Where to Now for the Trump Administration’s North Korea Policy?

President Trump and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un have now met three times. With a fair amount of fanfare and hope, Trump had held two summits with Kim. The first was in June 2018. The second, in February 2019. Those summits produced modest consequences. One of them was that, amid an exchange of friendly letters between the two leaders, North Korea refrained from provocative military actions while the United States scaled back joint military actions with South Korea. Then, over the weekend, with dramatic suddenness and circumstance, the two leaders held a third meeting, at the demilitarized zone. The forecasts coming out of each of these meetings, especially the most recent one, were optimistic, but the accomplishments have fallen far short of the goals of both leaders.

Yet hope springs eternal.

Trump’s goal hasn’t changed: to persuade Kim and the rest of the North Korean leadership that their abandonment of nuclear weapons and nuclear-weapons programs in favor of aggressive development of their country’s economy offers a path to greater personal wealth, popular support from the North Korean people, and favorable recognition in history. The administration’s effort, including the offer of U.S. development aid, to eliminate the North Korean nuclear threat by peaceful persuasion  is admirable. But just as the first two summits fell short of achieving that goal, so too the meeting to be held among nuclear experts from the two sides, as agreed at the DMZ meeting, will probably fall short.

Like Trump, Kim has not wavered in his objective: to remove the United States as an impediment to the achievement of the ultimate strategic goal sought by his grandfather, his father, and himself. That goal is the conquest of South Korea by force and the unification of the Korean Peninsula under his tyrannical rule.

As they conduct diplomatic discussions at the highest level, both sides continue to pursue their respective goals. For North Korea that has meant and, from all we can see, will continue to mean, the continuation of its annual military exercises, aimed at readying its army to invade South Korea through the tunnels it constructed under the border of the two countries; maintaining its vast array of artillery to the north of the southern border, within range of Seoul; and continuing to develop and strengthen its ability to fabricate nuclear weapons and deliver them by missile, or by other means, to locations as far away as cities in the continental United States.