During his first term as president, Donald Trump became the first-ever sitting US president to meet in-person with a North Korean leader – not once, but three times. He even went as far as stepping foot on North Korean soil.
In the presidential campaign this year, Trump boasted about his personal relationship with Kim Jong-un, saying the two “fell in love” as they exchanged letters and held summits. While the president-elect has not explicitly expressed his intention to pursue an engagement strategy with Pyongyang this time around, hopes for diplomacy have grown.
What Trump ultimately desires is to be the president responsible for a deal that no one but him would have been able to negotiate. Conflicts the world over offer three main options: Ukraine, the Middle East, and Korea. He could try his hand at any one or all three. Trump has already claimed he could end the war in Ukraine before his inauguration and do it in as little as 24 hours.
The historically more complex challenges such as the Israeli Palestinian conflict or that on the Korean Peninsula could prove more attractive to Trump as his crowning foreign policy achievement. If Trump does decide to give North Korea another shot, however, his administration’s strategy would have to undergo significant changes this time around.
North Korea has gone from verbal threats and displays with missile launches to deploying troops to Europe.
2025 will be nothing like 2017, when Trump first took office. Back then, North Korea was under immense pressure from a massive international sanctions regime and remained largely isolated. Its main hopes for breaking out of this economic and diplomatic straitjacket came from China and the potential of resuming diplomacy with South Korea and the United States. Kim saw his chance when the progressive Moon Jae-in administration took office in South Korea in May 2017. What followed was a careful display of calculated diplomatic moves, getting cosy with Seoul mainly to find an opening with Washington. And it worked.
But things are unlikely to go this way under Trump’s second term. The main reason: the Russia-DPRK relationship.
Although Russia has always been one of North Korea’s main allies, the relationship has advanced by leaps and bounds, culminating in a mutual defence treaty signed this past June. Just a few months later, both parties showed the world that this was far from just talk. North Korea made the bold decision – unthinkable just a few years ago – to dispatch troops to fight alongside Russia in Ukraine.
In other words, North Korea has gone from verbal threats and displays with missile launches to deploying troops to Europe. The decision speaks volumes of Kim’s confidence levels not just in his own country’s military capabilities but in its partnership with Moscow. The move also serves to show the world that North Korea has more than one partner it can count on besides Beijing, especially in the case of war.
Besides this, the international sanctions regime in 2024 is as good as dead. After China and Russia vetoed further sanctions against North Korea at the UN Security Council in 2022, Moscow’s veto against the extension of the UN Panel of Expert’s mandate on North Korea in March this year has hit sanctions monitoring efforts hard. Although the effect of sanctions on deterring Pyongyang over the past few years has been questionable, North Korea supplying weapons to Russia en masse for use in Ukraine shows sanctions are doing little to dissuade Kim. In fact, there is reason to believe that other countries may follow Russia’s suit in engaging in arms trade with North Korea in defiance of the now heavily weakened sanctions regime.
Another issue that could hamper Trump’s diplomatic efforts is North Korea abandoning the goal of unification with the South and officially labelling the ROK its absolute enemy. Given the current conservative Yoon Suk-yeol administration in the South, the possibilities for mending inter-Korean ties seem bleak, at least until Yoon leaves office in 2027. Even if Trump were to take the lead and convince Seoul to support a US drive to renew talks with the North, the current level of tensions on the Korean Peninsula are anything but conducive to diplomacy.
In addition to rejecting diplomacy with Seoul, the leadership in Pyongyang has repeatedly expressed that North Korea would not engage in any talks with Washington as long as it maintains its “hostile policy” – a reference to denuclearisation demands and a US unwillingness to explore a nuclear freeze approach or arms control pathway.
The biggest question mark will thus be whether Trump will be willing and able to change Washington’s decades-long North Korea policy. While a specific strategy has not been formulated, most in Trump’s conservative circle do not support accepting the DPRK as a nuclear state and maintain calls for denuclearisation and continued deterrence.
And even if Trump adopts a more flexible North Korea approach, it will take more than a few US concessions to bring Pyongyang back to the negotiating table. North Korea has much greater leverage over the United States now than it did during Trump’s first term, boasting a more powerful international position as well as continuously advancing military capabilities.
In short, any successful deal with North Korea will require significant diplomatic effort and persistence from Trump.
