Dr. Victor Cha, senior fellow at the George W. Bush Institute and president, geopolitics and foreign policy department and Korea chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, recently answered questions about the current state of U.S.-North Korea relations and his recommendations for what the U.S. should do to support the North Korea people. Read his interview with the Bush Institute team below.
What is the current state of the U.S.-North Korea relationship?
The state of U.S.-North Korean relations is in neutral right now. During the first Trump Administration, there was quite a lot of activity — three summit meetings between President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un that unfortunately did not result in any lasting agreements, but President Trump has expressed a clear inclination to meet with the North Korean leader again. Some people thought this might happen during the recent trip by the president to Asia for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum, but that did not happen.
Right now, the activity, if any, would be largely top-down at the leader level. There’s very little, if any, activity occurring between the two state departments and foreign ministries, and the issues remain the same: North Korea’s nuclear program, the Hermit Kingdom’s burgeoning relationship with Russia as a result of the war in Ukraine, and North Korea’s continuous human rights abuses.
The U.S. recently approved South Korea’s ability to develop nuclear submarines. What are your thoughts on how that will affect relations between South Korea, North Korea, and the United States?
President Trump’s announcement that he would support South Korea developing nuclear-propulsion submarines was probably the biggest surprise of his recent trip to Asia. It surprised the U.S. government, the South Korean government, North Korea, and China.
We’re not talking about nuclear weapons, but nuclear propulsion submarines, which could be very quiet and go a much longer distance. President Lee said it was important for South Korea to have this capability to track North Korean and Chinese submarines, which was a very big statement.
With one social media post, President Trump catapulted South Korea into the ranks of a handful of countries that will have nuclear submarine capabilities.
North Korea certainly noticed, as they are trying to develop their own nuclear submarine capability with help from Russia. China also took notice, since they now have to consider facing both U.S. and South Korean nuclear-powered submarines in the Indo-Pacific.
Strategically, this was the most far-reaching development from President Trump’s visit to Asia, but many details still need to be worked out in the aftermath of that agreement.
South Korea’s president has been praised as a pragmatic negotiator from his first trip to the White House and leadership at the APEC forum. Do you think President Lee Jae-myung can broker another summit, and would that change the current state of the U.S.-North Korea relationship?
I think President Lee has a very pragmatic approach to North Korea. On one hand, he thinks it’s important to try to create dialogue, engagement, and tension reduction with North Korea. And for that reason, he’s laid out and packaged a plan called END or exchange, normalization, and denuclearization. So, nobody can criticize him for not putting forward a stated policy of engagement with North Korea.
At the same time, what distinguishes President Lee from previous progressive governments in Korea is that his policy is driven by a pragmatic need to reduce threats and foster engagement, but there is not the same hardcore ideological commitment to engaging with North Korea at the expense of everything else. I think he’s certainly open to engagement, but not with the same sort of deeply driven ideological proclivities of past progressive presidents.
The likelihood that this will succeed I think, frankly, is small – not through any fault of South Korea’s, but because the North Koreans have made very clear since the end of the last progressive administration, the Moon Jae-in administration, that they are not interested in inter-Korean dialogue at all, or any sort of inter-Korean engagement, whether it is a progressive government or a conservative government.
President Lee tried unilateral steps, like stopping loudspeaker broadcasts and stopping civilian information balloons, but there has been no reciprocation from North Korea.
I don’t think it’s a fault of President Lee’s integrated engagement policy. It’s the position North Korea has taken, in no small part because they are getting a lot of help right now from Russia and China, and so they feel no need to engage with the United States or South Korea.
Amid these policy developments, what can the United States do to support the North Korean people?
I would say there are a couple of things at the policy level — and the Bush Institute has issued a number of reports on this — we must continue to press for human rights improvements in North Korea. This isn’t an isolated policy, but a policy that is integral to our main security policy, which is denuclearization of North Korea.
The reason those two things are linked is that the economic incentives that the United States has proposed to give North Korea in return for giving up their weapons are incentives that cannot be executed without some improvement in North Korean human rights. This is due to U.S. legislation that prevents American companies from working with North Korea if there are human rights violations in the production or supply chain. The U.S. pressing for human rights is important in and of itself, but it also sends a signal about how serious we are about a deal on denuclearization because we cannot execute the economic elements of that deal unless they improve their human rights situation. So, these two things are intertwined.
At the people level, we should continue to do things like the Bush Institute’s innovative Lindsay Lloyd North Korea Freedom Scholarship, which supports North Korean escapees and their children who are working to receive an education in the U.S. — whether it’s vocational training, community college, four-year college, or graduate school.
It’s helping to improve the lives of North Korean escapees, who someday may be extremely important leaders if unification ever happens in North Korea.
I remember one time during President George W. Bush’s time in office, we escorted a North Korean escapee in to meet with the president in the Oval Office. The President asked the North Korean defector, “what do you think the North Korean leadership would think of my meeting with you here at the White House?” If I remember correctly, the North Korean escapee said two things.
One, he said it shows that there is a God, in the sense that he was coming from a very difficult situation to be in the White House. And the other was if the United States doesn’t show that it cares about North Korean human rights, then who else in the world would? This is 20 years later, and that particular interaction still leaves a deep impression on me about why the United States needs to continue to stand up for the human rights of the North Korean people.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
