North Korea in the Age of Trump

Fifteen years ago, Bruce Cumings, a leading historian on U.S.-Korea relations, told me we wouldn’t see an end to the U.S.-North Korea nuclear crisis any time soon—he estimated no less than ten years. Young and naïve, I was shocked at the timeline. In 2003, post-9/11 “Axis of Evil” alarums made the U.S.-North Korea nuclear issue much more urgent than it is today.

But here we are in a stranger place than anyone envisioned—including probably North Korea’s leadership. No one can predict the future. I have various doubts about any diplomatic breakthrough. (If one comes, I’d credit South and North Korea’s own understandable gumption rather than ours—and Trump’s openness, if fickle and shallow, to negotiations.) But any student of U.S.-DPRK nuclear diplomacy—and the larger history of nuclear proliferation and disarmament—has to be cautiously optimistic.

This photo captures the increasingly absurd situation: a post-Cold War hegemon, by turns inattentive and hysterical, staring at one of its oldest Cold War enemies, one which embodies James C. Scott’s “weapons of the weak.” But these are nuclear-tipped weapons North Korea needs as a legitimate deterrent, acquired at great cost but which must be given up in some measure if North Korea hopes to join our international community. At what price? For what purpose? With what ramifications for our increasingly fractious international community? It is a Korean sunset, but it is also the world’s.