With the Trump administration soon to enter office, the North Korean (DPRK) issue will quickly come back onto the radar. Although a large part of the foreign policy commentariat would prefer Donald Trump to maintain the current status quo of isolating the DPRK, he made clear his willingness to revert to diplomacy and solve the nuclear conundrum for good. However the new administration will have to juggle competing priorities successfully to avoid repeating past failures in building a productive relationship with Pyongyang, 

Since the first Trump administration, U.S. foreign policy has refocused on strategic competition with China, the sole rival potentially strong enough to overpower the United States. With the appointment of Marco Rubio as Secretary of State and the return of realist Elbridge Colby to the Pentagon, China will inevitably be front and center for the foreseeable future. Hence, Trump’s engagement with North Korea will necessarily unfold in the shadow of competition with Beijing. 

The U.S.’s foreign policy when it comes to China imposes two seemingly contradictory courses of action on the Korean Peninsula. First, Washington wants a strong South Korea (ROK) on its side, Seoul is an economic and military powerhouse that contributes to maintaining the balance of power in East Asia. It helps defend the approaches to Japan and offers strategic military bases near Taiwan and northeastern China, further, its massive warlike production ability makes it all the more important.  

Second, Washington has a deep-seated interest in shutting down its forever antagonism with North Korea. In itself, the DPRK is a small, impoverished state of no consequence for U.S. world strategy. The last few decades of picking fights with foreign countries because they had unsavory regimes or to ‘show resolve’ for the sake of it has exhausted the American polity. Moreover, reducing the odds of a war with Pyongyang can help the United States refocus all its bandwidth on the Chinese threat. Washington also wants to prevent the nightmare scenario of a close alliance between North Korea and China, which would divide U.S. attention and increase the danger of joint hostile actions.  

Going further, peace with the DPRK would turn South Korea into a more potent and helpful ally. The North Korean issue poisons South Korea’s body politics, with the nation’s conservatives seeing any politician they dislike as a communist agent. Last December, President Yoon used the supposed threat of an imminent North Korean conspiracy to justify his botched coup attempt. Appeased relations with Pyongyang would lower the temperature in Seoul and allow it to devote more attention to counterbalancing China. 

Here Is the Catch

Making peace with North Korea is challenging because Pyongyang perceives the U.S.-ROK alliance as a fundamental threat. It has a point, as the two countries dwarf North Korea’s power potential and military capabilities. 

Furthermore, the North Koreans have made clear time and time again that complete denuclearization was off the table. The other way around, South Korea considers North Korea an existential danger. It is scared that a bilateral U.S.-DPRK rapprochement would leave it exposed to Pyongyang’s growingly formidable nuclear arsenal and its massive army.  

Therefore, Trump’s diplomacy must square the circle of engaging with North Korea without abandoning South Korea. Also, the new American administration must maintain close ties with Seoul while being open to engaging with a nuclear North Korea.  

Arms control talks are possible for the DPRK, but complete denuclearization is a dealbreaker. Still, any deal toward arms control will require symbolic concessions, and Pyongyang may even ask for a peace treaty formally ending the Korean War or want to establish diplomatic relations to lock in the rapprochement. 

Many neoconservative pundits will likely balk at that, but symbols are only that. More significantly, North Korea will wish for sanction relief and normal participation in the world economy. Given the unmitigated failure of sanctions to prevent its nuclearization and its ongoing trade with China and Russia, granting sanction relief presents little risk. It will at least alleviate the plea of ordinary North Korean citizens.  

However, Donald Trump should leave Kim Jong Un with no doubt that the U.S.-ROK alliance is non-negotiable. Although U.S. forces have no nefarious intentions toward the DPRK, they need to stay to counterbalance China’s rising power. Thankfully, that is something Kim can understand. 

He has poisonous relations with Xi Jinping and seeks alternative partners like Russia to reduce Beijing’s leverage. Kim might even be happy if American troops remained in Korea. Indeed, in 2018, he told then Secretary of State Mike Pompeo “that he needed the Americans in South Korea to protect him from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and that the CCP needed the Americans out so they could treat the peninsula like Tibet and Xinjiang.” 

The Two Ways to Get South Korea on Board

First, let Seoul decide what defense policy is best for itself. A significant part of the South Korean public and numerous experts are now of the opinion that the country needs its nuclear deterrent. Indeed, a nuclear South Korea would become capable of deterring potential North Korean aggressions alone and more able to project power outward to support the U.S. Indo-Pacific strategy. 

Donald Trump himself said in 2016 that he was not against the idea. Whether the country goes nuclear is a decision for the Koreans to make, but if it can allay Seoul’s fears and bolster the U.S. position in the region, there is no reason to oppose it. 

A second option is to shift the focus of security negotiations with North Korea from nuclear to conventional arms control. Pyongyang maintains over one million soldiers, a significant part of which dwells near the inter-Korean border and the Seoul capital area. With several thousand now fighting in Ukraine, the Korean People’s Army is bound to acquire combat experience. Although the weapons they are equipped with weapons are mostly obsolete, North Koreans fighting in Europe have large quantities of them. Further, Russian support for the DPRK’s military will greatly increase North Korea’s strength in the coming years.  

The threat to South Korea is not so much Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons in isolation but the danger that the DPRK would use them to facilitate a conventional invasion and deter U.S. intervention on Seoul’s side. Since denuclearization is impossible, U.S. diplomats could focus instead on reducing the threat of a conventional invasion. 

As it did with the Soviet Union at the end of the Cold War, Washington could insist on North Korean force reductions in exchange for additional economic benefits or security cooperation. If Pyongyang proves reluctant to cut troop and weapon numbers, the United States could propose North Korea redeploy some of its forces away from the inter-Korean border and toward China’s border. This move would both offer relief to Seoul and become a thorn in Beijing’s side. 

The incoming administration will have to play a complex game. It needs to reach peace with North Korea, already a headache in itself. But it must do so without sacrificing South Korea, one of America’s most vital allies. 

However, if successful, Donald Trump will secure the momentous foreign policy success of resolving the North Korean conundrum while reinforcing the regional U.S. position against China.  

Dylan Motin holds a Ph.D. in political science. He is currently a Non-resident Kelly Fellow at the Pacific Forum and a non-resident research fellow at the ROK Forum for Nuclear Strategy. He is the author of Territorial Expansion and Great Power Behavior during the Cold War: A Theory of Armed Emergence (Routledge, 2025) and Bandwagoning in International Relations: China, Russia, and Their Neighbors (Vernon Press, 2024).

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