[Analytics] US switches from simultaneously parallel action to all or nothing approach

After the second North Korea-US summit ended without a joint agreement, the US has been holding to an all-or-nothing approach in its negotiations over the North’s nuclear program, experts say. That would mean that the US has scrapped the step-by-step approach it exhibited prior to the summit and is determined to reach a “big deal” predicated on North Korea’s complete denuclearization. Hwang Joon-bum specially for the Hankyoreh.

“It really seems there’s an all-or-nothing approach right now from the administration. That seems to be backtracking [that] the Kim regime would not be very happy about,” said Frank Aum, a senior expert at the United States Institute of Peace, during a discussion about the second North Korea-US summit that was held in Washington on Mar. 8. Aum’s remarks draw attention to the fact that, since the rupture in the Hanoi summit, the US government has been taking a hardline approach to North Korea that differs from what came before the summit.

In regard to this, a senior official at the US State Department told reporters on Mar. 7 that there was no one in the US government who advocated a step-by-step approach to North Korea’s denuclearization and that he thought that North Korea’s complete denuclearization could be achieved before the end of US President Donald Trump’s first term in office (2021). This official also considerably raised the threshold for the concept of denuclearization, defining it as the elimination of nuclear warheads, fissile materials and the key parts of the nuclear fuel cycle; the elimination or destruction or all ICBMs; and a permanent freeze on all other programs for weapons of mass destruction.

That’s quite different from US State Department Special Representative for North Korea Stephen Biegun’s remarks prior to the summit, during a speech at Stanford on Jan. 31, about the principle of simultaneous and parallel action and from US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s repeated remarks that the US is aware that North Korea’s denuclearization will be a long process.

According to AFP, this “has been interpreted as a victory for National Security Advisor John Bolton, long a hawk on North Korea, over Pompeo and Biegun.” The wire service also concluded that Trump’s repeated emphasis on his good relationship with Kim was also evidence of an all-or-nothing approach.

The implication is that Trump believes that he can finesse his relationship with Kim into a one-time trade of complete denuclearization for complete sanctions relief. But assuming that everything can be achieved all at once is regarded by North Korea experts in the US as being completely unrealistic, the Washington Post said.

Amid these developments, US media outlets such as NPR and CNN reported on Mar. 9 that there were indications at the Sanumdong missile research complex near Pyongyang that North Korea was preparing to launch a missile or a satellite-bearing rocket.

After analyzing satellite imagery, Jeffrey Lewis, director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Project at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, made an unsettling prediction: “When you put all that together, that’s really what it looks like when the North Koreans are in the process of building a rocket.”