One potential upside of the coronavirus pandemic is that it seems to have, for better or worse, turned Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un’s attention away from each other and toward managing what for both leaders is a very serious set of challenges that may threaten their political survival. 

Indeed, Kim’s recent long absence may have been largely driven by the pandemic. With the number of pandemic-related fatalities in the United States approaching one hundred thousand, the president can hardly afford to begin a new round of diplomacy with North Korea.

Any predictions regarding North Korea and nuclear weapon related foreign policy must always carry large error terms, but Kim, like his predecessors, is surely playing as long a game as his health will allow. Barring any medical issues, he knows that he will outlast Trump and presumably several of his successors. Kim went to the more abortive Hanoi summit knowing that whatever happened there, he would have another two years of Trump’s first term to wrestle concessions from the president and further engage if he so chose. It therefore seems to me that he would be unlikely to risk any diplomatic forays with the American President now when Trump may well have left the building by January 2021. Whatever ability Trump had to credibly commit to concessions to North Korea has likely now evaporated. Much better for Kim to wait eight months until Trump or his successor have another four years and then begin that round of engagement with the United States with a test of what may be a mobile solid fuel ICBM that can more credibly deliver nuclear payloads to the continental United States. 

One way that this prediction may be wrong is if Kim believes that a Joseph Biden administration will likely be in office in 2021 and be less favourable to North Korea than Trump was. The North Korean leader may attempt to engineer a crisis close enough to the election to keep Trump in power but avoid escalation. Such a move would carry high escalatory potential and be very dangerous. Of course, Trump may feel pressure to escalate to such a provocation in a manner that he hasn’t before, and such a crisis may reduce Trump’s chances at the general election by convincing the electorate that he is too trigger-happy. Perhaps at least as dangerous and likely is Trump attempting to engineer a breakthrough or more likely a crisis with North Korea to rally the nation around him and win the election. Such a move however may also be more likely to cause nuclear escalation and increase the chance that Biden is president in 2021.

I think, however, that perhaps because of the pandemic these election related crisis manipulations are less likely because Kim and Trump have more pressing domestic fish to fry. The coronavirus pandemic may have taken three hundred thousand lives and counting at the time of writing, but it may also have helped kick the North Korean nuclear problem down the road to the next American president. It’s far from clear that a second Trump or first Biden term could make new progress on the North Korean nuclear issue where so many have failed. But half a year of stability, or at least the absence of Twitter threat storms, nuclear weapon and long range missile tests, and poorly planned summitry involving the United States and North Korea, is something we should be thankful for.

Dr. Michael Cohen is a Senior Lecturer at the National Security College, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University. He is the author of When Proliferation Causes Peace: The Psychology of Nuclear Crises, co-editor of North Korea and Nuclear Weapons: Entering The New Era of Deterrence, and various articles in several scholarly journals. ​

Image: Reuters.