By Ankit Panda
June 2024
This piece is part of NCNK's Nuclear Notions short essay series. All views expressed are the author's own.
More than five years after the historic February 2019 summit in Hanoi, Vietnam, between former U.S. President Donald J. Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, tensions on the Korean Peninsula have risen significantly—as has the threat posed by Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons. Today, North Korea presses forward with an ambitious program of modernization for its strategic nuclear forces while it simultaneously develops its nascent tactical nuclear weapons capabilities. Since 2019, Pyongyang has turned away from engagement with the United States and South Korea, focusing instead on nurturing its relationships with China and Russia, the latter of which has deepened its ties significantly with North Korea since 2023. Finally, adding to his broader strategic recalibration post-Hanoi, in December 2023, Kim altered decades of North Korean policy on inter-Korean unification by formally abjuring that objective and identifying South Korea as a distinct state.
Kim Jong Un’s humiliation and subsequent strategic reorientation in the aftermath of the Hanoi summit in 2019 remain a key driver of this contemporary predicament. By all accounts, Kim came to Hanoi with the expectation that the United States was ready to cut a deal. In the aftermath of the historic June 2018 Singapore summit—the first-ever meeting between a sitting U.S. president and a North Korean leader—Pyongyang had come to repeatedly use the phrase “corresponding measures” to allude to its expectation that it expected concessions from both Seoul and Washington in exchange for what it felt at the time were sufficient initial steps. Specifically, North Korea pointed to an April 2018 unilateral moratorium articulated by Kim Jong Un on the tested of long-range ballistic missiles and on nuclear testing, and the subsequent May 2018 dismantlement of the testing portal entrances at the Punggye-ri nuclear test site. Despite the reversible nature of these concessions, North Korea appeared to believe that these were sufficient initial gestures to invite reciprocal measures by its negotiating counterparties.
Kim traveled to Hanoi by train, spending more than two days to meet President Trump for a second time. By all accounts, he appeared to have been led to believe—partly by his own key negotiator at the time, Kim Yong Chol and by South Korean President Moon Jae-in - that the United States would be willing to accept an interim deal on sanctions relief. Even though Washington had maintained the goal of “complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula” heading into the Hanoi summit, the North Korean leader was expecting that an offer to trade away the country’s declared uranium enrichment plant, spent fuel reprocessing facility (the Radiochemical Laboratory), and mothballing the 5 MW(e) gas-graphite nuclear reactor in exchange for substantial multilateral sanctions relief would be in the realm of the acceptable for Washington. It was not—and the Hanoi summit ended prematurely without a deal.
In the immediate aftermath of the summit’s failure, senior North Korean figures communicated the extent to which Kim had been deeply affected. Choe Son-hui, at the time North Korea’s vice foreign minister, noted that “our chairman has lost the will to engage in dealmaking, with the U.S. saying that even a partial lifting of sanctions for the civilian economy is hard.” Ri Yong Ho, North Korean foreign minister at the time, further indicated that Pyongyang’s offer in Hanoi “will never be changed,” and that it was “difficult to say whether there might be a better agreement than the one based on our proposal at the current stage,” indicating a lack of flexibility on the North Korean side too.
There were indications of this even prior to Hanoi. By his New Year’s Day speech for 2019, in an expression of frustration with the Trump administration, Kim Jong Un had started to indicate what would become the cornerstone of his new disposition toward the United States, suggesting that if Washington “persists in imposing sanctions and pressure,” Pyongyang would be “compelled to find a new way.” The precise contours of this “new way” was left unspecified at the time, but many—including this author—suspected that it would involve the development of closer ties with Russia and China. Moscow, in particular, had already started to heighten its cooperation with North Korea in the second half of 2019, building on momentum from Kim’s first summit meeting with President Vladimir Putin in April that year.
The arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic, meanwhile, was hardly foreseeable for Kim at the time he articulated an intention to embark on this “new way.” North Korea declared the then-epidemic in China a threat to its “national survival” in January 2020 and locked down its borders. It did not resume any engagement with the Trump administration throughout 2020 and, weeks before Joe Biden’s presidential inauguration in January 2021, Kim announced a five-year plan of military modernization focused on newer, better, and more nuclear weapons at the Eighth Party Congress of the Workers’ Party of Korea. Following the conclusion of the Biden administration’s review of U.S. policy toward North Korea in the summer of 2021, Kim iterated North Korea’s basic position: that the country would be ready for both “dialogue and confrontation” with the United States. Kim made this determination after a “detailed analysis of the policy tendency of the newly emerged U.S. administration toward our Republic,” per North Korean state media.
In January 2022, North Korea carried out a launch of its Hwasong-12 intermediate-range ballistic missile, breaking, in effect, what had been its self-imposed moratorium on long-range missile testing announced in April 2018, prior to the start of Kim’s engagement with South Korea and the United States that year. This test followed days after the first sanctions package against North Korea announced under the Biden administration, taken in response to a series of shorter-range missile tests in the second half of 2021. If North Korea had been willing to give the Biden administration an opportunity to demonstrate that its policy review could have manifested in a different direction for U.S. policy toward Pyongyang, that appeared to have ended with this sanctions package. Pyongyang instead used this test of the Hwasong-12 to significantly accelerate its military development programs pursuant to the five-year plan announced at the Eighth Party Congress.
Tensions have steadily risen since Hanoi primarily due to these factors. Additionally, the inauguration of a conservative South Korean president, Yoon Suk-yeol, in May 2022 has added to tensions in an inter-Korean context. Yoon, unlike his predecessor, has restored focus on South Korea’s impressive conventional military capabilities and emphasized Seoul’s aspirations to preemptively disarm North Korea of its nuclear weapons and, if necessary, to kill Kim Jong Un himself in a war. This messaging has predictably drawn reactions from North Korea, including its watershed decision in September 2022 to revise its nuclear law to indicate that an “automatic and immediate” nuclear attack could follow if Kim were killed in a war (or North Korea’s command and control capabilities otherwise degraded).
As the November 2024 U.S. election approaches, North Korea appears to have few incentives to change course. If Kim’s talk of a “new way” after Hanoi was meant to communicate to Washington that North Korea had alternatives to the United States, then the last five years have certainly proven him right. Russia’s war against Ukraine, in particular, has given Moscow ample incentive to deepen its ties with Pyongyang, even as the two countries planted the seeds of their current strategic convergence in 2019. The opportunities that Kim now enjoys with Moscow likely far outpace what he might have imagined in 2019, when a full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine was hardly foreseeable. China, too, has maintained its relationship with Pyongyang. For the United States, breaking the post-Hanoi logjam in engaging North Korea will fundamentally come down to demonstrating that the terms of a future negotiation have changed. This will require going beyond the current formulation favored by the Biden administration—to invite Pyongyang to open-ended negotiations without preconditions at any time—and communicating that the United States would be willing to fundamentally offer North Korea concessions at the outset of a negotiating process that it was unwilling to in the past.
About the Author
Ankit Panda is the Stanton Senior Fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. An expert on the Asia-Pacific region, his research interests range nuclear strategy, arms control, missile defense, nonproliferation, emerging technologies, and U.S. extended deterrence. He is the author of Kim Jong Un and the Bomb: Survival and Deterrence in North Korea (Hurst Publishers/Oxford University Press, 2020).
Panda was previously an adjunct senior fellow in the Defense Posture Project at the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) and a member of the 2019 FAS International Study Group on North Korea Policy. He has consulted for the United Nations in New York and Geneva on nonproliferation and disarmament matters, and has testified on security topics before the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee and the congressionally chartered U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission.
Panda was a Korea Society Kim Koo Fellow, a German Marshall Fund Young Strategist, an International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) Shangri-La Dialogue Young Leader, and a Carnegie Council on Ethics in International Affairs New Leader. He has worked at the Council on Foreign Relations and the Liechtenstein Institute on Self-Determination at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs.
A widely published writer, Panda’s work has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the Diplomat, the Atlantic, the New Republic, the South China Morning Post, War on the Rocks, Politico, and the National Interest. Panda has also published in scholarly journals, including Survival, the Washington Quarterly, and India Review, and has contributed to the IISS Asia-Pacific Regional Security Assessment and Strategic Survey. He is editor-at-large at the Diplomat, where he hosts the Asia Geopolitics podcast, and a contributing editor at War on the Rocks.