By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

Get Ready for a Big, Bold, and Very Bad North Korea Deal

Donald Trump’s return to the White House has shaken up U.S. approaches to trade, Ukraine, the Middle East, and more. But so far, the Trump administration has paid little attention to North Korea even as the rogue dictatorship has grown stronger and more provocative. Just this year, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has conducted nine missile tests, stolen $1.5 billion in cryptocurrency, sent more troops to support Russia’s brutal war of aggression in Ukraine, and unveiled his military’s largest modern missile destroyer, a 5,000-ton warship equipped with state-of-the-art armament. Kim has filled his coffers by selling billions of dollars’ worth of arms to Russia, improved his military with lessons learned from the Ukraine war, and buttressed his aerial, missile, naval, and nuclear forces with Moscow’s technical support and hardware transfers.

Leaving North Korea to its own devices will not end well. Left unchallenged, the country could perform more nuclear tests; strengthen its ties with China, Iran, and Russia; and build more advanced weapons that could credibly threaten the U.S. homeland. During the first hundred days of Trump’s first and second presidencies, Pyongyang has undertaken more belligerent acts against the United States and South Korea than it has during any same period since the Nixon administration. It would be national security malpractice to ignore such ominous signals.

The Trump administration needs to restart dialogue with North Korea to arrest these developments. The question is how. Any U.S. government internal policy review predictably would condemn the failures of past policies, and with good reason: North Korea conducted a record 162 provocations, including missile tests, bombings, and incursions into South Korea, during the Biden administration—more than during the three previous administrations combined. Trump, by contrast, has touted his “great relationship” with the North Korean leader, built during three summit meetings in his first term, first in Singapore in 2018, then in Hanoi and the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea, in 2019. But there has been no substantive engagement between the two countries’ leaders since then, leaving the North Koreans free to operate at will to the detriment of U.S. and allied security interests. Trump, ever the performative dealmaker, is unlikely to let this lie for long. And with “America first” priorities taking over the U.S. foreign policy agenda, Trump might be willing to make significant compromises to get a deal with Kim. That objective is the right one; achieving it is a wholly different matter. North Korea enjoys far more leverage now than it has in the recent past. For it to accept constraints and sign on to an agreement with the United States, Washington may have to offer Pyongyang big concessions, courting risks to its national security and shocking its allies.

 

Turning Tables

North Korea is in a rather different place now than it was in 2018 and 2019 when Trump first engaged with Kim. For one thing, Russian leader Vladimir Putin is currently providing North Korea with everything that Kim could have wanted and more - food, fuel, hard currency, military technology, and a June 2024 defense treaty and security guarantee that harks back to Cold War days. This has been especially key for Kim, given the desperate state of North Korea’s economy after its three-and-a-half-year COVID-19 lockdown. Kim has also been emboldened by the growing alignment among China, Iran, and Russia to act in concert to undermine the global order. The UN sanctions regime against North Korea has been effectively dismantled as a result of Russia’s 2024 veto of the renewal of UN Security Council Resolution 1718, which had mandated a bevy of economic sanctions against North Korea after its October 2006 nuclear test and established a UN panel to monitor sanctions compliance by all UN member states. Today, neither Beijing nor Moscow is abiding by any UN Security Council sanctions on North Korea. As a result, trade in everything from seafood to oil is flowing across the Chinese and Russian borders into North Korea.

Pyongyang has significantly augmented its weapons arsenal since Kim and Trump met seven years ago, with an estimated 50 nuclear weapons, including miniaturized tactical nuclear warheads, and enough fissile material for an additional 40 weapons, according to public estimates. Kim’s arsenal continues to expand with solid-fuel intercontinental ballistic missiles and submarine-launched ballistic missiles, hypersonic glide vehicles, strategic reconnaissance unmanned aerial vehicles, and tactical nuclear and nuclear-powered submarines. The international community’s failure to stop North Korea’s arms proliferation since the last attempt at an agreement collapsed in 2009 has allowed Pyongyang to acquire a modern arsenal of this size and scope. Kim has more cards and more leverage than ever before.

For the United States, this new context makes reengaging with North Korea along old lines effectively pointless. Past efforts, such as the 1994 Agreed Framework during the Clinton administration or the George W. Bush administration-led–led Six Party talks in 2005, which both resulted in North Korea agreeing to take incremental steps toward denuclearization in return for energy and sanctions relief, won’t serve as guidebooks now. Each agreement ultimately failed to win North Korea’s commitment to genuine denuclearization. Moreover, North Korea is flush with economic support from Russia and China. Even though Pyongyang and Moscow stopped reporting trade figures at the start of the Ukraine war, satellite imagery published by the Center for Strategic and International Studies shows unprecedented levels of grain and fuel pouring southward by rail from Russia into North Korea. In addition, total bilateral trade between Beijing and Pyongyang grew 24 percent year-over-year in the first quarter of 2025, the highest since North Korea’s COVID reopening in 2023.

Kim will not preemptively surrender all nuclear capabilities in return for benefits and security. Although the United States achieved such a position with Libya in 2003, that country had only nuclear precursors and no finished weapons; Kim, on the other hand, has scores of weapons and ambitions to grow his stockpile to the size of France’s or the United Kingdom’s. The Russian invasion of Ukraine, moreover, has reminded Kim that willingly giving up one’s nuclear weapons, as Ukraine did in the 1990s, can have unfavorable consequences. (Kim presumably also saw the grisly fate that met Libyan dictator Muammar al-Qaddafi after he scrapped his nuclear weapons program.)

Nor will just relying on maximum pressure work. Squeezing North Korea’s economy, as the Obama, first Trump, and Biden administrations tried to do—has been made impossible by Russia’s and China’s noncompliance with international sanctions. Even if extended to financial and cryptocurrency sanctions, the strategy would have no teeth without Moscow’s and Beijing’s cooperation. Moreover, North Korea has proved itself to be supremely resilient. It survived more than three years of a COVID-19 border shutdown with China, its main trading partner, suggesting the regime can endure even the toughest of sanctions.

Trump is the only U.S. president to have tried summit diplomacy with Kim, but this failed. Negotiations went nowhere in part because Trump focused less on the details of denuclearization than on glad-handing the North Korean leader, hoping that direct contact, friendship, and trust-building would encourage Kim to work with, rather than against, the United States. But Kim makes decisions based not on mutual trust but on cold calculations of self-interest. Trump should not imagine that his bonhomie will somehow sour Kim on a lucrative relationship with Russia or convince the North Korean leader to cede the tremendous leverage he now enjoys.

 

Reaching the Summit

The pageantry associated with a possible fourth summit meeting could be irresistible for Trump, and he has already signaled his openness to such talks when asked about it by the press. But it is unclear how Washington could get Kim to the table to make a deal. Lifting sanctions is no longer as attractive an incentive as it was in 2018, given the collapse of the UN sanctions regime. Nor can Trump rely only on his powers of persuasion to effectuate a deal. Instead, he must enlarge the scope of incentives that a possible agreement could include, and he must be realistic about what is achievable in terms of disarming North Korea in the remainder of his presidential term.

Rather than the step-by-step process Washington undertook during negotiations with North Korea in 1994 and 2005, the Trump administration would likely view nuclear negotiations with North Korea through an “America first” prism, focusing less on nuclear disarmament and more on reducing the most proximate threats to the U.S. homeland. The core of such an agreement would be a ban on North Korea’s nuclear weapons tests, ICBM development, and fissile material production. The United States would also likely want Pyongyang to pledge not to provide weapons technology to Middle Eastern states (namely, to Iran) and nonstate actors. In making such a deal, the Trump administration would likely forgo negotiating on difficult but traditional denuclearization objectives that are important to regional allies, including disarming North Korea of hundreds of short-range missiles and thousands of artillery tubes that threaten Japan and South Korea but not the United States. Such a turn would generate fears of abandonment in Tokyo and Seoul, as well as other allied capitals both in the region and around the world.

An “America first” agenda might also seek to expand the deal beyond the Korean Peninsula rather than narrow it, linking peace in Northeast Asia to peace in Ukraine. Stopping the supply of North Korean troops and ammunition to Russia, which have accounted for 50 percent of Russian munitions used in the war, according to Reuters, and allowing Putin to retake lost territory in Kursk, would help Trump decrease U.S. spending in Ukraine and push Putin to stop fighting. A cease-fire in Europe would be better sustained if the Russian military were no longer bolstered by North Korean military supplies.

 

Peninsular Paradigms

What could the United States possibly give to North Korea to attain these objectives? The plausible answers are both unprecedented and worrisome. For example, Trump might abandon the goal of denuclearization in favor of arms control - a long-sought North Korean objective. What Pyongyang truly craves from Washington is de facto acceptance that North Korea is a nuclear weapons state. Even though this would not provide material benefits, it is arguably more important for Pyongyang. Even in the Six Party talks almost two decades ago, where I served on the U.S. delegation, North Korean interlocutors rejected denuclearization as the premise of negotiations, instead favoring arms control and threat reduction talks between two established nuclear powers - as some said, “just like the United States did with the Soviet Union during the Cold War.”

Whether intentional or not, Trump’s statements already intimate such a view. Despite the State Department’s standard reference to denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula as U.S. policy, Trump’s persistent references to North Korea as “a nuclear power,” as well as Secretary of State and interim National Security Adviser Marco Rubio’s characterization of a “nuclear-armed North Korea” effectively change three decades of U.S. policy of denying the regime’s nuclear status. This subtle but significant shift in language may make Kim more willing to engage with Washington.

This language alone, however, would not suffice for a deal. If the Trump administration wanted to achieve the objectives described above - stopping North Korean nuclear and intercontinental ballistic missile tests, fissile material production, proliferation of nuclear weapons technology, and troop commitments and arms shipments to Russia - it would probably have to contend with Pyongyang’s call for the withdrawal of U.S. military forces from the peninsula. As anathema as this would be to Washington’s alliance with Seoul, Trump has long been ambivalent toward U.S. troops in Korea - in 2011, for example, long before he entered politics, Trump said, “Why should we secure and bring great safety to all of these very wealthy nations that rip us off consistently, like as an example, South Korea and others, and not get paid for it? Why are we their security guard?” During his first term, he wanted to withdraw troops from both Afghanistan and South Korea, according to the journalist Bob Woodward. It is not at all implausible that a Trumpian Korea policy would want to end the 75 years of U.S. entanglement in the conflict there, bringing troops home (or deploying them elsewhere) and declaring peace on the peninsula. Trump’s predilections may also converge with the Pentagon’s purported plans to direct U.S. forces in Korea away from peninsular deterrence and toward defending Taiwan. The prospect of ending two wars - one in Asia and one in Europe - coupled with his infatuation with the Nobel Peace Prize, may be enough to compel Trump to take such unprecedented steps.

 

Regional Reset

Such a deal, although possible, would raise intense abandonment fears in South Korea. Never one for respecting alliance traditions, however, Trump could alleviate some of these fears by breaking long-held taboos in alliance politics. For example, the withdrawal of U.S. forces from South Korea would amplify local calls for the country to get nuclear weapons of its own. Trump might support this move by renegotiating existing civil nuclear agreements to allow for enrichment and reprocessing, granting Seoul the fissile material for nuclear bombs while stopping short of weaponization. Nuclear latency would enhance South Korea’s ability to deter threats on the peninsula, thereby allowing the United States to focus on the threat from China.

As an added confidence-building measure for the alliance, Trump could double down on his interest in closing the shipbuilding gap with China by promoting South Korean and Japanese shipbuilding to fill interim U.S. demand for a strategic commercial fleet, and by commissioning allied shipyards to service U.S. ships. Incorporating allied help in closing the naval balance of power gap with China would be welcome, given U.S. backlogs and domestic restrictions.

While satisfying some of Seoul’s concerns and advancing certain U.S. interests in Asia, such measures would be tied to Trump’s “America first” foreign policy vision. As the analyst Taehwa Hong noted in The National Interest in early May, to make the U.S.–South Korean alliance more profitable for the United States, Trump might advocate a new burden-sharing agreement in which South Korea supplies the United States with weapons and munitions as a form of supplemental payment for the alliance (in addition to the approximately $1 billion in annual payments it makes for the non-personnel costs of stationing U.S. troops there). Transfers of high-quality weapons and munitions, subsidized by the South Korean government, would greatly boost U.S. stockpiles and prevent defense industrial shortfalls.

Trump could even declare a new Eurasian “deal of the century,” pursuing joint investments with Japan and South Korea to turn the railway connection between Russia and North Korea—long dormant but revived in 2022 to supply Russia with arms for its war in Ukraine—from facilitating the transport of weapons to that of other goods, extending that commercial and energy link even to South Korea. An international project to refurbish these networks through to Seoul and beyond would fulfill Moscow’s long-held aspirations to connect the Russian Far East to Northeast Asian economies. The railway would provide revenue to North Korea and would promote long-stymied inter-Korean economic engagement. The sheer size of the deal, the potential commercial opportunities it could provide Trump’s family businesses, and the performative aspect of authoring such a major geostrategic bargain could encourage the president to get it done.

 

High Stakes

When it comes to North Korea, the United States cannot return to its policy conventions of the past, not even those from Trump’s first term. North Korea is stronger militarily than it has ever been, and with Chinese and Russian support, Kim will not succumb to economic pressure campaigns. Washington’s idleness over the past four years allowed North Korea to fight a war in Europe on Russia’s behalf, in return receiving weapons technology that deepens the nuclear threat it poses to the U.S. homeland. Doing nothing is not an option.

A U.S. policy toward the Korean Peninsula that might once have been regarded as dangerous and far-fetched is now within the realm of possibility under Trump. An “America first” Korea policy would likely include bold and mold-breaking measures—concessions that no other U.S. president would proffer. But Trump will not be satisfied with doing nothing on North Korea, and these radical steps might be just the ones that he would consider necessary in this changed context. The United States cannot afford to ignore Kim any longer, and after three failed summits during Trump’s first term, a fourth will have to produce tangible results rather than empty words. Those results may not sit well with many. Trump’s obsession with winning the Nobel Peace Prize, his desire to end the fighting in Ukraine, and his unique “bromance” with Kim could lead him to make a deal that recognizes North Korea’s nuclear status, sells out allies, and appeases Putin—all in the name of putting “America first.”

 

 

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