hankyoreh

KCTV broadcasts the launch of an ICBM on Feb. 18. (Yonhap)

North Korea experts in the US are urging the Biden administration to come up with a more proactive and serious policy to deal with Pyongyang. In their view, Biden’s North Korea policy over the past two years, which has focused mainly on pressure and sanctions, has been ineffective.

Stimson Center in the US hosted an online seminar on Tuesday titled “A Mid-Term Report Card for Biden’s North Korea Policy.” Among the speakers was Robert Gallucci, the former US State Department’s special envoy for North Korea and currently a distinguished professor at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service.

Gallucci, who played a key role in the 1994 Agreed Framework signed between the US and North Korea, argued that the combination of pressure and sanctions to bring North Korea back to the negotiating table “doesn’t work and it hasn’t worked.”

He said he would rate the Biden administration’s North Korea policy a D, saying “sitting out there, just naked, our goal as a country to get to the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula is rather sterile,” adding that this goal should be “put in the context of a policy aimed at normalization of relations between the DPRK and the USA,” using the acronym for North Korea’s official name.

He also said that, although the US maintains it has “no hostile intent” toward North Korea, its actions, such as joint military drills with the South, “can look very hostile” to Pyongyang.

Robert Carlin, former chief of the Northeast Asia division in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research at the US Department of State, also said that North Korea, which barely fired any missiles in Biden’s first year in office in 2021, has changed its approach in 2022.

According to Carlin, there is reason for concern that North Korea may have given up on the goal it had since the time of Kim Il-sung in the ’90s of normalizing relations with the US to serve as a buffer against China and Russia. “I’m afraid that might be gone now,” Carlin said. He also pointed to the change in government in the South and its use of provocative language as a factor that may have further provoked the North.

Next, Susan Thornton, former acting assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, also predicted that sanctions against North Korea, which is already isolated from the outside world, “will not make any difference.”

“North Korea used to see the US as a potential balancer against a China that they were concerned about being too dominant,” she says, adding that now, North Korea believes that “they can count on China’s unconditional support” in the context of this “clash between the two superpowers.”

Jenny Town, a senior researcher at the Stimson Center, shared a similar analysis of the situation.

Town does not see the “political will of Washington” to actively pursue a peace treaty or a major deal of that caliber. Although some argue that the US should take the first step given its stronger military power, she said, in the current environment it’s difficult to see that happening.

The experts called for a much more proactive policy to respond to the escalating crisis on the peninsula and to North Korea’s excessive shift towards China.

Gallucci called for the US to make a serious proposal soon, not just the same proposals over and over again. According to Gallucci, it is necessary to be more creative and proactive than in the past, given that nothing the US has tried over the years has worked so far.

Similarly, Carlin called for “a serious policy review” from Washington that differs from that which the country has seen since 2001 or 2002. According to Carlin, the US should conduct a lengthy, public review of its policy to show North Korea it is serious and, when it’s done, the person in charge of the policy should go to Pyongyang and present it to the North Koreans.

Regarding the trust-building measures agreed upon by the leaders of the US and North Korea in Singapore in 2018, Joel Wit, the director of 38 North and who was also involved in the Agreed Framework, said there may be “room to strengthen the 2018 agreement, which is probably, I think, under some threat now.”

By Lee Bon-young, Washington correspondent

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]