SEOUL, South Korea (AP) – Last year was a disaster for North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
He saw his country’s battered economy fall helplessly into further decline amid border pandemics as he pondered the collapse of television summits with former President Donald Trump failing to lift crippling sanctions of his country.
He must now start again with President Joe Biden, who previously called Kim a “thug” and accused Trump of pursuing shows instead of significantly reducing Kim’s nuclear arsenal.
While Kim promised to bolster his nuclear weapons program in recent political speeches, he also tried to give Biden an opening by saying the fate of his relations depends on whether Washington rules out what he calls hostile U.S. policies.
It is unclear how much patience Kim will have. North Korea has a history of testing new U.S. administrations with missile launches and other provocations aimed at forcing Americans back to the negotiating table.
At recent military parades in Pyongyang, Kim showed off new weapons she could try, including solid-fuel ballistic 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 U.S. and South Korea to rely more deeply on the possibility that Kim will never voluntarily hand over the weapons she considers her strongest guarantee of survival.
Kim’s arsenal emerged as a major threat to the United States and its Asian allies after tests in 2017 that included a detonation of an alleged thermonuclear warhead and ICBM flight tests that demonstrated the potential to reach deep into the American homeland.
A year later, Kim began diplomacy with South Korea and the United States, but derailed in 2019 when Americans rejected North Korea’s demands for relief from sanctions in exchange for a partial agreement. to partially relinquish its nuclear capabilities.
North Korea is unlikely to be Biden’s top priority, which despite facing growing domestic problems is also preparing to push back a 2015 nuclear deal with Iran that Trump exploited in favor of what he called maximum pressure against Iran. .
The “sequence of political attention of the Biden administration will likely be: Ordering the U.S. House, strengthening U.S. alliances, and aligning strategies toward China and Russia and then targeting 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 was vice president of Barack Obama, whose policy was to wait for North Korea as it gradually increased sanctions, it is possible that this method will not work because the North’s arms capabilities have grown significantly in recent years.
While sanctions, border closures and natural disasters that cause the harvest have created the toughest challenges of Kim’s nine-year rule, she won’t be in a hurry to offer concessions, Easley said. The Kim government has a high tolerance for domestic suffering and could expect widespread help from China, the only major ally.
North Korea’s first provocation under Biden’s administration could be related to ballistic systems launched by submarines, which Kim showed in recent parades.
Kim’s ambitions for long-range ICBM and reconnaissance satellites he expressed during the ruling party’s congress this month could lead to a space launch that would double as a test for long-range missile technology. This would be reminiscent of the 2009 launch that took place weeks after Obama’s first term.
“(The North) is capable of conducting tests that the U.S. and its allies cannot ignore,” Easley said. “Kim is likely to blow it up.”
The North Korean leader is trying to move diplomacy toward a arms reduction negotiation between nuclear states, rather than talks that would culminate in a total surrender of their weapons, according to Shin Beomchul, an analyst at the Korea Research Institute. of Seoul, based in Seoul. Strategy.
But North Korea will probably not test weapons until after Biden’s intervention on the state of the Union in February, where it could set the tone for its policy toward the north, Shin said. Kim may also want to see if the United States and South Korea continue with a major joint military exercise expected in March.
Although the Allies have described the annual exercises as defensive and have reduced much of their combined training activity under Trump to create room for diplomacy, North Korea has called for a complete halt to the exercises, describing them as invasion trials and tests of American hostility. .
“The North during the party congress has made it clear that it has no intention of moving first, but it is also interested in hearing what the United States has to say,” said Shin, who served as a South Korean diplomat for years. of Obama.
“Biden will not inherit Trump’s top-down diplomacy, but you could expect him to be more flexible about labor-level negotiations, offering to talk to North Koreans at any time and place and about anything,” he said.
Shin hopes Biden can end an agreement with North Korea that resembles the deal with Iran that Trump pulled out in 2018. It could provide North Korea with some level of compensation to freeze its nuclear and missile capabilities. at its current level.
While the United States is unlikely to give up its long-term commitment to North Korea’s denuclearization, reducing the country’s nuclear capabilities to zero is not a realistic short-term diplomatic goal, he said.
But an Iranian-style deal may not work with North Korea, which has much more advanced weapons and is unlikely to accept the oversight steps set out in the deal with Iran, Park Won said -gon, professor at the University of South Korea, Handong.
One thing is clear, however, Park said: If North Korea tests its weapons, Biden will mark sanctions that will continue to push Kim’s economy to the limit.