On December 5, 2025, the US presented its new National Security Strategy doctrine, described as a rethinking of priorities and a rejection of past mistakes.

The Omitted Wording

The term “denuclearization of the DPRK” has disappeared from the 29-page document, and this is extremely significant. It was this particular phrase, especially formulated as “complete, verifiable, and irreversible denuclearization (CVID),” that was the main stumbling block on the path of dialogue between Pyongyang and Washington.

Every US administration since the early 1990s has indicated denuclearization as an explicit political goal. In the first information message of the Trump administration in 2017, North Korea was mentioned 16 times, and denuclearization was named the primary objective.

However, keeping this topic on the agenda of the US-DPRK negotiations made them unacceptable for two reasons. First, the DPRK’s nuclear status is enshrined in its constitution, and abandoning it would be a violation of the country’s sovereignty. Second, the DPRK is no longer a threshold state with a nuclear program in the development phase, which could therefore be dismantled, but a fully fledged nuclear power whose nuclear disarmament is achievable only through a regime change and, preferably, subsequent occupation. Given the current international situation, such a process is unlikely without an accompanying world war.

But what is more interesting for us is why the United States has finally decided to renounce this agenda item. The first explanation is the recognition of reality: in the United States, there is now the prevalence of the opinion of those who have come to the realization that North Korea is not a caricatured “rogue state from an action movie” that the US overthrows. Instead, it is a stable country supported by the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China, and betting on its collapse is fallacious.

The second reason is more subtle: the United States intends to concentrate on confronting China, which could displace America as the world hegemon, and for this purpose, they plan to close all parallel projects, concentrating forces on the decisive direction for the sake of “conditions for stability in Europe and strategic stability with Russia.”

Furthermore, there are analysts in America who understand that the hypothetical Moscow-Beijing-Pyongyang triangle is not an aggressive bloc, but a group of countries that ended up in this configuration due........

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