A sudden change in US policy

Over four thousand miles away from Pyongyang on the 3rd of January 2020, events began to unfold on a service road on the outskirts of Baghdad International Airport—events that would have repercussions across the world. Overnight American policy changed and enemy military leaders and authoritarian political figures were put on high alert. The US had just ordered a drone strike to assassinate Irans No. 2 in command, General Qassem Soleimani, head of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Quds Force. The reason? He was supposedly planning attacks against American diplomats and service members, thus he had to be eliminated in a preemptive move.

Such an assassination of another country’s high-level military official has largely been unprecedented in recent times. Even though the new year has only just begun, the world seems to be going in a very wrong direction and further political and military escalations are likely. Political leaders who consider the US a threat or enemy will be particularly on edge after the Soleimani episode. One of those leaders will undoubtedly be North Korea’s Kim Jong Un.

Frustrated negotiations

The DPRK has been involved in negotiations with the US on easing sanctions for several years now, with the past two years seeing an extensive display of in-person diplomacy between the leaders of both countries. The main hurdle to getting sanctions lifted has been the DPRK’s insistence to get sanctions relief before it completely halts its nuclear weapons program. North Korea has been turned into a virtual hermit state due to punishing sanctions that were meant to persuade it to abandon its search for a nuclear deterrent. After years of sanctions and economic chaos, the DPRK decided to increase its efforts to find a solution. The election of Donald Trump gave the isolated regime newfound hope to finally find this solution they had so long been looking for.

Trump’s DPRK approach

Soon after his election win in 2016, US President Donald Trump publicly embarked on a war of words with Chairman Kim. While this generated a great deal of media attention it also helped the President energize his base and appear strong on foreign policy, in contrast to his predecessors who took a more conservative approach to the hermit kingdom and tried to deal with it through back channels and diplomatic routes. Despite the rough start, Trump and Kim’s relationship soon evolved into a more friendly one. Kim Jong Un was eventually able to have two face-to-face summits with President Trump, one in Singapore and another in Vietnam, as well as lower-level meetings with various US diplomats and government officials; quite the contrast compared to previous US administrations DPRK policies.

Trump and Kim meeting at Freedom House near the DMZ in June 2019

US increases tensions on the Korean Peninsula

DPRK-US relations have, however, come to somewhat of a stalemate ever since the Hanoi Summit came to an abrupt end in February 2019. Negotiations have since then come to a halt, with North Korea accusing the US of being deceitful and wasting their time with bad proposals. The events in Baghdad will without a doubt give Chairman Kim some pause for thought since there’s no guarantee Trump wouldn’t do the same to other political and military figures in other countries under the guise of ‘preemptive action’. To make matters worse for Kim, recently, local South Korean media reported that the same MQ-9 Reaper drones that were used in the assassination of General Soleimani have been deployed to the US Forces Korea (USFK) to reinforce security on the Korean Peninsula. While drones deployments are nothing new (the USFK military has had 12 MQ-1C Gray Eagle drones since 2018), the increase of such weapons on the peninsula is a worrying trend for the North.

This recent incident with Iran further highlights Trump’s willingness to deal with perceived threats through lethal force in a very public manner without even consulting Congress beforehand. This can’t possibly give Kim Jong Un any confidence that the US won’t do the same to him, at least under Trump’s leadership.

From friendly allies to disagreeing partners

To further underscore the Trump administration’s divergence from previous ones, the current government is urging allies around the world to increase the amount they pay for their security. Some notable examples are Japan and South Korea. The latter is being asked to increase its share of funding the US military presence on the ground from the current $896m to up to $5bn per year; a more than fivefold increase. The sixth round of talks took place earlier this week with both sides still failing to come to an agreement. As of this writing, Seoul continues to refuse to pay the exorbitant amount.

Besides increasing its share of defense spending, the US this week reportedly requested South Korea to dispatch military forces to the Strait of Hormuz to help aid US efforts in keeping the Middle East ‘secure’. Seoul has so far refused this as well but internal talks on the matter are still ongoing.

In addition to military affairs, the US-ROK alliance is also suffering in the diplomacy sphere. President Moon’s administration has long advocated for a much more liberal approach to dealing with North Korea and has tried repeatedly to push inter-Korean projects forward. The Moon government has had little success, though, mainly due to the US hardline approach. These differences in diplomatic approaches came to a head this week when the US ambassador the South Korea, Harry Harris, made some comments against Moon’s plans that earned him comparisons with previous Japanese colonial leaders. Not the smoothest start to 2020 for US-ROK relations.

Sanctions regime

The pressure seems to be mounting on the DPRK, and it remains unsure at what point the regime will break—if it breaks—due to international sanctions that continue to cripple its economy. In fact, the North Korean economy shrunk by 4.1% in 2018 due, in large part, to the punitive sanctions. Sanctions are continuously being tightened to further pressure North Korea to change its stance, but concrete results are yet to be seen. The North’s ability to fund its regime through illicit activity is also being curtailed, with overseas North Korean workers being forced to return home by a UN-imposed December 2019 deadline.

North Korean restaurant in Moscow, photo source.

Although many have returned home, an unknown number remain abroad despite the sanctions. President Moon is also increasingly calling for a resumption of tours to Mt. Kumgang and argues tourism does not fall under the sanctions regime.

A grim 2020 outlook

If North Korea is truly threatened by such overtures by the US, Kim Jong Un will likely want to conduct a maximum pressure campaign of his own against the international community and the US once this Iran-US incident has had its news cycle.

North Korea will likely begin conducting missile tests and increasing its war of words against the world. Chairman Kim is smart enough to realize the opportunities the upcoming election in the US will present him to put pressure on the Trump administration to deal with his demands through diplomatic channels, not via a drone piloted by a US Air Force soldier from a shipping container in the Nevada desert.

Kim Jong Un has repeatedly emphasized his country’s need to have nuclear weapons in order to deter the US from regime change. This latest move by the US will only reaffirm this stance and reconfirm that the North’s greatest fear—regime change—is not as unthinkable as some may argue. With negotiations having largely failed, Trump’s attention elsewhere, an increasingly tense US-ROK alliance, and a paranoid-as-ever North Korea, 2020 seems off to a shaky start for the Korean Peninsula.

Cover photo source