The debilitating political vacuum that has reigned in Seoul since South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol’s impeachment on December 14 has finally ended. On June 3, Lee Jae-myung won South Korea’s presidential election by a decisive margin. Lee, a liberal who narrowly lost the country’s last election to Yoon, has promised to fix both his society’s broken politics and its mounting economic problems with a domestic agenda that includes improving conditions for workers, shoring up the public sector, and boosting growth in strategic areas such as AI and defense.
But for foreign observers, the Lee government’s most significant policies will be those targeted at North Korea. The new president has promised to be less hawkish than Yoon, and his timing is fortuitous. With U.S. President Donald Trump back in office, Lee will have a rare window of opportunity to make progress with North Korea—which remains one of the most intractable problems in international security. During Trump’s first term, the United States and South Korea tried using diplomacy to persuade Kim Jong Un, North Korea’s leader, to slow his nuclear weapons program and stop his military provocations. Their efforts bore some fruit, despite criticism from national security veterans who had become resigned to isolating North Korea. But the process stalled when Trump lost interest, prompting a return to the status quo ante.
After five years without dialogue, leaders in Seoul and Washington could resume productive diplomacy with Pyongyang. In theory, Lee and Trump are well suited as a pair to wrangle the North Korean dictator. Trump yearns to make bold televised deals, and his taste for the dramatic appeals to Kim’s desire to command global attention at flashy summits. Lee can be equally brash, and his gritty determination to improve relations with Pyongyang can keep momentum going if and when Trump’s attention flags.
But both Lee and Trump will need to proceed with a clear-eyed understanding of the new obstacles imposed by the failure of the last attempt at negotiation, which will make it hard to get Kim back to the table. Lee, in particular, must be ready to sacrifice the unrealistic rhetoric about fully denuclearizing North Korea and reunifying the two countries that has long dominated South Korean politics, as well as the fantasy that imposing sanctions will change North Korean behavior.
There are, of course, downsides to diplomacy with Kim, including the likelihood that he will continue his efforts to ally with Russia and the risk that he will retreat once the going gets tough. But trying to restart talks is worth those dangers. Although many observers tend to assume that its isolation and economic misery make North Korea nonthreatening, its new partnership with Russia has given it more power, and without diplomacy, a new war on the Korean Peninsula cannot be ruled out. A pragmatic approach could reduce tensions—and yield a détente between Pyongyang, Seoul, and Washington in the near future.
Will power
The past decade has shown that managing the North Korean risk comes down to one underlying factor: political will in Seoul and Washington. Trump is an outlier among U.S. presidents in that he enjoys dealing with the ruling Kim family. Making a deal with North Korea was a signature focus of his first term’s foreign policy, and sealing it remains a piece of unfinished business.
Trump, in fact, deserves credit for the breakthrough achieved at the 2018 Singapore summit, the first-ever meeting between the U.S. and North Korean heads of state. His willingness to meet with Kim encouraged the Korean leader to stop testing intercontinental ballistic missiles, partially demolish his nuclear weapons test site, and offer to freeze the further development of his nuclear program. The progress Trump set in motion was dependent on equal participation from Seoul. South Korea’s president at the time, Moon Jae-in, doggedly pursued a détente with North Korea and teed up each step in the negotiations. Over the course of a dizzying 12 months of summitry, which began after Kim accepted Moon’s invitation to participate in the January 2018 Winter Olympics in Seoul, all three parties—Pyongyang, Seoul, and Washington—appeared ready to fundamentally change their relationship.
But this opening soon closed. By the time Trump met Kim for a second summit in Hanoi, Trump’s attention had drifted from North Korea, and both men’s greed for a quick deal derailed their fragile progress. On the summit’s first night, the White House announced that the two leaders were ready to sign a “joint agreement” the following day. When both sides insisted on maximalist goals in the next morning’s talks, however, Trump simply walked out before lunch was served. This was a serious mistake: had the U.S. president remained and engaged with his North Korean counterpart, he might have been able to persuade Kim to fully shutter the Yongbyon nuclear facility and lock in the moratorium on missile testing.
In 2018, Pyongyang, Seoul, and Washington appeared ready to change their relationship.Instead, by 2020, diplomacy had broken down. Ostensibly in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, North Korea imposed the harshest lockdowns on the planet; even its diplomats were sealed off from foreign contact. Weeks ahead of U.S. President Joe Biden’s inauguration, Kim laid out a five-year plan for North Korea’s military modernization; a year later, one of the first pandemic-related restrictions Kim loosened was to allow missile launches. Over the course of 2022, North Korea tested 69 missiles, the most in any year on record. He unveiled one military innovation after another—a nuclear submarine, a guided-missile frigate, military reconnaissance satellites, attack drones. Ankit Panda, a nuclear policy analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, recently described Kim’s effort to expand his country’s nuclear capabilities as “breathtaking.”
It didn’t help that when South Koreans narrowly elected Yoon to the presidency in March 2022, he pursued a hard-line approach toward Pyongyang. Yoon’s tough-guy stance only reinforced Biden’s disdain for talking to Kim. For the first time since the end of the Cold War, a U.S. presidential term came and went without a single meeting between U.S. and North Korean officials.
To be sure, Biden officials made other kinds of progress in Asia, strengthening the United States’ Indo-Pacific alliances and facilitating trilateral security cooperation with Japan and South Korea. But they left the North Korean security problem worse than they found it. Thanks in part to Washington’s inattention on Biden’s watch, Kim embarked on a profound strategic reorientation toward Russia. In April 2019, after the aborted Hanoi summit, Kim visited Vladivostok to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin. When Kim returned to Russia in September 2023, he sealed an alliance between the countries by opening a spigot of ammunition transfers to Russia for its war in Ukraine. Putin reciprocated with a historic visit to Pyongyang the following summer, and the two leaders signed a major defense treaty.
On the basis of the treaty alliance, Putin has been supplying fuel, food, and advanced weaponry to Kim. Meanwhile, starting in the fall of 2024, North Korea sent Russia the most precious resource in any alliance—troops. By the time Biden left the White House, over 10,000 North Korean fighters had been deployed on the Russian front. By providing such aid, North Korea collapsed the divide between the East Asian and European theaters in a way not seen since World War II.
Straight aim
These developments would not appear to make 2025 an auspicious year for Washington to reopen negotiations. But the underlying logic that drove Kim to negotiate in 2018 still holds. That year, Kim made a startling announcement: now that his country’s efforts to establish nuclear deterrence were “complete”—and considering that South Korea and the United States seemed serious about détente—North Korea would prioritize a new strategy and put “all efforts on economic construction.”
Kim desperately wants to enable North Korea’s escape from the chronic backwardness in which it has been mired since the end of the Cold War. His country remains one of the poorest in Asia: a quarter of the population lives near the subsistence level, foreign trade is minimal, and its GDP is a small fraction of South Korea’s. The breakdown in diplomacy after the failed Hanoi summit forced Kim to backtrack on his shift from guns to butter, but his underlying ambition remains. Kim’s major domestic speeches still dwell on economic issues and promises of a more prosperous future, just as they did seven years ago. Between inspecting munitions plants and attending missile tests, Kim keeps making visits to scallop farms and tourist projects. North Korea’s political old guard may be resistant to change, but Kim need point no further than China and Vietnam to show how ruling parties in communist states can retain power while encouraging rapid economic growth.
Putin’s assistance is helping the North Korean economy limp along. But Russia lacks the means to transform the country. China has the economic muscle and infrastructural capacity to lift up North Korea, but Kim is extremely wary of giving Chinese President Xi Jinping too much leverage over his government, and North Koreans are generally suspicious and resentful of China owing to Beijing’s long history of putting its own interests ahead of Pyongyang’s. That leaves South Korea and the United States as the partners that could enable a true economic transformation.
At a strategic level, therefore, Kim has reasons to reciprocate proactive entreaties by Seoul and Washington. At a minimum, he gains prestige from attending summits with the U.S. president; such meetings provide a domestic propaganda boost as well as more leverage in dealing with North Korea’s neighbors. Kim’s appearance at the Singapore summit led to five meetings with Xi in the space of 12 months, because Xi was forced to treat Kim as something closer to an equal given the importance Trump placed on engaging with the North Korean leader. Another round of summitry with Trump would give Kim new cards to play with Xi—and with Putin, too.
Long game
Since returning to the White House in January, Trump has been a bit of a tease when it comes to North Korea. He has trumpeted his “great relationship” with Kim and promised that his administration “will have relations with North Korea” but so far offered no serious moves to restart negotiations. The slow beginning is not surprising given that making progress with Kim’s regime will be a hard slog, requiring upfront sacrifices from Seoul and Washington. The chasm in mindset between the U.S. and the North Korean leadership, as well as Trump’s insistence on making deals himself, means that Trump’s team is unlikely to cultivate deep relationships with North Korean officials. During Trump’s first term, his negotiator, Stephen Biegun, struggled to get face time with his North Korean counterparts, who were deeply distrustful of Trump’s advisers. Negotiations happened, somewhat frantically, when Trump and Kim were in the same room.
This is where Seoul can come in. In 2018, members of Moon’s team did meet intensively with their North Korean counterparts, hashing out details in their common language and getting to know one another. This inter-Korean dialogue produced concrete agreements in September 2018: the Pyongyang Declaration and the Comprehensive Military Agreement, which lowered the risk of conflict in the demilitarized zone and along the two countries’ maritime border. South Korea’s new president should mimic Moon’s approach by pushing his national security staff and economic advisers to get into the weeds with their North Korean counterparts. A pragmatic, detail-oriented approach by Lee can supplement Trump’s theatrics.
But Lee will have to overcome three large hurdles if he wants to make progress toward a détente with Kim. First, he will have to convince Kim that South Korea can offer North Korea something Russia cannot. That means demonstrating that South Korea can help put North Korea on a path toward significant economic progress—which, in turn, will require Lee to lessen or lift sanctions. Lee can begin by removing the sanctions that South Korea imposed in 2010. But the more important effort will be to convince Trump to call off the Treasury Department’s hunt for new sanctions targets and persuade the UN Security Council to pare back its own sanctions. At the Hanoi summit, Trump would not budge on sanctions relief. But that meeting’s collapse—and, more broadly, the utter failure of sanctions to prevent North Korea from developing its nuclear potential—may prompt him to support Seoul’s push.
Lee can provide the consistent focus on North Korea that Trump lacks.Lee and Trump should also make it clear that complete denuclearization is not the raison d’être of negotiations. To be sure, the two leaders should ask Kim to take practical steps toward nuclear restraint, such as providing more transparency regarding North Korea’s nuclear program, ceasing his provocative weapons tests (if the United States and South Korea halt their own provocative military exercises), and shutting down the Yongbyon nuclear testing facility. But Lee and Trump must frame these requests as steps in a broader, reciprocal process of improving relations rather than harping on the demand that North Korea surrender its entire nuclear arsenal.
Finally, Lee will have to shift his language around reunification. Early last year, in a stunning policy reversal, Kim recognized South Korea as a sovereign state and challenged Seoul to agree on a national border. In doing so, he tossed out his country’s—and his family’s—long-standing precept that North Korea and South Korea must be reunified. That put the ball in Lee’s court.
Unlike Kim, Lee lacks the authority to unilaterally change his country’s policy. The South Korean constitution defines the Republic of Korea as encompassing the entire Korean Peninsula and its adjacent islands and stipulates that the country pursue “a policy of peaceful unification based on the basic free and democratic order.” But South Koreans’ views on reunification are evolving: according to polling last year by the Korea Institute for National Unification, less than half of South Korean millennials see reunification as necessary.
At a minimum, Lee should articulate a new vision—the peaceful coexistence of two sovereign states—and nudge the South Korean public toward a more realistic and constructive approach. Paradoxically, by letting go of the dream of reunification, South Koreans would likely increase the actual contact they can have with North Koreans and facilitate reunions between the dwindling number of relatives directly divided by the Korean War. If Seoul moves away from its insistence on reunification, Pyongyang will very likely be more open to contact at the people-to-people level.
None of this will be easy. But Lee can provide the consistent focus on North Korea that Trump lacks. If Lee can foreclose the unrealistic prospect of reunification, stop insisting on North Korea’s complete denuclearization, and offer Kim a path toward healthy economic development, he will open room for a détente. That would make it possible to put in place a wide variety of policies that reduce tensions on the Korean Peninsula. And if Lee succeeds, the U.S.-South Korean alliance can itself undergo a necessary transformation into a partnership based on fostering peace rather than preparing for war.
(Source: Foreign Affairs)