Washington’s North Korea reckoning |
Pyongyang is having its moment. The latest issue of Foreign Affairs, a premier foreign policy magazine that often reflects mainstream debates within the U.S. foreign policy establishment, ran three essays on North Korea, a rare occasion for the publication. Authored by three prominent Asia hands, each essay approached the question from a distinct vantage point, yet together they signal something unmistakable: Washington’s strategic assumptions about the Korean Peninsula are being thoroughly reexamined, and Seoul must take note.
Victor D. Cha of Georgetown University and the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) makes the case for a “cold peace.” After three decades of failed denuclearization efforts, he argues that Washington can no longer treat complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization as a prerequisite for engagement — arms control negotiations, crisis communication mechanisms and limits on missile production are what is achievable now.
Jung Pak, former U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state for East Asia and the Pacific, explains how that moment arrived. Tracing Kim’s reversal of fortune, she unpacks how what appeared to be Pyongyang’s nadir became the foundation for its ascent. Kim used the pandemic to tighten domestic control, pivoted toward Moscow when Russia’s war in Ukraine created an opening and leveraged Beijing’s competitive anxiety to extract concessions from both powers simultaneously.
Oriana Skylar Mastro of Stanford draws out the military-structural consequences of that transformation. Her central warning is pointed: Deterring North Korea now effectively means deterring Russia and China simultaneously. With North Korean troops battle-hardened on Ukrainian frontlines and Russian technology transfers steadily strengthening Pyongyang’s arsenal, Washington cannot step back from the peninsula without recreating the miscalculation of 1950.
While the focuses and prescriptions differ, the three authors converge on one bottom line: North Korea is no longer a manageable, isolated irritant. It is a battle-hardened, nuclear-armed state backed by two major military powers, and the international architecture that once constrained it has effectively collapsed.
This reckoning in these essays is not isolated. Joel S. Wit, a former State Department official, for instance, documented in his book "Fallout" how six consecutive U.S. presidents approached the North Korea conundrum yet collectively failed to prevent Pyongyang from building a nuclear arsenal. Fred Fleitz, a former National Security Council chief of staff under the first Trump administration, points to analogous patterns of mistakes and policy inconsistencies in his forthcoming book. Taken together, these works suggest that think tanks and policy circles across the U.S. spectrum have been edging toward a similar conclusion that the old approach is broken.
What are the implications for Seoul?
First, Seoul must abandon any residual naivety about Pyongyang’s strategic calculus and intentions. North Korea is not the estranged neighbor that essentially desires reconciliation for economic or cultural reasons. It is a state with more than 50 nuclear warheads, combat-tested conventional forces, a self-proclaimed thriving economy and a regime that no longer requires South Korea for its survival.
Moscow and Beijing now fill the economic and diplomatic gaps that Seoul and Washington once leveraged. Any engagement policy Seoul pursues toward the North must be premised on this uncomfortable reality. Pak’s analysis is especially sobering here: Kim’s positive overtures toward Seoul, should they come, are likely tactical maneuvers designed to weaken Seoul’s ties with Europe and Washington rather than genuine gestures toward reconciliation.
Second, denuclearization is receding as a practical goal, and Seoul must plan accordingly. The six-party consensus that once underpinned nonproliferation pressure is gone. Russia has abandoned it clearly and entirely. China has quietly dropped “denuclearization” from its official statements and diplomatic talking points since 2023, conspicuously absent from major diplomatic documents, including the November 2025 white paper on arms control and statements from this year’s summit between the leaders of China and South Korea. If Washington moves toward arms control as its primary objective, any expectation of reviving multilateral frameworks resembling the Six-Party Talks on curbing North Korea’s nuclear programs in the near term is illusory. Seoul should recalibrate its diplomatic energies accordingly.
Third, South Korea must invest in the kind of hard deterrence this new threat environment demands. Seoul’s pledged increase in defense spending to 3.5 percent of gross domestic product is a step in the right direction, but numbers alone are insufficient. Korea must secure seamless integration into allied defense architecture, meaningful participation in extended nuclear planning and alliance frameworks robust enough to account for potential Russian and Chinese involvement, rather than merely a bilateral contingency against Pyongyang. If the conventional U.S. extended deterrence weakens, it must compensate with enhanced deterrence assurances backed by credible capability. Even as Washington and Pyongyang edge toward some form of cold peace, every concession Seoul makes to its own defense capabilities diminishes its leverage, both against the North and within the alliance itself.
When Washington’s leading experts are calling for a fundamental reorientation of American strategy toward North Korea, Seoul cannot simply continue to be anchored to assumptions and frameworks that presided over three decades of failure. Pyongyang is no longer waiting for the world’s permission. It has already moved on, and Seoul must, too, with a strategy built for the world as it is.
Park Jin-wan is a nonresident fellow at the University of Vienna’s European Centre for North Korean Studies and a co-founder of the U.S.-ROK-Japan Trilateral Next-Gen Study Group.