South Korea

With fresh agreement on sharing costs for the nearly thirty thousand U.S. troops in South Korea, the Biden administration can now focus on bolstering the alliance and addressing challenges posed by China and North Korea.

The Biden administration is in the midst of a North Korea policy review that will shape prospects for diplomacy and the relative priority of North Korea on Biden’s to-do list. Perhaps the earliest and most significant issue the Biden administration faces as part of that review is whether to use the Singapore Declaration as a foundation for future diplomacy toward North Korea or as another lesson learned on a three-decade long road strewn with North Korea policy failures. The one-page Singapore Declaration signed by former U.S. President Donald J. Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un is admittedly a thin reed upon which to build. It identifies four aspirational objectives: 1) a new U.S.-North Korean relationship, 2) peace on the Korean Peninsula, 3) work toward “complete denuclearization,” and 4) a return of the remains of American MIAs from the Korean War from North Korea. At the time of the declaration’s signing, North Korea specialist Andrei Lankov assessed that “we expected it to be a flop, but it’s floppier than anything we expected. The declaration is pretty much meaningless.” But the inevitable temptation among the Biden team to toss a document signed by Trump may be tempered by the other signature on the document: that of Kim Jong-un.   Some might argue that Kim Jong-un himself was never sincere about the declaration, while others will blame the failure to implement the declaration on miscommunications at the February 2019 Trump-Kim summit in Hanoi. Trump administration Special Representative for North Korea Stephen Biegun spent over two years declaring that the door was open to working-level negotiations to flesh out a denuclearization-for-peace and normalization pathway for the U.S.-North Korea relationship. Despite his efforts, Biegun earned only a week of face time with North Korean diplomats in Pyongyang in preparation for the Hanoi summit and a day in Stockholm in October following the summit’s failure. Moreover, North Korea’s own internal assessment of the U.S.-North Korea relationship provided at the Eighth Korean Worker’s Party Congress last month further reveals North Korea’s true intent. At the meeting, Kim credited the adoption of the Singapore Declaration “that assured the establishment of new DPRK-US relations,” but failed to mention commitments to establishing peace or denuclearization. Moreover, the Congress assessment reveals that summitry proved politically useful to Kim as a venue for North Korea to defend “its independent interests and peace and justice against the superpower.” Kim asserted that his meeting with Trump raised North Korea’s strategic position and prestige, but it did not serve as a pathway for real improvement of relations with the United States, still characterized during the Congress as North Korea’s “principal enemy.” Although Kim Jong-un appears to have walked away from the Singapore Declaration, the Biden administration should leave the door open for North Korea to take part in substantive working-level negotiations. Simply maintaining a posture of openness to and readiness for a denuclearization dialogue contradicts propaganda efforts designed to lay the blame for North Korea’s failures on a perceived U.S. “hostile policy.” The declaration also remains an accomplishment for Kim that provides an already existing framework for moving forward if North Korea chooses to do so. Most important, a reaffirmation of the validity of the Singapore Declaration provides an opportunity to challenge Kim to reaffirm the declaration himself and to preserve the self-restraint shown on mid- and long-range missile testing that made both the declaration and the three summits with a U.S. president possible. Just as North Korean self-restraint is an essential condition for the Biden administration to keep the declaration in place, a North Korean return to missile testing would catalyze a U.S. campaign to rebuild international support for implementation of an expanded UN sanctions regime that has eroded since Kim turned to summitry in 2018.  Finally, an affirmation of the Singapore Declaration provides a foundation for alliance cohesion with Japan and South Korea by acknowledging South Korea’s desire to keep open a pathway for improvement of U.S.-North Korea relations while perpetuating a framework that might help keep in place North Korean self-restraint on missile testing that most immediately endangers Japan.  Building on the Singapore Declaration uses Kim’s own commitments, limited as they are, to provide a foundation on which to build allied support for a peace-and-denuclearization pathway that can ease North Korea’s isolation and enhance its security and prosperity. Keeping the spotlight on Kim will help clarify Kim’s motives, highlighting the costs and sparse returns on his investments-to-date in nuclear and military development.

This article is co-authored with Chaesung Chun, Patrick Cronin and Sang-hyun Lee. The U.S.-South Korea alliance has survived for almost seven decades, and has sustained peace on the Korean peninsula since the Korean War. To thrive going forward, however, the alliance must not only hold open the door to the establishment of peace and denuclearization with North Korea, but expand even further. The U.S.-South Korea alliance should refashion itself to meet urgent global challenges and enhance regional and global prosperity. Although the list of global challenges has rarely been more daunting than it is now—from the pandemic to North Korea’s nuclear program to China’s growing assertiveness—common pursuit of a partnership built on shared values has never been more essential to overcoming nationalist-driven impulses, domestic divisions and defend against economic and political coercion. The U.S.-South Korea alliance should work bilaterally and in concert multilaterally with like-minded partners for peaceful solutions to disputes based on agreed-upon rules and to expand space for cooperation and peace-building in Korea, Asia and beyond. Toward that aim, the U.S. and South Korea should quickly resolve issues like burden-sharing costs, the transition of operational control and impediments to the maintenance of military readiness. To do so, both “America first” and “Korea first” impulses will have to be set aside in favor of continued force integration and the establishment of institutions strong enough to protect alliance cooperation from the threat of rising nationalist challenges. Resolution of these issues will enable Presidents Joe Biden and Moon Jae-in to more effectively coordinate policies toward North Korea and expand the focus of the alliance to larger contextual issues, such as how to better handle Chinese economic and political coercion while leveraging new technological forms of cooperation to address challenges to a peaceful and prosperous democratic global order. Early consultations between Biden and Moon to fashion a joint strategy toward North Korea are critical, and will be closely watched. North Korea and others will be looking for early signs of a combined approach that enhances stability on the Korean peninsula, affirms a commitment to the peaceful coexistence of the two Koreas, establishes a pathway and benchmarks for economic cooperation, and strives to overcome mistrust and removes the nuclear issue as an obstacle to improved political relations. The two allies should expand the breadth of their alliance to hold in-depth consultations that also include blunting the effectiveness of Chinese policies that resort to economic and political coercion rather than accepting the peaceful rules-based settlement of disputes. The establishment of a whole-of-alliance approach to policy toward China will require in-depth dialogue to understand and close gaps between Washington and Seoul on how to effectively respond to China’s growing assertiveness. The U.S.-South Korea alliance approach must be developed alongside multilaterally coordinated efforts both with regional and global U.S. alliance partners to clearly establish the conditions necessary to push back on “might makes right” efforts to establish a Sinocentric order. Large-state bullying needs to be dissuaded in favor of a global system that encourages disputes to be resolved through peaceful diplomatic negotiations. There are even more significant opportunities to expand the alliance functionally, both to develop new frontiers for alliance cooperation and to enhance joint responses to common threats that endanger humankind. As leaders in development and practical application of technologies, the U.S.-South Korea alliance has the potential to address emerging global challenges in the areas of health, climate change, AI, energy security, supply chains and space cooperation. The U.S.-South Korea alliance stands as an antidote that can be readily used to manage not only the ongoing challenge posed by North Korea, but also to address the shared threats of heightened nationalism, major power rivalry and global health challenges facing the two nations. The authors have completed a year-long study for the East Asia Institute analyzing the U.S.-ROK alliance and recommending a course for the future, the full text of which is available here.

President-Elect Biden and his team come at a critical time for Japan-South Korea relations.

Worsening Japan-South Korea relations have unprecedented ramifications for the economic and security fields.

A return to provocations as North Korea’s primary mechanism for drawing international attention would signal weakness, not the intended message of strength.

Biden's return to a conventional alliance management approach could shed light on cracks in the U.S.-South Korea alliance previously obfuscated by Trump's unconventional approach.

Without Paik’s herculean effort, South Korea as we know it today—a vibrant, capitalist, and liberal democracy—wouldn’t exist.

The Korean War had hybrid origins as a civil war, a regional conflict, and a flashpoint in the global bipolar competition. The peninsular, regional, and global dimensions of the confrontation pointed to and reinforced the impulse toward division and military conflict by the summer of 1950. The replacement of the Korean armistice with a stable and permanent peace regime will require that these peninsular, regional, and global factors align so that they form the conditions necessary to achieve peace. At present, it appears unlikely that all three dimensions which contributed to the division of the Korean Peninsula will come into an alignment favorable to peace by 2025. On the peninsula, the first president of South Korea, Syngman Rhee, and the founder of North Korea, Kim Il-sung, shared conflicting but equally burning passions for Korean unity. The clash of these passions, which were channeled into and magnified by competing ideologies, sparked a fierce competition for legitimacy between rival states that has sustained Korea's political division to this day. The embers of inter-Korean rivalry continue to burn bright and are fed by North Korea's recent demolition of inter-Korean relations. Hopes for inter-Korean reconciliation and cooperation generated two years ago by the commencement of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un's overtures at summit diplomacy have evaporated and will take time to rebuild. At the regional level, miscalculation driven by the perceived geopolitical and geostrategic value of the Korean Peninsula brought Chinese and American soldiers into direct military conflict during the Korean War. Korea's division has for decades contributed to regional stability because China and the United States had their own respective spheres of influence on the Korean Peninsula. But rising Sino-U.S. rivalry threatens to subsume and deny the limited common interest Washington and Beijing share in cooperating to achieve North Korea's denuclearization. Though Sino-U.S. cooperation is a prerequisite for integration and eventual unification of the Korean Peninsula, Washington and Beijing are unlikely, in the current environment, to achieve the level of cooperation necessary to adequately support a transition from armistice to a sustainable and enduring peace on the Korean Peninsula and in Northeast Asia. Bipolar U.S.-Soviet competition during the Cold War brought the Korean War to center stage as a global flashpoint in 1950, but, after the Korean armistice and subsequent failure of the Geneva Conference to achieve a political resolution in 1954, the Korean conflict then receded from the center of global attention for decades. Now, North Korea's nuclear and missile development has returned the peninsula to the epicenter of global concern. North Korea's nuclear expansion renders it a global security concern that can only be overcome through collective action and a deal that guarantees North Korean security in exchange for its disarmament. But the failure of U.S.-North Korea summitry to generate a space for political compromise has reinforced the North Korean leadership's instinct to rely on its nuclear capabilities as its only source of security. Only a major disruption that shakes up peninsular, regional, and global trend lines will open the way for the end of the Korean conflict by 2025. But the primary source of disruption these days is North Korea, which desires to use its role as disruptor not to end the Korean conflict but rather to enhance its prospects for power and survival. Until this changes, prospects of a sustainable and durable Korean peace remain slim indeed. This article was originally published here by The National Interest.

Tensions rocketed on June 16 when North Korea demolished a liaison office that had stood as a symbol of hope for improved communications.

This week, North Korea’s Kim family dynasty imposed a new test of loyalty on its southern neighbors and found them lacking. 

On June 12, North Korea’s Foreign Minister Ri Son-gwon issued a highly unusual commemorative statement to mark the second anniversary of the first-ever meeting of U.S. President Donald J. Trump and North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un. The statement laid bare North Korea’s disappointments, rejected Trump’s declarations of success in his diplomacy with North Korea, and predicted an enduring confrontation backed by North Korea’s nuclear development as the main pillar of deterrence against U.S. hostility. The statement reiterated months of North Korean expressions of frustration and underscored the fragility of the U.S.-North Korea relationship and the risks that a renewed escalation of tensions could bring.  Ri’s statement echoes the change in direction North Korea first announced last December: that the strengthening its nuclear development to deter the U.S. nuclear threat would be its main strategy for dealing with the United States. Kim Jong Un reinforced that message last month at an expanded meeting of North Korea’s Central Military Commission when he pledged to bolster his country’s nuclear deterrence capabilities in response to an undiminished nuclear threat from the United States. Two years after the drama of a diplomatic reality TV moment in U.S.-North Korea relations, the fundamental conflict between the United States and North Korea over denuclearization remains as intractable as ever. The global security risk posed by a nuclear North Korea has not diminished, and the task of dealing with a North Korea that has redoubled its commitment to nuclear deterrence remains a potential flashpoint for escalation between nuclear-capable adversaries. In a new CFR Contingency Planning Memorandum, I discuss the risk that a renewed escalation of tensions in the U.S.-North Korea relationship could bring and provide recommendations for how the United States can rebuild international consensus in opposition to North Korea’s nuclear development. Following the presidential elections in November, either President Trump or Vice President Biden will face an even more difficult challenge posed by the growing entrenchment of North Korea’s continued nuclear development. U.S. leaders should start by revitalizing the role of the UN, improving sanctions implementation, restoring U.S. and allied military exercises to the 2018 pre-Singapore summit exercise schedules, and updating preparations for instability in North Korea. This article was originally published by Forbes.

On June 12, North Korea’s Foreign Minister Ri Son-gwon issued a highly unusual commemorative statement to mark the second anniversary of the first-ever meeting of U.S. President Donald J. Trump and North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un. The statement laid bare North Korea’s disappointments, rejected Trump’s declarations of success in his diplomacy with North Korea, and predicted an enduring confrontation backed by North Korea’s nuclear development as the main pillar of deterrence against U.S. hostility. The statement reiterated months of North Korean expressions of frustration and underscored the fragility of the U.S.-North Korea relationship and the risks that a renewed escalation of tensions could bring.  Ri’s statement echoes the change in direction North Korea first announced last December: that the strengthening its nuclear development to deter the U.S. nuclear threat would be its main strategy for dealing with the United States. Kim Jong Un reinforced that message last month at an expanded meeting of North Korea’s Central Military Commission when he pledged to bolster his country’s nuclear deterrence capabilities in response to an undiminished nuclear threat from the United States. Two years after the drama of a diplomatic reality TV moment in U.S.-North Korea relations, the fundamental conflict between the United States and North Korea over denuclearization remains as intractable as ever. The global security risk posed by a nuclear North Korea has not diminished, and the task of dealing with a North Korea that has redoubled its commitment to nuclear deterrence remains a potential flashpoint for escalation between nuclear-capable adversaries. In a new CFR Contingency Planning Memorandum, I discuss the risk that a renewed escalation of tensions in the U.S.-North Korea relationship could bring and provide recommendations for how the United States can rebuild international consensus in opposition to North Korea’s nuclear development. Following the presidential elections in November, either President Trump or Vice President Biden will face an even more difficult challenge posed by the growing entrenchment of North Korea’s continued nuclear development. U.S. leaders should start by revitalizing the role of the UN, improving sanctions implementation, restoring U.S. and allied military exercises to the 2018 pre-Singapore summit exercise schedules, and updating preparations for instability in North Korea. This article was originally published by Forbes.

Russia's inclusion in an expanded G7 would run contrary to the group's aims and interests.