Michael Auslin is the Williams-Griffis fellow in contemporary Asia at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author of The End of the Asian Century.

Just days after Secretary of State Rex Tillerson stated that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un was demonstrating “some level of restraint” by refraining from firing his missiles, Pyongyang on Tuesday launched an intermediate-range ballistic missile over Japan, where it broke up before falling into the ocean. Despite multiple North Korean launches since the Trump administration came to power—18 already this year—Tillerson continues to argue that there remains a “pathway to sometime in the early future having some dialogue.”

President Donald Trump may be about to make his biggest mistake with North Korea. Contrary to popular opinion, the mistake is not threatening “fire and fury.” Rather it will be extending an open hand to Pyongyang and proposing a new set of diplomatic negotiations. Once Trump does that, he owns America’s failed North Korea policy, and he will almost certainly fail in turn. He thus has one last chance to disavow the mistakes of the past quarter-century and forge a new policy designed to deal realistically with a nuclear North Korea. The odds are he won’t take it.


The great trap the administration is barreling toward is the chimera of a nuclear-free North Korea. Writing jointly two weeks ago in the Wall Street Journal, Tillerson and Secretary of Defense James Mattis said that the administration’s goal is to “achieve the complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula and a dismantling of the regime’s ballistic missile programs.” To do so, “diplomacy is our preferred means,” wrote the two senior officials. Pyongyang’s response was to send a missile shooting past Japan’s fifth-largest city, Sapporo.

After nearly 25 years of diplomatic failure to achieve just this very goal, it strains credulity to think that Kim would give up his family’s three-generation dream of obtaining nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them anywhere in the world. Indeed, Kim is within striking distance of achieving what his grandfather and father could only imagine: a credible, multi-layered arsenal of nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles, and, one day, possibly even a ballistic missile submarine.

To put it as bluntly as possible, North Korea will never surrender its nuclear arsenal willingly, under any conditions. For decades, the Kims have been offered everything possible to induce them to do so, and they have cheated on every agreement they have made while steadily building their capability. Now that Kim the younger sees the reality of putting the American homeland at nuclear risk, thereby almost ensuring the permanent safety of his regime, why would he give that up? It simply makes no sense to do so.

And if hopeful U.S. officials believe that they, for some reason, have a real chance at denuclearization, then listen to the North Koreans themselves, who state as clearly as can be that they will never give up their weapons. That’s not a negotiating tactic. It’s a statement of fact. Not to recognize that we are in a different world from eight or 16 years ago is an analytical error of momentous proportions.

Here is where Trump and his team are about to make their mistake. If they do propose a new round of negotiations, then they have, in effect, adopted the failed approach of three presidents before them: Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. The North Korean crisis, which Trump inherited, will now be something that he owns. And short of an unexpected collapse of the Kim regime, Trump will leave office with no deal and a fully nuclear-capable North Korea, to boot.

What the president should do is simple, if radical. He should admit the failure of America’s North Korea policy since the 1990s and abandon the fantasy of “complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization.” Instead, he should acknowledge that North Korea is a nuclear weapons-capable state, and that the United States will treat it as such. That means revamping U.S. policy toward explicit containment and deterrence of a nuclear North Korea. That is the only realistic policy toward a problem that has no good solution.

The truth is that the United States, along with its ally South Korea, has been deterring the North for the past 60 years. As such, Trump would only be stating the obvious. Deterrence against a nuclear North Korea, however, won’t look like deterrence against the Soviet Union. North Korea does not have an empire to defend or proxies to support; it will not get involved in wars far from its borders, nor will it have a globe-girdling military that Washington will have to track and oppose at multiple points. This will be a cold war, but it is not a repeat of the Cold War. As such, U.S. policymakers and analysts will have to rethink deterrence from the ground up. How will concepts such as signaling work against a nuclear Pyongyang? Can there be clear “escalation ladders”—clear articulated responses to North Korean threats—and “off ramps”—exit strategies for cooling things down—in case a conflict does break out? Living with a nuclear North Korea will require a different set of skills than one committed to endless negotiations.

One danger is that the American public may begin to question the U.S. commitment to South Korea that puts it in the nuclear bull's-eye of North Korea. Pyongyang poses no existential political threat to Western civilization, liberal capitalism— or even the United States. Yes, it can wreak havoc, but it is not seeking to expand its ideology past its borders or take over nations unconnected with its standoff with South Korea.

Containing North Korea, then, is not about preventing expansion. It is about reducing and crimping Pyongyang’s freedom of action abroad. Washington will have to think carefully about what containment means, including how much we will try to end North Korea’s manifest illicit activities that help provide the revenue for its nuclear program. We will have to begin thinking of sanctions strictly as punishments, not as inducements to come back to the negotiating table. And Trump and his successors will have to carefully draw very specific red lines for North Korean proliferation, and back up U.S. pronouncements with the willingness to use limited military force. In short, Trump will have to come up with a new declaratory policy for U.S. action against North Korea.

All of this will have to be done in close concert with our allies, mainly South Korea and Japan. Yet the impulse in Seoul, where a dovish president was just elected, is for more negotiations, and undoubtedly more compromises. This is exactly what North Korea wants. Going back to the table means more years of delay, obfuscation and not-so-stealthy progress toward nuclear prowess. China wants this, too, as it maintains the North as a buffer state on the peninsula, gives Beijing greater influence in guiding events, and diverts U.S. attention from coming up with a more realistic plan to deter and contain Pyongyang. Washington will have to resist calls for more meaningless negotiations, and instead focus on a realistic plan for protecting American interests as well as those of allies who understand that the old approach cannot work.

Trump sees himself as a master negotiator, capable of sitting down with any foe to hammer out a deal. When it comes to North Korea, there’s no deal to be had. He should tighten the screws on Kim instead of trying to reason with him—or he will come to regret it.