It seems Kim Jong Un is taking a page from America’s foreign policy playbook. Trump has now made the problem much worse.
For a backwards nation that has an economy roughly half the size of Vermont that can’t even feed its own people, North Korea sure knows how to drive headlines around the world. Through a series of carefully calibrated moves—restarting missile tests after a 577-day lull, a new found love of press conferences, veiled threats and intense diplomatic outreach to potential great-power patrons—Pyongyang has settled on a new strategy to gain concessions from the Trump Administration after a failed summit. Think of it as North Korea’s own version of maximum pressure.
How ironic. It seems Chairman Kim Jong Un is taking a page from America’s foreign policy playbook. Clearly humiliated after coming home from the second U. S.-North Korea meeting in Hanoi empty handed—and most importantly, gaining no sanctions relief whatsoever—Kim cannot appear to look weak to his generals, high-ranking military officers and upper-tier Korean Workers Party supporters he needs support from to ensure his rule. For Kim, now is the time to show that if America will not back off a diplomatic approach that essentially demands North Korea give up its nuclear weapons and missiles for eventual economic and geopolitical rewards later in the future—essentially trading nukes for a promise—that he does indeed have cards to play.
And play them he has. His ace card—and arguably the one that nearly started a nuclear war back in 2017—are now back on full-display: advanced missile tests. But while the missiles Kim is testing now are not the long-range rockets that can hit the U. S. homeland with a nuclear payload, the portly pariah of Pyongyang is showing the world that the year and a half plus was put to good use, developing solid-fueled missiles that could be fired quickly, and might be able to defeat some America’s best defenses.
