President Donald Trump‘s recent summit with South Korean counterpart Lee Jae Myung set the stage for a shared effort to rekindle peace talks with North Korea following a failed effort during the U.S. leader’s first administration.
But the situation has grown far more complex since Trump last teamed with a progressive South Korean president to foster negotiations with North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un.
Kim has ordered an unprecedented deployment of troops to aid Russia amid its war with Ukraine, fortifying a landmark mutual defense treaty reached last year with Moscow, and has accelerated military developments, showing little sign of abandoning a nuclear arsenal that Pyongyang ties to its survival. At the same time, he has rejected overtures from Seoul and even dropped the goal of unification with South Korea as a national objective.
Analysts and former officials worry that such challenges to the status quo that thus far has prevented a major conflict from erupting across the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) since its establishment at the end of the Korean War more than seven decades ago have added new volatility to an increasingly unpredictable equation.
“There is a real and growing risk of Kim Jong Un initiating a renewed conflict in Korea,” Markus Garlauskas, director of the Indo-Pacific Security Initiative of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, told Newsweek. “I am concerned that just because there has not been major aggression by the North recently, and because Kim appears to have abandoned Korean unification as a goal, too many Americans have become complacent on this risk.”
“Too many Americans are locked into a very backward-looking view of deterrence in Korea, focused on deterring an all-out offensive, which is setting the bar in the wrong place…and glossing over how much has changed,” added Garlauskas, who previously served in a number of U.S. intelligence positions focused on North Korea as well as at U.S. Forces Korea, “particularly in North Korea’s improved nuclear and non-nuclear strike capabilities and the strategic alignment of China, Russia and North Korea.”
North Korea’s ‘Strongest Strategic Position’
While North Korea, officially known as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), has often been portrayed in the West as a paper tiger in terms of its military capabilities and geopolitical influence, U.S. officials have been sounding the alarm over what they assess to be Pyongyang’s efforts to simultaneously shore up its warfighting prowess and enhance its international partnerships.
In its annual threat assessment released in March, the Office for the Direction of National Intelligence (ODNI) described North Korea as being “in its strongest strategic position in decades, possessing the military means to hold at risk U.S. forces and U.S. allies in Northeast Asia, while continuing to improve its capability to threaten the U.S. Homeland.”
Kim, for his part, “is increasingly confident in his international political legitimacy and regime security,” according to the ODNI assessment.
This legitimacy has been given new weight by the acceleration of ties in recent years, and particularly over the past year, between Kim and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Pyongyang and Moscow’s relationship dates to North Korea’s founding as a Soviet-backed state, led by Kim Jong Un’s grandfather, Kim Il Sung, standing opposite U.S.-backed South Korea after World War II and the subsequent war fought between the two sides from 1950-1953. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 was accompanied by a famine that marked the most devastating chapter in North Korea’s history and led to greater reliance on China.
Since coming to power in 2012, Kim has sought to rebalance his country’s great power ties by investing in more robust ties with Moscow. He oversaw a new chapter in this endeavor last year when he ordered the deployment of thousands of troops to support Russian forces seeking to repel a Ukrainian cross-border offensive.
Kim’s decision in recent months to acknowledge and even embrace this expeditionary action has underlined the ruler’s notion of North Korea playing an outsized role in world affairs.
Garlauskas said he agreed with the ODNI’s latest assessments and warned that “the interconnectivity” between flashpoints in Europe and Asia “makes this much more risky than before, as does North Korea’s growing nuclear capabilities.”
“As North Korea’s military capabilities improve with Russia’s support, Kim’s risk calculus is likely to change,” he said, “and it will be hard to anticipate the moment when he decides to again use military force to achieve North Korea’s ends at a time and place where he can have a military and political advantage.”
How such a conflict may play out was the subject of a tabletop exercise Garlauskas participated in alongside his team at the Indo-Pacific Security Initiative and U.S. government officials in May.
Among the conclusions he reached was that “an escalating South Korea-U.S. conflict with North Korea will likely become about the future of the global nuclear order, the credibility of U.S. extended deterrence, and the potential unification of the long-divided Korean peninsula.”
Threats From Within
While Kim exudes confidence from strengthening his public position, however, some point to looming internal trends that may also affect his calculus.
Domestic developments in North Korea are notoriously difficult to track, even for current U.S. officials, given the nation’s ironclad security regime, limited ties to the outside world and adherence to the distinct Juche ideology centered on sovereignty and self-reliance. But Kim’s rare acknowledgement of setbacks, including his allusions to a new “Arduous March”—a term last used to describe the post-Soviet famine era—hint at cracks in the traditional narrative.
“North Korea has considerable internal instability,” Bruce Bennett, a senior defense researcher at the RAND Corporation, told Newsweek. “This instability reflects the failure of North Korea to meet the needs of its people, include food, other consumables, and other items.”
“This is a particular problem with the North Korean elites who historically have expected a much better life than the common people, and yet now are having difficulty sustaining even a modest life,” said Bennett, who formerly served at the Office of the Secretary of Defense and U.S. Forces Korea, among other government positions.
While Kim’s position as third-generation supreme leader affords him unquestioned command over the country, reports indicated he was forced to fight for this status, having been named heir apparent only a year before his father’s death. Kim, who was the world’s youngest leader at the time of his ascension to power, oversaw purges of alleged opponents, most notably his powerful uncle, Jang Song Thaek, while elevating a new-generation cadre.
There have since been little public manifestations of those questioning Kim’s authority. But as he allocates growing number of funds from the world’s most heavily sanctioned nation toward military achievements while South Korea’s economic growth accelerates, Bennett argued that Kim’s decision last year to renounce unification ran the risk of stirring new dissent.
“When Kim renounced unification a year and a half ago, he also uprooted the hopes of many of his elites who were counting on unification giving them, over time, a lifestyle more like that of South Korea,” Bennett said. “They had, after all, concluded that the Kim family regime was unable to meet their needs, and information leaks into North Korea told them that South Koreans lived much better than they do.”
The situation is “further complicated” by North Korea’s military deployment to Russia, which U.S. and South Korean intelligence estimate could number up to 15,000 personnel.
“In North Korea, the Kim family regime evaluates all people based upon their political reliability to the regime,” Bennett said. “At the most aggregate level, people are considered core class, wavering class or hostile class. When Kim decided to send soldiers to Russia, he did not send hostile-class soldiers because in most cases they are not trained in the use of firearms.”
“And when he decided to send special forces, he was basically deciding to send children of the elite families—the core class,” Bennett said, noting that many of these “core class” families have only “one son.”
As such, after a period of suppressing information regarding the deployment, which Bennett said reportedly included isolating a number of elite-class families, Kim’s decision to open up in April and begin honoring the families of those slain abroad may have another motive aimed at addressing grievances.
In any case, Bennett warned that tensions simmering from within the seemingly impenetrable fortress of North Korea could propel Kim toward more radical actions.
“No one really knows how bad the instability in North Korea is, not even Kim,” Bennett said. “But at some point, he may decide that he needs a diversion for especially his elites. At that point, he could carry out a limited nuclear weapon attack.”
Like Garlauskas, Bennett has also participated in war game exercises analyzing a North Korea attack scenario. The result, he said, is that “existing U.S. deterrence strategy may not deter Kim from carrying out such a nuclear attack”
“And that is especially true the larger his nuclear weapon inventory gets,” he added. “So, the United States can ill afford to ignore the tensions and risks on the Korean Peninsula.”
Coming Back to the Table
As Trump learned during his first administration in dealing with North Korea, and continues to grapple with the Russia-Ukraine war and the war in Gaza, advancing peace is far easier said than done.
Following a period of heightened tensions in 2017, Trump became the first sitting U.S. president to meet a North Korean ruler the following year, raising hopes for a deal that would involve denuclearization for peace and sanctions relief. After two more meetings, however, the process unraveled in 2019, with frictions quickly returning to the peninsula.
But there are lessons to be learned from the process.
“If Kim wants to make a deal, he will have to accept that at least, in principle, such a deal would be considered an interim step to full denuclearization, to give room for the U.S. and South Korea to negotiate,” Garlauskas said, “just as the U.S. and South Korea would have to accept that Kim is not going to easily trade away the capabilities he’s invested in and from which he is gaining so much leverage.”
Bennett advised that Washington and Seoul recalibrate their approaches away from totally shuttering Kim’s advancing program and toward “halting that nuclear weapon growth or at least seriously restraining it,” which he described as “a more appropriate objective given that North Korea is unlikely to ever relinquish its nuclear weapons.”
Observers have also argued that Trump’s decision in June to launch direct strikes against the nuclear facilities of Iran, which has engaged in talks with the U.S. though without possessing a nuclear arsenal of its own, has only prompted Kim to tighten his grip on his arsenal.
There are some positive signs indicating diplomacy is attainable, however. For one, Trump and Kim have avoided direct criticism of each other despite the rising tensions.
Kim’s influential sister, Korean Workers’ Party Publicity and Information Department Deputy Director Kim Yo Jong, said last month that her brother’s relationship with Trump was “not bad.” Trump, speaking at the meeting with his South Korean counterpart on Monday, said he had a “great relationship” with the North Korean leader.
South Korea’s Lee has also played a supportive role. Seoul’s new progressive president has once again named engagement with Pyongyang as a priority after a period of hostility under his ousted predecessor, President Yoon Suk Yeol, and, in meeting Trump, described the U.S. leader as “the only person who can resolve” the inter-Korean issue.
Jean H. Lee, presidential chair at the East-West Center in Honolulu and co-host of the Lazarus Heist podcast for the BBC World Service, said the alignment between Trump and Lee Jae Myung “certainly presents the potential for an opportunity for the type of diplomacy with North Korea that we saw in 2018 and 2019.”
Yet she cautioned that the situation today “is far different than it was in 2019,” with Kim having “focused on strengthening and diversifying his weapons arsenal, and billions in cybertheft as well as help from Russia.” All of this, she said, has “certainly helped him get closer to his goals and where he wants to be for any future negotiations with President Trump.”
“If that negotiation was tough in 2018 and 2019,” Jean H. Lee told Newsweek, “it’s only exponentially more difficult six, seven years later when North Korea has focused almost everything on building up that program despite the U.S. government’s best efforts to try to stop the flow of money into the program through cyber-attacks.”
So, while she felt the “strong show of rapport between the U.S. and South Korean presidents” would “help set the stage for potential diplomacy with North Korea,” she also said such a process would only take place after “a sequence of events” through which all three parties could demonstrate their concrete commitment toward a new peace process.
“And I think we will continue to see North Korea aligning with Russia for as long as it suits both Kim’s and Putin’s interests,” she said. “And we’ll see North Korea continue to rebuff South Korea overtures for the time being.”
“But just like these leaders are thinking a few steps ahead,” she added, “we should be prepared for the potential for diplomacy down the road.”
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