SEOUL, South Korea (AP) – Last year was a disaster for North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
He helplessly watched his country’s already shaky economy decay further amid the closing of a border pandemic, while meditating on the collapse of the summits made for TV with former President Donald Trump, who failed to lift the paralyzing sanctions of your country.
Now he must start all over again with President Joe Biden, who previously called Kim a “thug” and accused Trump of chasing glasses instead of significant reductions in Kim’s nuclear arsenal.
Although Kim has promised to strengthen his nuclear weapons program in recent political speeches, he has also tried to give Biden an opening, saying the fate of his relations depends on Washington discarding what he calls hostile US policies.
It is unclear how patient Kim will be. North Korea has a history of testing new United States governments with missile launches and other provocations designed to force Americans to return to the negotiating table.
At recent military stops in Pyongyang, Kim introduced new weapons he can test, including ballistic solid fuel systems designed to be fired from vehicles and submarines, and the largest intercontinental ballistic missile in the North.
A resurgence of tensions would force the United States and South Korea to consider more deeply the possibility that Kim will never voluntarily negotiate the weapons he considers his greatest guarantee of survival.
Kim’s arsenal emerged as a major threat to the United States and its Asian allies after tests in 2017, which included detonating an alleged thermonuclear warhead and flying ICBMs that demonstrated the potential to reach the depths of the American homeland.
A year later, Kim started diplomacy with South Korea and the U.S., but it derailed in 2019 when the Americans rejected North Korea’s demands for a major easing of sanctions in exchange for a fragmented deal that partially yielded its nuclear capabilities. .
North Korea is unlikely to be a top priority for Biden, who while facing growing domestic issues is also preparing for an impetus to return to a 2015 nuclear deal with Iran that Trump exploded in favor of what he called maximum pressure against the Will .
The “sequence of political attention from the Biden government is likely to be: putting America’s own house in order, strengthening US alliances and aligning strategies on China and Russia, and then approaching Iran and North Korea” said Leif-Eric Easley, a professor at Ewha University in Seoul.
But North Korea never likes to be ignored.
Although Biden served as vice president of Barack Obama, whose policy was to wait for North Korea while gradually increasing sanctions, that method may not work because the North’s weapons capacity has grown significantly in the years that followed.
While sanctions, border closures and devastating plantation natural disasters have created the most difficult challenges for Kim’s nine-year government, he will be in no hurry to offer concessions, said Easley. Kim’s government has a high tolerance for domestic suffering and can count on extensive help from China, its only major ally.
North Korea’s first provocation under the Biden government may be related to ballistic systems launched by submarines, which Kim exhibited at recent parades.
Kim’s ambitions for long-range ICBMs and reconnaissance satellites that he expressed during the ruling party’s congress this month could lead to a space launch that would function as a test of long-range missile technology. This would be reminiscent of a 2009 launch that took place weeks after Obama’s first term.
″ (The North) is capable of conducting tests that the US and its allies cannot ignore, ”said Easley. “It is likely that Kim will explore this.”
The North Korean leader is trying to move diplomacy toward a nuclear reduction negotiation between nuclear states, rather than talks that would culminate in the total surrender of their weapons, according to Shin Beomchul, an analyst at the National Research Institute of Korea , based in Seoul. Strategy.
But North Korea is unlikely to test weapons before Biden’s State of the Union speech in February, where he could set the tone for his policy towards the North, Shin said. Kim may also want to see if the United States and South Korea continue with a major joint military exercise scheduled for March.
Although the allies described their annual exercises as defensive in nature and reduced much of their combined training activity under Trump to make room for diplomacy, North Korea called for a complete halt to the exercises, describing them as invasion trials and proof of US hostility.
“The North, during the party’s congress, made it clear that it has no intention of giving in first, but is also interested in hearing what the United States has to say,” said Shin, who served as a South Korean diplomat during the Obama years. .
“Biden will not inherit Trump’s top-down diplomacy, but you can expect him to be more flexible about job-level negotiations, offering to speak to North Koreans anytime, anywhere and about anything” , he said.
Shin hopes that Biden will eventually seek an agreement with North Korea that resembles the agreement with Iran that Trump withdrew in 2018. This could provide North Korea with some level of compensation for freezing its nuclear and missile capabilities at its level. current.
While the United States is unlikely to give up on its long-term commitment to denuclearizing North Korea, reducing the nation’s nuclear capabilities to zero is not a realistic short-term diplomatic goal, he said.
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 included in the deal with Iran, said Park Won-gon, a professor at Handong University in Korea. southern.
One thing is certain, however, Park said: if North Korea tests its weapons, Biden will increase sanctions that will continue to push Kim’s economy to the limit.