DMZ Zone,” The Washington Post, March 24,
2012, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/obama-visits-s-korea-dmz-zone/2012/03/24/
gIQA5QNtYS_story.html (accessed February 17, 2021).
41. See, for example, the near-unanimous Congressional support for the North Korea Sanctions and
Policy Enhancement Act of 2016 or the continued support for The North Korea Human Rights
Act.
42. “Democratic Candidates Dump on Trump over North Korea Meeting,” Reuters, June 30, 2019,
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-northkorea-usa-democrats-idUSKCN1TV0PE (accessed
February 17, 2021).
43. Van Jackson, On the Brink: Trump, Kim, and the Threat of Nuclear War (New York, NY:
Cambridge University Press, 2018); and Bob Woodward, Fear: Trump in the White House
(New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 2019), 99.
44. “Trump Says He Deserves Nobel Peace Prize Not Abiy Ahmed,” BBC, January 10, 2020,
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-51063149 (accessed February 17, 2021); and Bolton,
Room Where It Happened, ch. 4.
45. The following draws on Kelly, “Persistent Status Quo,” especially 412–14.
46. “President Donald J. Trump Put America First during the Hanoi Summit,” White House,
March 4, 2019, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/president-donald-j-trump-
put-america-first-hanoi-summit/ (accessed February 17, 2021); and Adam Taylor, “Nukes and
Sanctions: What Actually Went Wrong for Trump and Kim Jong Un,” The Washington Post,
March 2, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2019/03/01/nukes-sanctions-what-
actually-went-wrong-trump-kim-jong-un/ (accessed February 17, 2021). The utility of the
Yongbyon site to the Kim regime and whether its “dismantlement” would significantly hinder
the North’s nuclear weapons program is an open question. For an overview, see Cho Han-bum,
“From Hanoi to Panmunjom: Assessment and Prospects for DPRK–U.S. Denuclearization
Negotiations,” Korea Institute for National Unification, July 1, 2019, http://repo.kinu.or.kr/
bitstream/2015.oak/10382/1/CO19-12%28e%29.pdf (accessed February 17, 2021).You can also read
