Experts weigh in on how Biden should approach North Korea

SEOUL, Dec. 10 (UPI) -- With a pandemic raging and the economy reeling at home, North Korea may not be the top priority for President-elect Joe Biden when he takes office next month. But the secretive nuclear-armed state looms as one of his biggest foreign policy challenges.

On Thursday, a group of experts with wide-ranging experience in North Korean affairs discussed the issues awaiting the Biden administration at the 2020 International Symposium on Sustainable Peace on the Korean Peninsula, held at Yonsei University in Seoul both offline and through video conferencing.

Joseph Yun, who was U.S. Special Representative for North Korean Policy from 2016 to 2018, said that one of the first things Biden should do is assure North Korean leader Kim Jong Un that Washington is planning to re-engage and build upon the steps made by his predecessor.

"The most important thing is whether we can persuade North Korea to be patient," Yun said.

"In my view, what the Biden team has to do as soon as possible, even before Inauguration Day, is to send a message. And that message ideally should [say] that the Biden administration acknowledges and recognizes the Singapore joint statement between Kim Jong Un and Donald Trump."

A summit between Kim and President Trump in Singapore in June 2018 produced a joint declaration in which Kim "reaffirmed his firm and unwavering commitment to complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula," while Trump committed to providing security guarantees to North Korea.

The two sides also agreed to work together to establish improved relations and build a lasting and stable peace regime on the peninsula.

Yun said that he didn't believe Biden would revert to the Obama-era policy of "strategic patience" in dealing with North Korea, but was concerned that Pyongyang would send a threatening message of its own during the transition period.

"Quite frankly, I'm very worried about what North Korea will do in the meantime," he said. "If it's the case, as it was in 2017, where North Korea welcomes a new president through a provocation such as a missile launch or nuclear test, then all bets are off."

Robert Gallucci, a professor at Georgetown University and a former assistant secretary of state, said he expected that Biden would lay the groundwork for high-level diplomatic talks but would not revert to Trump's top-down style of diplomacy, which led to which led to made-for-TV moments, but ultimately did little to lead to denuclearization.

"My expectation is that we will not continue with theater as diplomacy," Gallucci said. "I'm hoping that we engage in good old-fashioned diplomacy and have a working diplomat sit down at a table and expect to be at that table for some period of time."

Gallucci, who led the U.S. negotiations with North Korea on the 1994 Agreed Framework, said that the long-term goal of diplomacy should be normalizing of relations with North Korea, and that Washington should seek buy-in from other countries in the region.

"What [North Korea] can trust is a true normalized relationship with the U.S.," he said. "They will not trust a declaration on a piece of paper."

"It is profoundly in the interests of Seoul and Tokyo and Beijing and Washington that normalization take place," he added. "Not only normalization of relations between North Korea and the United States but normalization of the state of North Korea in the international political system."

Gallucci said that complete denuclearization remains the desired outcome, but cautioned that North Korea will always be a "threshold state," with the knowledge and ability to restart its nuclear program and the capacity to hide small amounts of fissile material.

"The amount of material we're trying to make sure North Korea doesn't have is a few baseballs in terms of size for each fissile core of a nuclear weapon," he said. "So are we going to be sure we've got every baseball collected?"

Siegfried Hecker, senior fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University and former director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, agreed that fully verifying the denuclearization of North Korea is going to be an enormous challenge, especially if North Korea is not an engaged partner.

"Verification to zero in an adversarial environment is impossible," he said.

The nuclear program is North Korea's "national pride," Hecker added. "It's actually a place where they feel they have succeeded. And now you're expecting them to just give it away. They're not going to do that."

Hecker said that technical experts should be closely involved in the diplomatic process to better understand the terms of any deals being negotiated.

"It's a huge technical and military enterprise and you must understand these aspects If you're going to construct that parallel reciprocal process," he said. "if you're going to give something on the normalization end, you want to make sure that what you get back in denuclearization actually reduces the risks."

A key sticking point in negotiations with North Korea has been demands by Washington for full denuclearization before offering any relief from the punishing international sanctions that have remained in place since 2017.

Kim Joon-hyung, chancellor of the Korea National Diplomatic Academy, said that progress will have to be made in smaller steps.

"If Washington is truly serious about offering absolutely zero relief until full denuclearization, that is a non-starter," Kim said.

"It seemed to [North Korea] that there weren't any concessions from the U.S. Unless they see reciprocity, they will not come back to the negotiating table. It's more realistic for the two sides to build trust through a small deal."

Kim said the administration of South Korean President Moon Jae-in should "make a full effort to persuade Biden not to abandon what Trump accomplished and to pursue a more practical approach while combining his own bottom-up diplomacy with his predecessor's top-down approach."