[Salon] How the US learned to stop worrying and accept North Korea's bomb

[Chas Freeman <cwfresidence@gmail.com>]

How the US learned to stop worrying and accept North Korea's bomb

Security documents from Washington, Beijing no longer cite its weapons as a threat

Aidan Foster-Carter

December 14, 2025    https://asia.nikkei.com/opinion/how-the-us-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-accept-north-korea-s-bomb

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un supervises what state media KCNA says is a test-launch of a strategic cruise missile designed to demonstrate the readiness posture of various nuclear capabilities on Feb. 26. © Reuters

Aidan Foster-Carter is honorary senior research fellow in Sociology and Modern Korea at Leeds University in the U.K.
Let's play conspiracy theorists, shall we? Everyone's at it. So much less effort than thinking.Take the so-called U.S.-China struggle for world domination. Bah, humbug. All a sham. Behind the posturing, they're actually in cahoots. Thick as thieves, those two.For evidence, look no further than two recent official security documents issued by the U.S. and China. How do this pair plan to tackle the manifold threats posed by North Korea?Ermm ... They don't. Neither of them. Silence from Washington, milquetoast from Beijing.This is a huge change. And the timing: Coincidence? Don't be such a sap.China started it, publishing a security white paper on Nov. 27. Past versions had always stated "denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula" as a policy goal.No longer. Now a bland paragraph merely calls for "resolution of the Korean Peninsula issue through political means." Er, what issue would that be exactly? No longer the bomb, it seems.Beijing weighs its words carefully. This change is no accident, but a policy shift. Chinese President Xi Jinping is telling North Korean leader Kim Jong Un he's off the hook. China will no longer press him to give up his nukes.Maybe that's no big surprise. More shocking, a week later, was the new U.S. National Security Strategy (NSS). Former Economist editor Bill Emmott lambasted this as "blatantly racist ... slop" full of "brazen lies, absurd claims and frequent non-sequiturs." But it delighted Moscow.Emmott omitted omissions. One is huge. For over 30 years, previous versions of the NSS had always cited Korean denuclearization as a major policy goal. This U.S. stance was consistent and bipartisan.U.S. President Donald Trump's first-term NSS in 2017 -- twice as long as his new scrappy slop -- mentioned North Korea 16 times. Accusing the Kim regime of "rapidly accelerating its cyber, nuclear, and ballistic missile programs," it declared: "North Korea's pursuit of these weapons poses a global threat that requires a global response."That was then. Yet now, not a sausage. Six pages on Asia, but zero -- nada! -- on North Korea. Nukes? ICBMs, which can strike the U.S.? Cyber? Nothing. Forget it, dude. Not a problem.Some see this as a cunning ploy to lure Kim back to dialogue. Good luck with that. Can jilted Don really not grasp that the old bromance is over? His buddy got into bed with Russian President Vladimir Putin instead.Heads of delegation to the Six-Party talks join hands before a meeting in Beijing on Aug. 27, 2003.   © APTruly, this is the end of an era. And goodness, what an astonishing roller-coaster it's been.Thirty years ago, a U.S. president drew up plans to bomb North Korea's nuclear site at Yongbyon. That's how seriously Washington took nuclear proliferation threats back then. Bill Clinton blinked when the Pentagon forecast half a million casualties -- just in the first three months of any conflict with Pyongyang.As British wartime leader Winston Churchill said, jaw-jaw is better. Cue another former U.S. president, Jimmy Carter, cruising down the Taedong river in Kim Il Sung's yacht in July 1994. Kim promptly expired -- but the U.S. and North Korea kept talking. In October that year they signed a so-called Agreed Framework.Quite some deal, that. The U.S. agreed to build North Korea two light water reactors (LWRs) if they shut down Yongbyon. South Korea, Japan and the European Union were leaned on to foot the bill. Somehow, the website of the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization (KEDO) is still online: a poignant reminder of what might have been.The problem is that KEDO rested on a lie: that North Korea's nuclear ambitions were civilian, not military. Even as the International Atomic Energy Agency monitored the sealed fuel rods at Yongbyon, the North Koreans were secretly enriching uranium elsewhere.Enter George W. Bush, whose envoy James Kelly called Pyongyang's bluff. KEDO lingered on till 2006, but the agreement was busted. A new approach was needed, this time truly multilateral.Remember the Six Party Talks? That big hexagonal table in Beijing? The first and only time Northeast Asia got itself some regional security architecture, much-needed then as now.China hosted, and all the key powers participated: the two Koreas, the U.S., Japan and Russia.Hopes ran high that this ad hoc Korea-focused forum might evolve into something permanent.In North Korea, hopes exist to be dashed, and the Six-Party Talks were no exception. They began in 2003 and petered out in 2009, after several inconclusive rounds. Issues were divided into baskets, but Pyongyang's salami-slicing -- demanding much, for minimal concessions -- was playing for time rather than any real intention to denuclearize.And then, bang. In 2006 the DPRK's first nuclear test was a sobering reality check. The talks limped on, but Pyongyang's defiance and bad faith -- five further nuclear tests followed, plus ever bigger and better missiles -- saw the global community switch from carrot to stick.From 2006 through 2017 the United Nations Security Council passed nine major resolutions, censuring Pyongyang for its weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and imposing ever tighter sanctions. These eventually crippled North Korea's trade, which is nearly all with China.Crucially, all this was unanimous. China and Russia voted with South Korea's Western allies. Back then, nobody wanted to see this rogue state become a nuclear-armed loose cannon.In theory, the sanctions regime is still in place. Patently it failed to curb, much less halt, North Korea's efforts to build a WMD arsenal. Pyongyang found many loopholes. In recent years enforcement of sanctions by China and Russia has gone from patchy to almost non-existent.So you might say these shifts by Beijing and Washington merely acknowledge new realities. And there's a possible silver lining. Accepting that the DPRK has nuclear weapons would at least permit talks on arms reduction and capping arsenals, impossible at present.But this is clutching at straws. That's not where we are. Kim is in no mood to talk. Sending munitions and martyrs to the fight against Ukraine means Russia has his back now. In the current neo-Cold War geopolitical environment, superpower unity is but a fading memory.Clutching at another straw perhaps, the sole consolation is that Kim's bark is worse than his bite. His weapons are formidable and his threats lurid, but he doesn't actually do anything. Neither China nor Russia would countenance any 1950-style adventurism on the peninsula.Correction. Kim may eschew kinetic provocations (but keep an eye on his drones). Yet his malign cyber-legions roam the virtual planet 24/7, stealing crypto and causing mayhem.That's a global menace. Trump's 2017 NSS got this right, so his silence in 2025 is bizarre. But Trump is not a serious person, and the 2025 NSS is a woeful and shoddily tendentious shambles.North Korea has won. The global community and non-proliferation have lost. Maybe nothing and no one could have stopped the Kims, but our failure to do so will have consequences.Facing Kim Jong Un, and with the U.S. now unreliable, in the coming years South Korea and Japan may well feel impelled to go nuclear too. Will that make the region or the world safer?