An adaptation of my full emailed comments today to China Newsweek (no relation to Newsweek) on the assumption to office of ROK Foreign Minster Chung Eui-yong and the implications for U.S.-DPRK relations under the Biden Administration:

Newly-appointed ROK Foreign Minister Chung represents President Moon’s best effort in his remaining year in office before the March 2022 presidential elections to see if the Biden administration will show anything more than pro forma interest in improving U.S.-DPRK relations. Right now, Iran is one of President Joe Biden’s highest priorities, and we can presume that Biden will embrace some of Trump’s tougher line with China. Frankly, Biden wants to avoid seeing the North Korea nuclear issue become a higher priority than it is right now.

Unless he appoints a Special Envoy for North Korea, President Biden cannot spare anyone of stature right now; even Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman, who met Kim Jong Il in 2000, will likely be tasked to focus more on the Iran situation as she was lead negotiator for the JCPOA in 2016. Although Chung has the best relationship with Kim Jong Un (from early 2018), Secretary Blinken will likely not budge if Chung pleads with him to focus more on the Korean peninsula. All Blinken wants to do is get the U.S.-ROK SMA cost-sharing agreement nailed down equitably, and probably any resumption of joint exercises next month will be severely hampered by COVID anyway. A Biden-Moon meeting this year may in fact have to be virtual.

While Trump’s three meetings with Kim were unprecedented and historic, Trump was unwilling to make a partial or interim deal. That was his failure at Hanoi two years ago. Because nothing further was accomplished other than a courtesy meeting at the DMZ that June, Trump’s diplomacy with North Korea now has a bad reputation because of Trump’s behavior after losing the November 3 election and his constant allegations of fraud. Whatever good was in those three meetings with Kim is now considered highly tainted because of Trump’s greatly diminished political stature in the foreign policy realm. 

While increased inter-Korean cooperation without the U.S. is a way out for the North, North Korea will not move in that direction because South Korea by itself is not enough. Only with the U.S. can Kim balance his relations with China, and only the U.S. can relieve the UN sanctions imposed upon him. While a DPRK accommodation with the ROK is a likely path for the longer-term future, it is only meaningful if the U.S. backs it. Instead, the Biden administration seems interested only in managing the issue and not investing the effort at this time to make meaningful progress. Biden is surely calculating that it will take four years at minimum to undo the foreign policy damage done by the Trump administration, and even that is an optimistic assessment. 

In the end, Kim Jong Un may try to force the issue with Biden, but if he does so in the wrong way or at the wrong time, it could backfire on him and make his precarious situation even worse. And for the Democrats, even more than the Republicans, North Korea is synonymous mainly with the nuclear issue, and there is little sense of the history since 1945 of how we got to this point. Biden only seeks to minimally manage the North Korea issue because his administration is greatly over-burdened with domestic and other foreign policy priorities.♦