Kim jong-un

The United States only has one president at a time. Until January 20, that’s Joe Biden. But President-elect Donald Trump and his skeleton foreign policy team are waiting in the wings, plotting policy behind the scenes on issues — Ukraine, Gaza, Iran, Middle East peace — that have stymied the Biden administration for the last year. In fact, Trump is already influencing the respective calculations of allies, partners and adversaries before he even steps foot in the Oval Office. And Biden’s advisors seem perfectly fine with it. Trump fancies himself as a master negotiator, somebody who’s inherently skilled at poking, pressuring and sweet-talking the opposite side of the table until he gets what he wants.

Last summer, US Army soldier Travis King ran across the Korean Demilitarized Zone into the arms of the North Koreans. It wasn’t because of some mental break or as part of a spy operation. North Korean state media claims he was motivated by racism and mistreatment — of course they would. The DPRK’s outlets have previously criticized the US for its treatment of African Americans, around the same time they compared former president Barack Obama to a “wicked black monkey.” Like the six American servicemen who crossed the DMZ before him, King probably had a mixture of reasons for his flight. Unlike in the previous cases, however, King’s detention was a short one.

A US soldier, Private Second Class Travis King, entered North Korea through the Joint Security Area (JSA) today for currently unknown reasons. “It's clear that he willfully, of his own volition, crossed the border,” State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said in a briefing Tuesday afternoon. According to the Wall Street Journal, King apparently had “served time in detention” in the South and was heading back to the US when he decided to participate in a tour of the JSA. Another individual on the tour says that King laughed as he crossed into the North. The reasons for King’s actions are still not clear. US soldiers have deserted and defected to North Korea before, often to get out of service, but it is an exceedingly rare occurrence.

While the world is captivated by all things Omicron and Russia, North Korea is once again back on the world stage. And that can only mean one thing: bigger and badder missile tests. None of this should come as a surprise. North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, has announced to the world on numerous occasions that he will continue to test such weapons, even as his nation suffers from a “food problem.” Kim, his father, and his grandfather have been marching towards a fully viable nuclear deterrent for decades now. What is new is that Kim has declared that he will not abide by the promise he made to not test certain weapons platforms that directly threaten the US homeland — what drove the near-nuclear showdown with President Donald Trump back in 2017.

Kim Jong-un is focused first and foremost on managing his country’s lingering food crisis. But that doesn’t mean the thirty-seven-year-old dictator has any intention of siphoning off resources from North Korea’s weapons programs. He made that abundantly obvious this week, when Pyongyang conducted its second ballistic missile test using hypersonic technology in four months. According to North Korean media, the missile traveled 435 miles to the east, hitting the designated target. The response to the latest test was predictable. South Korea called an emergency meeting to discuss the launch. The US State Department quickly issued a statement to reporters reminding them that the tests are a violation of multiple UN Security Council Resolutions (as if North Korea cared).

If you don’t follow North Korea for a living as I do, you likely have forgotten all about the so-called hermit kingdom and its portly pariah of a leader, Kim Jong-un. Sure, there are the occasional headlines. Kim has lost a whole bunch of weight. The country is locked down as it has no way to combat Covid-19 and would never let in the international community to distribute vaccines. And, of course, there was last night's missile test. But even then the media does not seem to care much when it comes to North Korea. The reasons are quite obvious: with the Omicron variant sweeping the world, even a regime such as North Korea's has trouble breaking into the news cycle.

Let’s be honest. If North Korea didn’t have nuclear weapons and missiles to carry them to targets as far away as the US homeland, you would not be reading this article. In fact, the national security establishment would most likely consider North Korea, a nation that can no longer feed itself with a GDP smaller than Rhode Island's, to be a joke. And yet the so-called Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) keeps cranking out ever-more advanced weapons platforms that drive headlines and clicks the world over. North Korea’s most recent test, a submarine-launched ballistic missile, seems at least on the surface to be pretty threatening. Yet a more sober analysis suggests that such a weapon, at least by itself, is no major threat to anyone, and for the foreseeable future.

North Korea now possesses a nuclear weapons arsenal that could kill millions of people in minutes. Our media, rushing to create the simple but misleading narrative that President Joe Biden has ended America’s supposed longest war, forget that Washington technically has been at war with North Korea for 71 years. It's Pyongyang, not Kabul, that will be the real test of Biden's foreign policy — and the real opportunity. A few months back, the Biden administration named that conflict its top national security priority. Yet Team Biden has done little to work towards ending what can only be described as the ultimate forever war. And, just like clockwork, Pyongyang seems to always remind us that its deadly atomic arsenal is growing by the day.

Cable networks have countless hours to fill, and it is far easier to fill them with speculation about a closed-door summit than to wait patiently for real news. We won’t have that news until the Trump-Kim summit ends. Oh, we might get a nudge about whether the talks are going well, but nothing more. That’s how secretive negotiations work. To save time, here’s the essential background. It covers almost everything you can hear — and several things you won’t — for the next 24 hours ‘live from Hanoi’ on all the networks. Kim Jong-un’s only goals are to stay alive and in power. To that end, he and his father have spent enormous resources to build deliverable nuclear weapons, with substantial aid from China.

Forget all the nuclear threats or pumped-up rhetoric, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un might just be the most boring of world leaders for one reason: he consistently tells us what he is going to do then tries to do it. Case in point. For the last few years, Kim has been very clear about setting his agenda for the coming year in the most public of ways, letting the world know his plans. In a now annualized New Year’s Day Address, Kim in 2017 told the world he would test ICBMs — weapons that can, at least in theory, hit the US homeland. Last year, he signaled he was ready for a better relationship with South Korea and participate in the Olympics, which ended up being the foundation of the détente we see today between Pyongyang, Seoul and Washington.

What if the foreign-policy elites in Washington, D.C. could admit the truth when it comes to North Korea? The fact is that there is next to nothing the Trump administration can do to rid the world of this nuclear nightmare unless Kim Jong-un’s regime is willing to deal his weapons away. At the moment, we are nowhere near a deal to denuclearize North Korea. Just trying to even figure out where we are in talks with Pyongyang is confusing enough. Inter-Korean détente is moving forward at a rapid pace. It should be called the Moon Miracle, since South Korea's president has staked his entire legacy on securing peace and deserves much of the credit.

You can tell when Donald Trump has just achieved something: he starts being strangely amiable, and his critics start frothing at the mouth. He’s just met supposedly one of the most dangerous, evil men in the world — and made him look like a sweet overgrown child. He and Kim Jong-un signed an agreement and all the rolling news anchors talking about how ‘historic’ it is are for once not exaggerating. 'Today, we had a historic meeting and decided to leave the past behind and we are about to sign the historic document,' Kim said. 'The world will see a major change.' He also thanked Trump for the summit. ‘We’re going to take care of a very big and very dangerous problem for the world,’ said Trump.