Is the day coming when the world admits North Korea has won?
iStock/Дмитрий Ларичев
Some years ago, after briefing South Korean lawmakers on North Korea’s nuclear ambitions, a South Korean defense expert, liaising with the Americans on the issue, stormed out of the meeting fuming and swearing.
Pyongyang had just withdrawn from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the global agreement intended to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons. It was, in effect, an admission that its nuclear research was aimed not merely at generating electricity but at building bombs.
The expert had been drafted to explain this significance to civilian politicians who had cut their teeth as student protestors against the country’s previous anti-communist dictatorships.
The politicians, she said later, simply did not get it.
“I can’t believe those idiots,” she fumed. “They are like babies who think mummy America will take care of them. They kept asking, ‘What’s the problem?’ Then one of them said, ‘This might actually be a good thing because after unification we’ll have nuclear weapons.’ The others all nodded. They are not serious people.”
At the time, her anger seemed justified. South Korea’s political class appeared astonishingly complacent in the face of what would become one of the region’s and, indeed, the world’s gravest security challenges.
Yet, looking back a quarter of a century later, perhaps those lawmakers were not being naïve. Perhaps they were merely ahead of their time.
I say that because, uncomfortable though it may be to admit, the world appears to be edging toward accepting North Korea as a nuclear state.
That is not to say we are there yet. Every official communiqué still demands the “complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.” Every international summit dutifully repeats the formula. Every sanctions package is justified as another step toward persuading Pyongyang to abandon its arsenal.
But there is now a widening gap between diplomatic language and strategic reality.
This week, Kim Yo-jong, the influential sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, mocked yet another international call for denuclearization after ASEAN foreign ministers repeated the familiar demand in their annual statement.
She dismissed the phrase as something that had “already lost all conceptual and practical meaning.”
Continued insistence on denuclearization was a “failure of strategic thinking and logic” and “a foolish and absurd delusion,” she said.
Her confidence was striking. So too was her assertion that North Korea’s position as a “responsible nuclear state” was “ultimate and irreversible” and that its nuclear capability would continue to expand.
Of course, North Korea says many outrageous things. Most deserve dismissal.
But this particular claim is becoming harder to ignore.
Twenty-five years of diplomacy, led by Washington, but from time to time with the involvement of Seoul, Tokyo, Beijing, and Moscow – not to mention the backing of the entire UN – have produced zero.
Negotiations have failed.
Summits have failed.
Economic sanctions have failed.
Threats have failed.
Offers of aid have failed.
International isolation has failed.
North Korea has not merely refused to surrender its weapons. It has steadily improved them. It has tested nuclear devices, developed increasingly sophisticated missiles, rewritten its constitution to declare itself a nuclear state, and made nuclear weapons central to its national identity.
At what point does their persistence become our acceptance?
From Pyongyang’s perspective, the logic is brutally simple.
Libya’s Muammar Gadhafi abandoned his weapons programs in exchange for rehabilitation with the West. Years later he was overthrown and killed.
Iran negotiated, delayed, bargained and compromised for years, only to see its nuclear facilities repeatedly attacked before they were ready for use, and its senior military leadership targeted, and now its political leaders killed.
North Korea drew the obvious conclusion decades ago. We’re seeing that logic now.
Possessing nuclear weapons may be expensive. It may leave the country isolated. It may put its citizens at risk.
But it also appears to guarantee one thing above all else: regime survival.
Indeed, one can argue that if North Korea had never embarked on its nuclear program, the Kim dynasty might not exist today.
When Pyongyang first made that calculation in the 1990s, observers figured the motive was regime survival motive but dismissed the concern as paranoid fantasy. The United States and South Korea, after all, were not looking for another war. Their preferred strategy was patience – waiting for North Korea’s dysfunctional system to collapse under its own contradictions.
Yet history has a way of making yesterday’s paranoia look like tomorrow’s prudence.
Whether Western governments ever intended military action matters less than whether North Korea believed they might.
The Kim family bet everything on nuclear deterrence. So far, that bet has paid off.
None of this means North Korea deserves recognition as a legitimate nuclear power. It violated international agreements to build its arsenal. Its weapons remain illegal under numerous United Nations Security Council resolutions. Official recognition would carry profound consequences for global non-proliferation efforts, encouraging other states to conclude that enough patience and enough bomb tests eventually earn acceptance.
But there is a difference between legitimacy and reality.
The uncomfortable truth is that North Korea increasingly resembles China in the 1960s, and India and Pakistan in the late 1990s: countries that were initially condemned, sanctioned and isolated before eventually becoming de facto accepted nuclear powers.
A treaty formally acknowledged the China reality. But India/Pakistan was never acknowledged. Reality simply overtook diplomacy.
The question now is whether the same process is unfolding on the Korean Peninsula.
Much may depend on President Donald Trump. If North Korea returns to the top of his foreign policy agenda, another cycle of summitry, pressure and brinkmanship could follow. If diplomacy fails again, the danger of military confrontation cannot be dismissed.
Alternatively, Washington may simply decide that other crises deserve greater attention. China, Ukraine, the Middle East and domestic politics all compete for limited presidential bandwidth.
If that happens, North Korea’s nuclear status will not be officially recognized.
It will simply become increasingly normal.
And perhaps one day, without anyone admitting that policy has changed, the world will quietly accept what it has spent a generation insisting could never happen.
There may never be a formal ceremony welcoming North Korea into the club of nuclear powers.
But history has often shown that the last step toward acceptance is not a declaration.
It is silence.
Hae-song is a Seoul-based analyst and writer on North and South Korean affairs. Having grown up overseas, he has lived his working life in South Korea where he consults on South Korean political and economic issues and on North Korea and defector related issues.
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