North Korea

With U.S. President Donald Trump’s announcement that CIA Director Mike Pompeo’s meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jung Un to prepare for a summit meeting went “very smoothly,” demands for a strategy for the direct talks become even more pressing. While the Iran nuclear deal contains technical constraints and verification provisions that provide important groundwork for a North Korea deal, there are five lessons from the deal’s shortcomings that should serve as the main pillars for developing President Trump’s strategy. 1. The leverage from sanctions is strongest now and difficult to rebuild. Go for a permanent deal. The Iran deal was the first major arms control deal of its kind, where tough, multilateral sanctions provided the leverage for the deal, and their removal was a central part of the agreement. At the heart of the concerns about the Iran deal is that it is not permanent. The sanctions were removed, but several of the most important provisions blocking the pathways to their nuclear weapons development expire within a decade or so. It took years to build a global consensus for Iranian sanctions. It would take a long time to rebuild that pressure after the constraints expire, longer than it would take for the Iranians to rebuild their program. The same would be true for North Korea. Among the approaches that are being publicly debated is that the administration should take a phased approach ― first seek to achieve a freeze and then pursue follow-on negotiations to achieve denuclearization. This would be a grave mistake. A phased approach will only kick the crisis down the road, as the consensus to maintain sanctions diminishes after a freeze. The U.S. has the economic leverage now and should remain steadfast on demanding a permanent deal that requires North Korea abandon its nuclear weapons program and return to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. The U.S. removed its nuclear weapons from South Korea in the 1990s. South Korea and North Korea’s other regional neighbors are permanently bound by the nonproliferation treaty. North Korea is the outlier in the region. 2. Include verifiable constraints on ballistic missiles. The last-minute rush to include ballistic missiles in the Iran talks led to an ambiguous solution. Ballistic missile constraints were not included in the deal itself, but rather were addressed in a weak provision in U.N. Security Council Resolution 2231 endorsing the deal, which only “called upon” Iran to not undertake any activity related to ballistic missiles designed to be capable of delivering nuclear weapons. In diplomatic parlance, that is not a clear prohibition and one the Iranians have not felt obligated to abide by. The result has been the erosion of trust in the overall deal. The threat of the North Korean ballistic missile program includes the significant threats the missiles present to our allies in the region and to our homeland. Ballistic missiles are also a central part of North Korea’s destabilizing black market proliferation, from which it derives important economic benefits. Given the rapid advancement of the North Korea ballistic missile program, these missiles need to be constrained quantitatively and qualitatively, and the proliferation of missiles and missile parts need to be halted by carefully considered, verifiable provisions. 3. Get congressional approval. As the past couple of years have underscored, domestic support is essential for the U.S. to be able to fulfill its obligations under the Iran deal. A nuclear deal with North Korea will need to have domestic support, and that can only be successfully achieved with congressional approval. The Iran deal was concluded as an executive agreement that did not require the approval of Congress. Although a compromise was eventually reached to consider a resolution of disapproval, the spadework was not done to build and ensure domestic support for the agreement. President Trump will basically have two options for congressional approval: Submit the deal as a treaty to the Senate for advice and consent, or follow President Richard Nixon’s model of submitting the interim agreement of the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks Tready (SALT I) as an executive agreement that requires an up-or-down majority vote in both houses of Congress. While the former is preferable on constitutional grounds, the latter is at least a better option than circumventing Congress and leaving the domestic support unattended and vulnerable to erosion. 4. Let China provide the carrots. The U.S. is better at sticks. As the struggle with waiving sanctions in the Iran deal demonstrates, the U.S. is better at putting sanctions on an authoritarian regime than it is at taking them off and providing economic benefits. This will be equally as difficult, if not more so, with the Kim regime, which has one of the worst human rights records globally and whose economy is built on black markets. While the U.S. will have certain responsibilities to enforce the terms of a deal if negotiated, the responsibility for the longer-term incentives should shift to China. It has a lot to offer: security guarantees, by strengthening its 1961 mutual assistance agreement; more investment in North Korean industry and infrastructure; membership in the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank; and integration into its “One Belt, One Road” initiative, among others. 5. Get the support of our allies. A significant achievement of the Iran deal is that it was negotiated by a coalition of partners ― the U.S., the U.K., France, Russia, Germany and China. Nonetheless, its main shortcoming is that it did not have the support of regional allies ― most importantly, Israel and Saudi Arabia. The lack of regional support, dramatically demonstrated by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to Congress against the deal, has contributed to the erosion of America’s commitment to the deal. A North Korea deal will ultimately fail without the support of our regional allies ― most importantly, South Korea and Japan. If our regional partners do not feel secure, there are many ways the agreement could be undermined, including, perhaps, most importantly, with the dangerous conclusion that their security is at risk under the agreement and that they need to develop their own nuclear weapons.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe will return to Florida tomorrow to meet with President Donald J. Trump. Much has changed since Abe’s first visit in February 2017, just a month into the new Trump administration. The Abe-Trump relationship has blossomed over the president’s first year in office, largely at the prompting of a growing showdown with North Korea. The sensitive task of how to manage Trump’s desire to renegotiate the terms of U.S.-Japan economic ties remains incomplete, however. Both leaders have been hobbled by political scandals at home and will want to avoid a summit that highlights their difficulties. Many in Japan believe that the personal relationship that has anchored the U.S.-Japan alliance throughout the tumultuous transition into the Trump administration has frayed, and Japan’s media will be paying careful attention to how Trump treats Abe and whether the relationship is resilient enough to negotiate some of the harder issues where the interests of Tokyo and Washington may not align.  To be successful, this summit needs to accomplish three things. First and foremost, Abe and Trump will need to talk about Kim Jong-un. Japan’s prime minister will want the United States and Japan to be on the same page on North Korea, and he will want assurances that President Trump will represent Japan’s interests when he meets with Kim. The surprise announcement that Trump will meet with the North Korean leader was a bit of a body blow to the Abe cabinet. Tokyo had worked throughout 2017 to ensure the U.S.-Japan alliance was militarily prepared to respond to a missile attack, at times synchronizing exercises with those of the U.S. and South Korean militaries. Pyongyang’s relentless stream of missile launches in 2017 were all aimed in Japan’s direction, and they revealed Tokyo’s vulnerability to a missile attack. Deterrence and defense were bolstered as the alliance sought to respond. Now that Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump have agreed to meet, however, Tokyo must also consider its stake in any potential negotiations over the future of the Korean Peninsula. This is a more difficult task for Japan’s prime minister. While the United States focuses on denuclearization, Japan must also consider the missile threat emanating from North Korea. Today, Kim’s missile arsenal may be the greatest immediate threat to Japan and one that Tokyo is unprepared for should conflict break out. Ballistic missile defenses will need improving, and even then, it would be hard to claim that Japan is fully protected from North Korea’s missiles. As important to the Japanese public will be President Trump’s willingness to work on behalf of those Japanese abducted by the Kim regime. Abe has been one of the most outspoken advocates on the issue of Japanese abductees, critical of the inability of past governments to get Pyongyang to account for the missing. Already, President Trump met with the families of the abducted during his November visit to Japan. Earlier this month, after the Trump-Kim meeting was announced, U.S. Ambassador to Japan William Hagerty met with the families to promise that President Trump will raise the issue of the missing Japanese in his discussions with Kim Jong-un. Second, we should expect a statement on how Tokyo and Washington see the future of the economic relationship. This is perhaps the most difficult topic of the meeting. Washington and Tokyo have yet to find a way forward on their trade relationship, as President Trump and his advisors continue to focus in on the bilateral trade deficit. While in Tokyo last fall, Trump seemed to chastise Abe for his economic accomplishments and noted that Japan would be buying more American weapons to help fix the deficit and provide more jobs for American workers. In February, Vice President Mike Pence visited Tokyo on his way to the Pyeongchang Olympic Games, but he did not hold consultations with Deputy Prime Minister Taro Aso, his counterpart in the U.S.-Japan Economic Dialogue. Rumor has it that the Trump administration was growing increasingly frustrated with meetings that had no outcomes. In March, Japan was conspicuously not given an exemption from the United States’ Section 232 sanctions on steel and aluminum, unlike other close partners, such as Canada, Mexico, and South Korea. This struck another blow to the idea of a special Trump-Abe relationship.  Coming into the summit, therefore, Abe will need to find a way to address these economic irritations, yet there is little evidence that Tokyo is interested in a bilateral free trade agreement. Instead, Abe is likely to offer a framework for the United States and Japan that looks a lot like what was negotiated in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Only this year, the TPP has evolved, largely because of Abe’s leadership, to become a Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP)—otherwise known as the TPP-11—agreed upon without the United States. Intriguing in the run up to this week’s summit was the president’s instruction to Lighthizer and the new director of the National Economic Council, Larry Kudlow, to review the U.S. interests in the TPP, although Trump continued to tweet about the need for an agreement on trade with Japan. Finally, both Abe and Trump need a political boost. The Abe cabinet’s approval rating percentages have dipped precariously into the thirties after new discoveries about the government’s handling of two suspicious cases of favorable treatment involving the prime minister and his wife. One scandal has it that a rightist kindergarten was given a discounted rate in a government land deal. The school claims political backing from Abe’s wife, who has denied knowledge of the details of the land sale. In the other, a friend of the prime minister’s was supposedly given preferential treatment to open a veterinary school in Ehime Prefecture. Neither of these cases has produced evidence of direct involvement by Abe, but both have exposed corrupt practices by bureaucrats trying to court favor with the prime minister’s staff. The Ministry of Finance doctored documents once the scandal broke in the land sale to the kindergarten, and the Ministry of Education, Science, and Technology was responsible for the alleged favoritism displayed in the veterinary school case. The prime minister has repeatedly stated that he will take full responsibility should it be proven that his office was involved. President Trump, on the other hand, has his own ongoing political tempest, and his own approval ratings at about 40 percent are only marginally better than Abe’s. Coinciding with the release of former FBI Director James Comey’s new book and the President’s Twitter response to it, the summit will likely be overshadowed by Trump’s distractions at home. There are also other foreign policy priorities for Washington. The air strike in Syria has set off a round of questioning of the Trump administration’s strategy in Syria, particularly its increasingly confrontational approach to Russia. Simmering in the background, of course, is the administration’s rising threat of a trade war with China. Abe will want to talk about these foreign policy challenges and will have thoughts of his own on how Japan sees both the Syrian civil war and the possibility of a trade war with Beijing. Worsening U.S. relations with Moscow also limit Abe’s ability to negotiate a peace treaty with Russian leader Vladimir Putin—a project that has stalled as Russia’s relations with Europe and the United States have worsened. Once again, the golf course beckons. Abe will want a success story at Mar-A-Lago to bolster his approval rating back home and to ensure that the alliance with the United States is still Japan’s best bet for security. He will urge caution with Kim Jong-un and a broad-minded approach to regional trade. President Trump too might like a bit of positive news. He will need to listen carefully to Abe’s worries about the summit with Kim, and he will need to find a good approach to claiming victory on trade with Japan. Both will want to spend time away from cameras, trying to resolve their differences and putting a strong statesman-like face on as they struggle through this increasingly fraught era.  

Patrick McEachern is a Council on Foreign Relations international affairs fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. government or Department of State. When North Korean leader Kim Jong-un reportedly offered a summit meeting with President Donald Trump, American and South Korean officials understandably and predictably credited the “maximum pressure” strategy. They reasoned that sanctions and pressure tactics brought Kim to the table, secured Pyongyang’s unilateral concession on refraining from nuclear and ballistic missile flight tests, and would allow the two leaders to discuss denuclearization. Notwithstanding skepticism about North Korea’s intentions, non-governmental analyses largely agree that Kim is coming to the table because sanctions are “beginning to bite.” However, observed data dispute the notion that North Korea’s economy has suffered recent setbacks. North Korea’s economy has grown following the regime’s domestic marketization and monetization efforts, and food prices and the exchange rate have remained stable. There have been sporadic reports of fuel shortages, but satellite data does not show any lines at the gas pumps. North Korea’s economy chronically underperforms, but it is not facing a current crisis. To be sure, both UN and U.S. sanctions have become more ambitious, and China has signaled a greater willingness to clamp down by signing onto the UN sanctions. China accounts for roughly ninety percent of North Korean licit trade with illicit and weapons-related trade providing additional sources of foreign currency. Though the Chinese and transnational criminal networks fail to report reliable trade data with North Korea, a confluence of anecdotal information supports the idea that North Korea’s foreign earnings have dropped significantly. How can the North Korean economy be doing just fine and sanctions have a biting effect simultaneously? One theory holds that North Korea is financing its trade deficit with reserves, which delays the economic hurt until the savings run out. Kim could worry about the unknown economic consequences of continuing down this path. Beyond economics, the Trump administration has raised the rhetorical pressure with more explicit public discussion of possible military options to come, providing Kim another potential worry about the future. While there are not observed consequences inside North Korea from the pressure campaign today, Kim may expect trouble ahead. The observed-expected distinction is important to understanding Kim’s motivations and psychology ahead of his summit with Trump. Is Kim desperate to make a deal with the Americans to relieve pressure, or is he looking proactively to advance gains? Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, in research that would lead to a Nobel Prize, showed how people psychologically underweight in decision-making probable future consequences over the certainty of observed conditions today. When in the “domain of losses” of facing current problems, leaders are more likely to take desperate risks to reverse their fortunes. When in the forward-looking “domain of gains,” they are more likely to avoid risks to safeguard what they already have. In approaching the U.S.-North Korea summit, Kim Jong-un appears to be in the “domain of gains.” He may be trying to preemptively head off the expected—but probabilistic—consequences of the pressure campaign and test the waters of advancing his regime’s long-sought goals with the Americans. He is not defensively reacting to the certainty of a present problem he can see within his country today. That means he is more likely to be risk-averse in the negotiations and less eager to make just any deal with Trump to get some immediate pressure relief. Kim’s risk-accepting behavior is usually considered dangerous as it implies his greater willingness to use force, but Kim will have to take some risk in curtailing his nuclear program to make progress in diplomatic negotiations. The North Koreans are not close to surrender, but the United States should not negotiate with itself and water down its opening bid before sitting down with the North Koreans either. North Korea’s past negotiating behavior suggests they will initially outline their full wish list, and there is no reason the American should not go on record with the same. Opening bids are different from anticipated outcomes, and a realistic assessment of the other side’s material and psychological motivations can help set expectations to reduce the likelihood that the leaders speak past each other at the summit. It is tempting to look for a win-lose outcome where we get everything we want from the North Koreans and give nothing in return. However, Kim is not desperate, so we should not expect him to give away the farm for free. Looking for a long-term and sustainable win-win outcome that entails difficult and distasteful trade-offs on both sides should be the summit’s goal.

Kim Jong-un’s invitation to Donald Trump to meet, delivered through South Korean intermediaries, is both stunning and predictable. After all, Trump has telegraphed his desire for a meeting with Kim ever since he suggested a hamburger summit with Kim as a candidate for president in 2016. Now that Trump has his invitation, the question is whether he can exploit it to bring a runaway North Korean nuclear and missile threat under control without being advanced by an accompanying intensive negotiation process that would inevitably rely on specialized expertise within the U.S. government to craft the level of agreement and verification measures necessary to pin Kim down. At a minimum, a prospective summit should provide momentum to secure the release of three Americans currently detained in Pyongyang. Historically, the American president has been the “closer” of such deals, but an early meeting between Trump and Kim would sacrifice that role in favor of a reshaping of the relationship with the North Korean leader by setting the tone surrounding the U.S.-North Korea relationship without an accompanying (decades-long) process and verification of North Korea’s implementation of denuclearization. Past denuclearization efforts have foundered on a combination of failures to secure verification and North Korean subterfuge, but have never gone so far in giving the Kim family the prestige or treating North Korea with the strategic weight that it has sought for decades. Trump’s strongest argument for such an approach: everything else has failed, and a U.S.-North Korea summit has never been tried. Oddly, Trump’s own threats to annihilate North Korea, while challenging North Korean assumptions about how the United States would respond to its nuclear advances, has generated political space for Trump: even a bad deal with Kim may be perceived as a better outcome than a catastrophic conflict with North Korea. But why would Kim reach out now and offer a meeting with Trump? Speculation on the range of possible motives for Kim will range from desperation to uncanny strategic intuition. But the most interesting aspect of Kim’s outreach and its timing is that it combines a high personal propensity to take risk with a strong desire to actively manage uncertainties generated by the growing risks to North Korea’s regime survival. Alongside the Kim family’s desire to assert independence and centrality as narratives that undergird and reinforce its control over the regime is a deep desire for external affirmation that can only come from improving North Korea’s relationship with the United States. That is why North Korea has consistently asserted that it would only abandon its nuclear program if the United States were to drop its “hostile policy”—normalization and acceptance of the regime by the United States as an alternative regime survival guarantee to that provided by nuclear weapons. In essence, the Kim family has always wanted Washington to impute to Pyongyang the same strategic weight that Richard Nixon gave to Beijing when he used the China card to balance the Soviet Union. At the same time, Kim’s move smacks of both desperation and an astute recognition that international economic pressure, political isolation, and the threat of military conflict could eventually checkmate the regime. Instead of furthering regime survival, North Korea’s pursuit of the capability to strike the United States with nuclear weapons raised the risks of accidental conflict and preventive war. For Kim, the prospect of an early summit with Trump provides the best prospect of removing international sanctions pressure while giving Kim room for maneuver to possibly keep his nuclear deterrent in place. Moreover, a prospective nuclear deal with Trump provides Kim with an opportunity to secure external symbols of regime legitimacy without having to address North Korea’s atrocious human rights record. (After all, only Trump can offer a Trump-branded hotel in Pyongyang, payable in fissile material.) Given the stakes, risks, and blowback that inevitably will accompany a Trump-Kim hamburger summit, a safer course, if indeed a summit is inevitable, would be to retain South Korean involvement by securing an invitation for Trump to join the inter-Korean summit already announced for the end of April at Panmunjom. South Korea shares with the United States an existential interest in denuclearization, but only the United States has the standing in North Korean eyes as a counterpart in that discussion. But South Korean involvement would help address American staffing deficiencies while keeping denuclearization front and center, all the while blunting North Korean efforts to drive a wedge in the U.S.-South Korea alliance. Scott Snyder is senior fellow for Korea studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of South Korea at the Crossroads: Autonomy and Alliance in an Era of Rival Powers.

Patrick McEachern is an international affairs fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and public policy fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. government or Department of State. North Korea's nuclear and missile provocations to date have resulted from its developmental mission to produce a nuclear deterrent. While lethal conventional provocations remain a tragic component of North Korea's approach to the South, Pyongyang has focused its security response to Washington over the last quarter century on its nuclear program. North Korea could catch the world's attention and provoke through (re-)starting fissile material production facilities, missile flight tests, or nuclear tests. As Pyongyang declares victory in its nuclear development and shifts to an operational focus for its nuclear arsenal, the nature of North Korean provocations will change–and get more dangerous. In line with North Korea's stated nuclear doctrine and precedent from previous new nuclear powers, Pyongyang is more likely to brandish its nuclear assets to intimidate and coerce. In November 2017, after a North Korean inter-continental ballistic missile (ICBM) flight test, Kim Jong-un claimed his country had completed the development of its nuclear force. He repeated the sentiment in his 2018 New Year's address, adding that the regime had successfully achieved a nuclear deterrent to check American invasion. Kim’s claims are pre-mature, but North Korea's technical barriers to a reliable nuclear arsenal that can threaten the U.S. mainland are winnowing. Whether it takes Kim Jong-un “a handful of months,” as the CIA Director predicted, or a handful of years to gain genuine confidence in his ability to deter the United States, it is worth considering now the implications. North Korea's nuclear doctrine articulates two purposes for its arsenal: deterrence and coercion. The deterrent goal appears to be the bulk of the strategy. Pyongyang repeatedly cited the U.S. invasion of Iraq and intervention in Libya as justification for its nuclear development. The United States will intervene militarily in a smaller state unless it invests in equalizing nuclear weapons to deter, they argued. However, Kim Jong-un has also directed the development of his nation's nuclear program to coerce. In 2013, Kim's first major speech on nuclear issues stressed the importance of nuclear development for national defense and economic development. This “byungjin,” or dual-track, approach remains, but Kim has expressed broader purposes more recently for his regime's nuclear weapons as the program has developed. At the 2016 Korean Workers Party Congress, he reaffirmed the byungjin line, stressed deterrence, and claimed a diversified nuclear force should be a useable element of national power. Nuclear weapons, he said, provide North Korea more influence in foreign affairs on the Korean Peninsula and throughout the region. In a series of field guidance visits, Kim ordered a nuclear arsenal that can deter and coerce. North Korea cannot strike targets with its nuclear weapons without risking regime-ending retaliation, so it begs the question how Kim may hope to use nuclear weapons to coerce. Early in the Cold War, Nobel laureate Thomas Schelling identified how states sought to leverage nuclear weapon not only as a last ditch protection against invasion but to shape proactively an adversary's actions. The record of success in rattling the nuclear saber is mixed, but most nuclear states have tried: In 1958-59, the Soviets moved nuclear weapons into East Germany during the Berlin Crisis to urge U.S. withdrawal from the city. In 1962, the United States alerted its nuclear forces and both Kennedy and Khrushchev struggled to maintain effective nuclear launch authority amid the Cuban missile crisis. In 1973, Israel made initial moves to arm its nuclear-capable Jericho missiles to unlock reluctant American military support during the Yom Kippur War. In 1999, Pakistan moved out of storage its nuclear-capable missiles during the Kargil crisis. In 2002, India tested its nuclear-capable Agni missile amid Operation Parakram that mobilized 800,000 Indian troops and saw tough nuclear rhetoric following Pakistani-backed militants’ attack on the Indian parliament. Beyond the historical record of other states rattling the nuclear saber, Kim fits the mold of a leader more likely to use brinkmanship and risk-accepting behavior. He lacks conventional military superiority over the U.S.-ROK alliance that would render nuclear threats redundant, and he does not have the same reputational risks associated with nuclear bluster given past nuclear statements. A credible North Korean nuclear deterrent injects a new dynamic into North Korean brinkmanship. North Korea's conventional forces have long raised their alert status during U.S.-ROK military exercises, noting that the U.S. military build-up could be a precursor to invasion. How would the U.S.-ROK alliance respond if North Korea noted in advance that it would alert its nuclear forces to defend against the possibility of military exercises turning into an invasion? In the Cuban missile crisis, the nuclear alert jeopardized civilian control over nuclear launch decisions. How would the alliance respond if Kim claimed he would pre-delegate launch decisions to field commanders if military exercises practiced “decapitation strikes” against North Korean leadership targets? Neither a nuclear alert nor pre-delegating launch authority involves using nuclear weapons, but it rattles the saber and increases the risk of accidents and unauthorized nuclear use. If North Korea's ballistic missile-carrying submarine, currently under construction, later appears off South Korea's coast ahead of an election or international sporting event, how will South Korea and the United States respond? It has been routine to return to the UN Security Council following North Korean missile launches and nuclear tests, but thinking through how to deter and respond to new types of North Korean provocations based on an operational nuclear capability is necessary to get ahead of the threat curve and avoid policymaking amid crisis. Strategic provocations require more than military planners' attention, and whole-of-government and bilateral and trilateral (including Japan) responses are necessary to ensure a thoughtful and coordinated approach. The first step is recognizing that the future of North Korean provocations is likely to be different than its current playbook.

South Korea must capitalize on its diplomatic push to bridge the divide between its longtime ally and its combative neighbor.

For much of its recent history, Korea has been caught in conflicts between powerful neighbors—an experience that provides sobering lessons for South Korean leaders grappling with their country’s vulnerabilities today. Since its independence following World War II, South Korea has recovered from war, overcome poverty, democratized, and developed into the 11th-largest economy in the world. Yet sitting astride Northeast Asia’s major geopolitical fault lines, it remains existentially vulnerable: the North Korean nuclear threat continues to grow, and the war of words between U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un continues to escalate. There is no ready historical template to help South Korean leaders sidestep tragedy should words turn into military action. It is no wonder, then, that South Korean President Moon Jae-in so eagerly grasped Kim’s New Year’s olive branch and invited North Korean athletes to participate in the Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang as an insurance policy against disruption during the games—and with the hope that the Olympic goodwill generated would avert a return to confrontation. But with the Olympic flame extinguished at the end of the February 25 closing ceremony and the Paralympics to follow, the question is whether Moon can extend the spirit of inter-Korean reconciliation beyond a limited-time-only easing of tensions on the Korean Peninsula. Making his gambit succeed, and forestalling a return to dangerous escalation, will require more than just diplomacy between the two Koreas. Moon must find a way to bridge the divide between Washington and Pyongyang. MISSED CONNECTION For Moon, brokering the Olympic truce proved surprisingly easy with a big assist from Kim. He failed, however, to connect his North Korean and American guests. The perceived overeagerness of his administration to roll out the red carpet for the North Koreans generated pushback domestically and internationally. Moon’s domestic critics charged that he had turned the Pyeongchang Olympics into the Pyongyang Olympics by allowing not only North Korean athletes and officials but also an orchestra, a cheering squad, and a tae kwon do demonstration team to come for the games. Those feelings were reinforced by the novelty of hosting Kim’s sister both at the opening ceremonies and at the Blue House, South Korea’s presidential headquarters. The symbolism of the fielding of a unified women’s hockey team also proved controversial among South Koreans: they could accept athletes marching together under a unified flag but were reluctant to sacrifice South Korean competitiveness on the altar of political symbolism. Read more on ForeignAffairs.com.

The U.S. military is prepared for a number of contingencies with regard to North Korea, but the best path forward is diplomacy aimed at denuclearization.

South Korea branded the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics as the “Peace Olympics” as part of its campaign to win rights to host the games. Just months ago, the phrase seemed empty as Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un engaged in a war of words, and the United States and North Korea appeared set to careen toward military confrontation. But Kim Jong-un has launched a momentary charm offensive with his New Year’s offer to join the Olympics and lower tensions on the peninsula for the duration of the games. The immediate challenge for South Korea's Moon administration is how to be a good host to the world, navigate fierce domestic political divisions over how to deal with North Korea, and identify an exit ramp for the U.S.-North Korean nuclear confrontation. Read more on The Hill.

While sports may temporarily transcend divisions in society, events like the Olympics rarely serve to advance countries’ diplomatic aims.

President Trump’s State of the Union speech signaled the White House’s dangerous and growing fixation on using maximum pressure alone to denuclearize North Korea. But the soundest way to resolve the nuclear crisis lies in the simultaneous application of both maximum pressure and diplomatic engagement.

South Korea hopes to solidify its image as modern and efficient as host of the winter games, but its success relies heavily on cooperation from the North.