Every U.S. president over the last two decades has arrived at the White House thinking that with enough perseverance, resolve and dexterity, they can solve—or at the least substantially mitigate—the North Korea conundrum. Without fail, every single U.S. president over the last two decades has left that very same building passing on the conundrum to their successors. 

President George W. Bush entered the job highly skeptical of the Clinton administration’s “Agreed Framework” deal with Pyongyang, tore it up, and began the process of enacting a U.N. Security Council sanctions regime against the North Korean economy to pressure the Kim dynasty into eliminating its nuclear weapons program. The result: failure.

In 2009, President Barack Obama vowed to talk to Washington’s traditional adversaries if they were willing to “unclench" their fists and in 2012 even arrived at an understanding with the North Koreans known as the “Leap Day Deal,” which traded a nuclear and missile launch moratorium for U.S. aid. Yet after that arrangement blew up months later, Obama largely gave up on diplomacy with the North, spending the rest of his presidency piling on the sanctions pressure and hoping Pyongyang would reform its ways.

President Donald Trump, meanwhile, started blustery but came to see top-level diplomacy with Kim Jong-un as his best chance to wriggle something out of the North. It didn’t work; the two men walked away from their second summit in Hanoi in February 2019 with nothing to show for it. As far as President Biden’s tenure, there's frankly nothing much to say.   

If Kamala Harris wins the 2024 election, she will face the same problem many of her peers confronted: a North Korea steadfastly committed to retaining its nuclear weapons arsenal. The only difference is that North Korea has more of those weapons in its stockpile today than it did previously, not to mention an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) program, newer launch platforms to shoot off those missiles if the time comes, and a more impatient Kim Jong-un who no longer seems to care whether Washington extends him an olive branch or not. 

Harris would also be starting her work in a more hostile geopolitical environment—hostile not because the U.S. is on the cusp of losing its power and influence in East Asia but rather because North Korea is now in a better position to refuse U.S. demands and counteract U.S. economic pressure. Unlike in 2017, when North Korea's nuclear development was still very much a unified issue for the U.N. Security Council, the Kim dynasty is essentially walled off from further sanctions at the U.N. level and has gone to considerable lengths to improve its bilateral relationships with Russia and China, two powers that aren’t necessarily thrilled with North Korea’s behavior but have nevertheless chosen to look the other way to complicate Washington’s policy agenda in the region. 

The North Koreans have cannily used Russia’s desperation in Ukraine to become Moscow’s go-to foreign source for basic munitions—the U.S. State Department assesses that North Korea has sent more than 11,000 containers of munitions to the Russians since September 2023—and have parlayed that into a comprehensive strategic partnership with Moscow. Kim likely hopes that his budding ties with Russian President Vladimir Putin will unnerve Chinese President Xi Jinping to the point where Beijing increases its assistance to North Korea in the form of agricultural equipment, food aid, machinery, and diplomatic cover.

Harris won’t have much to work with, so she is likely to take the path of least resistance by putting Biden’s North Korea policy on auto-pilot. With Pyongyang not amenable to dialogue with Washington, she will focus on the deterrence side of the coin—redoubling the U.S.-South Korea alliance and bolstering the trilateral security arrangement between the U.S., South Korea and Japan (an item that was mentioned in the 2024 Democratic Party Platform). Expect more visits by U.S. nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines in South Korean ports, more fly-overs of the Korean Peninsula by strategic assets like the B-2 bomber, and more talking points about why nothing short of a disarmed North Korea is acceptable. 

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. On North Korea policy specifically, the U.S. has been consistently insane. Washington can’t get out of the trap unless it understands a basic concept many analysts in the Beltway are too thick-headed to acknowledge: the Kim dynasty is never going to denuclearize. If the U.S. wants to make progress on the North Korean file, it needs to tailor economic and political concessions to realistic asks that the North Koreans might accept such as a suspension of North Korean nuclear and ICBM tests, re-entering the 2018 military de-escalation accord with South Korea and working with the international community and the U.S. specifically on risk-reduction measures that will minimize the prospects of conflict. The alternative, adopting the same old stance, is no alternative at all.

About the Author: 

Daniel R. DePetris is a fellow at Defense Priorities and a syndicated foreign affairs columnist for the Chicago Tribune.