Why Negotiations with North Korea are Futile

For the past three decades, North Korea has expanded its ballistic missile technology at an alarming speed. They are now believed to possess between 20 to 60 warheads, as well as missiles capable of hitting the United States. Throughout repeated interactions, the United States, as well as other countries in the international community, have attempted to negotiate an end to North Korea's development and exporting of nuclear missiles, to no avail. Past failed attempts to negotiate with North Korea demonstrates that we do not have much leverage on the bargaining table, nor do our punitive measures have substantial effect due to massive amounts of foreign aid North Korea receives from allies like China.

First, it’s important to understand why rogue states like North Korea build up an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction: it is specifically so that they can avoid coercion and from larger nations like the US. Kim Jong Un is terrified of the US overthrowing the North Korean regime, and his nuclear arsenal is one of the only measures capable of deterring western invasion. As such, when the US tries to negotiate with Kim Jong Un to disassemble his nuclear missile collection, there is little incentive for North Korea to obey the nation it is most distrustful of, and for whom it has built up this arsenal.

North Korea would ultimately like to unify the Korean Peninsula by overtaking South Korea, which is unlikely a point where the US would concede. While in his campaign rhetoric Trump was confident that he would be the US president to successfully negotiate with Kim Jong Un, his track record over the past few years shows otherwise. Let's examine his summits with Kim. In June of 2018, leaders signed a joint statement pledging to pursue lasting peace and complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, which was later rightfully criticized as an "empty promise" (NPR). In February 2019, the Trump-Kim summit ended early without a deal on denuclearization, which demonstrates that these talks on denuclearization have clearly not been substantive.

As we can see from these Trump-Kim interactions, it is clear that North Korea does not have an incentive to abide by denuclearizing agreements forged with the US, since the forecasted cost of giving up their nuclear protection far outweighs the benefits of relieved US economic sanctions. However, another perspective on these summits remains:

“The president committed a cardinal error of deal-making: He misjudged the person across the table from him. He thought that Mr. Kim had come to the negotiating table primarily because of the U.S. sanctions policy of “maximum pressure” and his own rhetoric warning of nuclear “fire and fury.” Mr. Trump assumed that Mr. Kim was negotiating from a position of weakness that left him ready to make major concessions” (CSIS).

It is fully possible that Trump’s summits with Kim Jong Un failed miserably because Trump did not read the intelligence briefings closely enough to realize that North Korea was coming into the bargaining table thinking that they were in the position of power. One may assume that Kim Jong Un never had any intention to denuclearize, since he possesses nuclear weapons capable of hitting the United States. As such, it may pique the interest of many to see how negotiations would fare if a less-presumptuous US president began the next summit with modest concessions and a structured outline for win-win outcomes within the US-NK bargaining range. While the US currently cannot coerce North Korea into denuclearizing, perhaps US leaders can bring China to the negotiation table through economic incentives, and lessen the amount of foreign aid provided to North Korea. This would be a promising step to allow for effective talks on denuclearization in the future.