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US Republican Party nominee for president Donald Trump and Democratic nominee Vice President Kamala Harris. (AP/Yonhap)

The goal of North Korea’s denuclearization is absent from the US Democratic Party’s latest party platform, in a change from its previous platform.

The revised 2024 platform, which was released by the Democratic National Committee on Sunday, includes the following section about the Korean Peninsula: “President Biden has also worked alongside our allies to counter the threat posed by North Korea’s destabilizing development of nuclear and missile programs, in violation of multiple UN Security Council resolutions. By bolstering our trilateral cooperation with South Korea and Japan, we are maintaining peace and stability in the Korean Peninsula and beyond.”

While the updated platform stresses “trilateral cooperation with South Korea and Japan,” which the Biden administration touts as one of its main achievements, it drops language about building “a sustained, coordinated diplomatic campaign to advance the longer-term goal of denuclearization” that appeared in the 2020 platform.

The new platform was announced during the opening ceremony of the party’s national convention in Chicago, with the presidential election just a few months away, in November.

The Republican Party’s platform, which was released this past July, not only fails to address denuclearization but doesn’t even mention North Korea or the Korean Peninsula.

That’s a big change from the hard-line demand for “complete, verifiable and irreversible dismantlement” of the North Korean nuclear program that appeared in the Republican Party’s platforms in 2016 and 2020.

The South Korean government responded to the silence on denuclearization in the Democratic Party’s platform by asserting that the US hasn’t abandoned the goal of denuclearization. If the US were to actually drop that policy goal, it would mean de facto toleration of North Korea as a nuclear weapon state, which would be a major scandal in South Korea.

“The international community, including South Korea and the US, remain firmly committed to North Korea’s denuclearization. We will remain in close communication and cooperation with the Americans about policy toward North Korea and its nuclear program regardless of the outcome of the US presidential election,” said Lee Jae-woong, the spokesperson for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

But experts note that there’s a growing sense in the US that North Korea’s nuclearization is no longer feasible, a sense that’s likely to be reflected in the next administration’s policy. Such a shift might have catastrophic consequences for the administration of South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol, who has doubled down on a policy of digging in his heels on North Korea.

“The view that North Korea’s denuclearization is not practicable has been spreading through the US, among both Democrats and Republicans. That reflects a shift from denuclearization to ‘management’ [of the North Korean nuclear program],” said Cho Sung-ryul, visiting professor of military studies at Kyungnam University and former consul general to Osaka.

“There’s an irreversible shift toward believing that state resources shouldn’t be squandered on matters that are ‘unnecessary,’ from the American point of view, such as North Korea’s denuclearization,” Cho said.

“If the Democrats return to power, they’ll make a point of reasoning with South Korea and accommodating its position because of their priority on American alliances. But Trump will make a unilateral and coercive push to scale back the US troop presence in South Korea and to halt joint military exercises in exchange for North Korea giving up the capacity to launch intercontinental ballistic missiles that can strike the US,” he predicted.

If the US policy on the North Korean nuclear program shifts from denuclearization to disarmament negotiations, it will certainly create daylight with the Yoon administration’s hard-line stance on North Korea. Some think these changes in the US are behind Yoon’s abrupt overtures for dialogue with North Korea, including the proposal for an inter-Korean deliberative body, in his recent speech on Liberation Day, on Aug. 15.

Mira Rapp-Hooper, the senior director for East Asia and Oceania at the US National Security Council, remarked in March that the US “remains committed to the complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula but [will] consider interim steps on that pathway to denuclearization.”

A growing number of experts in the US assert that as North Korea’s nuclear weapon and missile capabilities grow ever more dangerous, there’s no realistic way of persuading the North to give up nuclear weapons in a short timeframe. As such, these experts say, South Korea and the US need to establish a new strategy that’s focused on reducing the threat through confidence building and arms control with North Korea.

By Park Min-hee, senior staff writer

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