One of the great foreign policy disappointments of Donald Trump’s first term was the failure to advance his initial promising initiative to begin normalizing relations with the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). Trump had abandoned the threats and bluster toward Pyongyang that marked his early months in office. Instead, he moved to open a personal dialogue with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un and facilitate productive negotiations on several important issues. That approach led to an unprecedented U.S.-DPRK summit meeting in Singapore on June 12, 2018 and, later on, to a famous sight: the U.S. president crossing the Demilitarized Zone from South Korea into the communist North on June 29, 2019, to hold a brief chat with Kim.
Unfortunately, Trump failed to prevent hawks from both parties in Congress and in the overall national security establishment from sabotaging such conciliatory efforts. Indeed, the president made a fatal blunder of his own by appointing the rabidly hawkish John Bolton as his National Security Advisor. Congressional opponents of any meaningful relationship between the United States and the DPRK also excoriated Trump for moving to reduce Washington’s confrontational stance toward Pyongyang.
Indeed, hardliners in Congress and the broader policy community denounced the president for his willingness even to interact with Kim. The United States gave the odious dictator a huge boost in prestige, critics contended, merely by affording him a face-to-face meeting with the president and treating him as an equal. “In his haste to reach an agreement, President Trump elevated North Korea to the level of the United States while preserving the regime’s status quo,” intoned House minority leader Nancy Pelosi.
Despite that bruising political experience during his first term, Trump has indicated that he would be receptive to a new dialogue with the North Korean leader before the end of 2026. “I get along with him well,” Trump stated. “And you know what? The fact that I get along with him, that’s a very good thing, not a bad thing.”
On the delicate and difficult issue of relations with North Korea, Trump’s instincts are correct. A new summit meeting would be a useful first step toward ending the dangerous policy rigidity that, except for Trump’s all-too-brief interlude, has plagued the U.S. stance toward North Korea for decades.
To achieve a constructive breakthrough, however, the president must go on the offensive against a host of vitriolic, often partisan, detractors. Even his mild new outreach to Pyongyang is already drawing fire akin to the ideological and partisan attacks that doomed his efforts in 2018 and 2019. The rhetoric of Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI) was typical. “Kim Jong Un is not, I think, terribly impressed with Donald Trump. And withdrawing forces from Korea, canceling exercises, plays into his game.” Trump in a Truth Social post the previous Sunday stated that he told Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to “substantially reduce” planned joint military exercises alongside South Korean forces.
The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board echoed Reed’s opposition to Trump’s conciliatory gestures to Pyongyang. “President Trump is nothing if not impulsive, and his latest brainstorm is to rekindle his courtship of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un.” The Journal’s editors were especially annoyed that Trump had cited his “very good relationship” with Kim and had contended that U.S. military exercises with South Korea “send a signal that is totally inappropriate and hostile, to a Country that, as long as Donald J. Trump has been President, has been unthreatening and respectful.”
The editors expressed alarm at the president’s approach. “This will reinforce the growing belief in Asia and Europe that the U.S. is becoming an unreliable ally,” they fumed. “It may also increase the calls in the South for Seoul to develop its own nuclear deterrent.”
Despite the shrill criticism, Trump’s latest initiative actually is a cautious, overdue effort to jump-start meaningful diplomacy with Pyongyang. The real danger is that such a modest, conciliatory effort will be too little, too late.
Except for Trump’s brief foray into realism in 2018-19, U.S. policy toward North Korea has been stuck in a time warp for decades that is totally detached from reality. For example, Joe Biden’s administration still pursued the fanciful objective of inducing or compelling the DPRK to return to nuclear virginity. U.S. leaders since George H. W. Bush have made that demand the central feature of U.S. policy regarding the Korean peninsula.
It was an impractical objective even during the 1990s and the earliest years of the twenty-first century. It is laughably delusional in 2026. Experts at the U.S. Arms Control Association estimate that North Korea has assembled approximately 50 warheads. Other sources place the likely figure even higher. The DPRK also is building an increasingly capable ballistic missile system to deliver such weapons. Kim’s government has tested several long-range missiles, and there are credible indications that such missiles already may have sufficient range to reach the continental United States.
It is worse than useless to ignore Pyongyang’s mounting nuclear and missile capabilities. Yet at the present time, the United States has no formal relations whatsoever with a volatile regional power that could do serious damage to America’s economic and security interests.
Trump needs to push back hard against the hawkish obstructionists on both sides of the political aisle. Indeed, the president needs to do far more than merely hold another flashy, high-profile summit meeting with Kim. The Trump administration needs to initiate a wide-ranging, pragmatic set of negotiations with Pyongyang on the nuclear issue, establish official diplomatic relations between the two governments, conclude a formal peace treaty ending the Korean War, and lift the massive array of U.S. economic sanctions against the DPRK. That would be a good start.
Reprinted with permission from Antiwar.com.
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