South Korea longs for Trump’s focus as efforts to engage Pyongyang

Joe Biden’s lack of ambition in finding a diplomatic breakthrough with North Korea has left some South Koreans missing the flamboyant summitry of Donald Trump.

The Biden administration has adopted a “calibrated, practical approach” to North Korea, maintaining that it was willing to engage diplomatically without preconditions once Pyongyang was ready to do so.

But observers in Seoul and Washington say an unwillingness to spell out proposals and a lack of engagement at the highest levels indicate a desire to manage rather than solve the North Korea issue, even as Kim Jong Un enhances his missile and nuclear programmes.

“The administration wouldn’t put it like this, but their policy on North Korea is really one of benign neglect,” said Sue Mi Terry, director of the Center for Korean History and Public Policy at the Wilson Center in Washington and a former CIA analyst.

“They seem to have given up hope of any breakthrough, and for totally understandable reasons,” adding that the administration’s focus was on China.

When North Korea in 2017 tested an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of striking the US mainland, Trump declared that he would rain down “fire and fury” on the east Asian nation.

After a period of acute tension and bellicose rhetoric that policymakers in both Seoul and Washington feared could lead to war, the two leaders met in Singapore in 2018 and Hanoi in 2019. The summits upended America’s traditional approach to the Korean peninsula.

Their meetings were accompanied by a series of inter-Korean summits in 2018 that produced a historic handshake between Kim and Moon Jae-in, the South Korean president, at the demarcation line dividing the two Koreas.

“There was a really stark sense of possibility, even euphoria in Seoul at the time,” said Ankit Panda, a North Korea weapons expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Everybody thought Kim Jong Un was coming to town. There was a sense that South Korea was on the front lines of history.”

But the process collapsed at Hanoi amid disagreements over sanctions relief and the dismantling of North Korea’s nuclear programme. Kim has not engaged in talks since, his isolation exacerbated by the lockdown he imposed on his country in response to the coronavirus pandemic.

For Biden administration officials, the failure of Trump’s North Korea gambit justifies their low-key approach.

“We have no hostile intent toward [North Korea] and remain open to meeting with them without preconditions,” said a state department spokesperson.

“We hope the DPRK [Democratic People’s Republic of Korea] will respond positively to our outreach. However, to date, we have not received any substantive response from the DPRK to our offers to meet.”

A senior western government official said: “A…