Analytical Outlook for North Korea
Dramatic turns have unfolded on the Korean Peninsula in the short span of the past two years.
The “fire and fury” mood in late 2017 turned into a series of attention-grabbing summits and dialogues between Donald Trump, Kim Jong Un and Moon Jae-in up until the Trump-kim Hanoi summit in February this year, which was followed by a stalemate in both the Us-north Korea denuclearization talks and inter-korean relations. What went wrong and what will happen?
Ramon Pacheco Pardo, Reader at King’s College London and KF-VUF Korea Chair at the Institute for European Studies of Vrije Universiteit Brussel, offers an account of North Korea’s policy towards the US, and the evolution of its nuclear policy, in particular, from the early 1990s. He locates the chronology in an analytical framework of an asymmetrical bargaining process between a weak power and a superpower, and argues that Pyongyang has used an evolving combination of the bargaining tactics available to weak powers to seek the normalization with the US except bandwagoning: balancing with Beijing, Moscow, Seoul and even Tokyo; soft balancing; participation in international regimes but only reluctantly; and, of course, brinkmanship.
Based on his analysis of North Korean behavior, Pardo contends that denuclearization of North Korea, if an option at all, should most probably only take place after the normalization of relations between Pyongyang and Washington, and that a multilateral framework should be useful to support the steps to be taken before normalization takes place.