Having served as Vice President from 2008 to 2016 under Barack Obama, Biden comes into office familiar with the North Korea question. “I strongly suspect the Biden Administration’s approach on North Korea will rely on pressure and sanctions to raise the cost to North Korea of its nuclear and missile programs,” Revere says. How North Korea got more desperateĪnalysts say that once Biden takes office in January, he is likely to take a far more conventional approach to relations with North Korea than his predecessor-who famously eschewed formal diplomatic channels and instead put his faith in his personal relationship with Kim. At a military parade last month, the North’s military displayed what experts said is a new, bigger intercontinental ballistic missile. In October 2019, North Korea fired a submarine-launched ballistic missile that American officials said had a range of more than 1,200 miles-a capability that would make North Korea’s nuclear threat even harder to contain. With Trump now on his way out of office, those lofty claims have come to nothing, as North Korea has continued to develop advanced weaponry.
After that exchange, Trump and Kim vowed “to establish new U.S.– relations in accordance with the desire of the peoples of the two countries for peace and prosperity.” The tenor of the two leaders’ exchanges had changed significantly by spring of 2018, when Trump and Kim met for the first-ever summit between the leaders of the U.S. Read more: How a North Korean Nuclear-Armed Submarine Could Make It Even Harder to Strike a Deal
That year, Trump vowed to execute a policy he called “fire and fury,” as the two sides traded verbal barbs, with Trump calling Kim “little rocket man,” while North Korean state media called the U.S. presidents, and tensions with North Korea began to spike soon after Trump took office in 2017. Pyongyang has a track record of carrying out provocations early in the terms of U.S.