North Korea’s increased threats and provocations are leading many U.S. experts to hope that some form of diplomacy will be able to prevent North Korean attacks and especially the North’s threatened use of its nuclear weapons. However, negotiators should be careful that North Korea doesn’t gain long-term advantages in exchange for promises of better behavior in the near term.

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has been very clear that he will never negotiate North Korean denuclearization. Kim may be prepared to agree to reduce his threats and provocations, but I believe that in exchange he will be seeking the means to eventually achieve peninsula dominance.

What would Kim be seeking? Just before his father passed away in 2011, the senior Kim wrote final instructions to his son about leading North Korea. Among his instructions, the most important was: “We must unify Korea. The unification of the peninsula is the ultimate goal of our family.”

Some may question the importance of this objective given Kim’s recent renunciation of unification. But note that Kim only renounced unification resulting from ROK efforts to cause the Kim regime to collapse so the ROK could........

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