Senators lament US failure on North Korea denuclearization, look to next steps

Senators said Wednesday that the United States had failed in its policy to contain North Korea’s nuclear ambitions and now needed to focus on short-term “risk reduction” as the pariah state ramps up its testing programs and threats.

Last week, North Korea adopted a constitutional amendment effectively doubling down on its commitment to become a nuclear power, which followed leader Kim Jong Un’s moves to accelerate nuclear weapon production.  

North Korea has test-fired more than 100 missiles since early 2022, ratcheting up tensions with neighbors South Korea and Japan.

During a hearing Wednesday of the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee on East Asia, Chairman Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) said it was time for the U.S. to develop a North Korea strategy that accounts for these developments.

“What we’ve been doing is clearly not successful, at least in achieving the goal as we’ve stated it, which is denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula,” Van Hollen said. “That’s a very worthy goal, but in practice, clearly, we’ve not been able to achieve it. 

Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) shared similar frustration, characterizing it as “whistling past this graveyard” and asking the witnesses to provide some short-term steps for “good outcomes.” 

“They keep getting better and better and seem to be totally undeterred, and we just need a new pathway,” Schatz said. “Forget denuclearizing the peninsula, let’s talk about risk reduction in the short-term.” 

Victor Sha, a Koreas expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, recommended deploying inspectors in tandem with addressing the sanctions that most frustrated North Korea.

“But if we ever to get back into a negotiation, as a former negotiator, the first steps would be threat reduction, risk reduction, freezing Pyongyang, getting inspectors back in, trying to get into the experimental light water reactor,” Sha said.

“In exchange for things like reducing sanctions, the 2016/2017 sanctions, the general sector sanctions, which were the ones that North Koreans were most concerned about when President Trump met them in Vietnam.” 

Trump aggressively pursued diplomacy with Kim during his time in the White House but failed to secure commitments from North Korea to curtail its nuclear ambitions. President Biden has made little public effort to restart negotiations.

During a state visit from South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol, Biden said that any nuclear attack from Pyongyang “will result in the end of whatever regime were to take such an action.”

Jenny Town, senior fellow at the Stimson Center, told senators that the U.S. should still work towards denuclearizing the entire Korean Peninsula but also consider ways to encourage broader change in North Korean society.

“North Korea’s thinking of denuclearization, on its nuclear program, has fundamentally changed. So whatever hope we had before is even less now. But that does not mean we give up,” she said.

“But in the meantime, I think we really need to define what our other goals with North Korea are. There were trends, for instance, that were promising in North Korea prior to 2017/2018 when negotiations started, and those were the rise of markets, growing socioeconomic space and social change that was happening inside the country.”  

She said America’s punitive approach to North Korea was proving counterproductive to U.S. aims of scaling down the nuclear threat, and suggested that sanctions should focus on “dual-use” goods that could be used for building weapons.

Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) also expressed concern that the U.S. does not have a consistent strategy or policy when it comes to dealing with North Korea.

“What we’ve done so far, from what I can tell, has not worked,” Romney said. He invited the witnesses to share the lessons they had learned from the past diplomatic efforts with North Korea that started in the 1990s.  

Sha said the deal the U.S. is pushing — conditional upon North Korea freezing or disbanding its nuclear program — does not align with what Pyongyang is willing to do.

“One of the main lessons I’ve learned from this, it’s not really the modalities of the negotiation or what’s on offer, the problem right now is that the deal that makes the most sense from a U.S. and ally perspective is not the one that the North Koreans want,” Sha said. 

Scott Snyder, senior fellow for Korea Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, suggested that the U.S. should try to focus more on stimulating social and economic change within North Korea, which could open the space for engagement.

“Our perspective on trying to counter their action has kind of inhibited us and, even in policy terms, inhibits us from trying to reach into North Korea and generate the level of debate and even dissent that would actually be necessary for North Korea to change direction,” Snyder said.  

Town suggested that any eventual progress on the nuclear issue will require smaller steps that aren’t directly linked to North Korea’s weapons program.

“We need to start building this in steps,” Town added. “We need to start providing the kind of incentives and early wins that would help create some momentum in any negotiation process. We need to be open to talking about issues other than just denuclearization, especially just to rebuild the relationship itself.”