As U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin recently traveled to Tokyo and Seoul to meet their Japanese and South Korean colleagues, how to manage China was the prime topic of discussion. But hovering in the background as always was North Korea and its nuclear program, a generations-long problem that has eluded multiple U.S. administrations going back to the George H.W. Bush era.
Thus far, U.S. President Joe Biden has provided little information about what his North Korea policy will consist of. This is not entirely unexpected; the administration is still in the middle of an inter-agency policy review, which could be wrapped up by next month. But if the remarks and statements from senior administration officials are a clue about where the policy may be going, we should all anticipate another four years of muddling through.
The Biden administration, like the Trump, Obama, Bush, and Clinton administrations before it, remains focused on the foreign policy equivalent of winning the multi-million-dollar jackpot: North Korea’s complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization. They’ve gotten the cold-shoulder and a rhetorical fusillade from the North in response.
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