This essay was originally published in Foreign Affairs magazine.

This is a welcome development for Beijing. Chinese analysts view South Korea as a weak link in the United States’ East Asian alliances, and Beijing is trying to divide Washington and Seoul through a combination of compliments and threats. In August 2020, Chinese media praised South Korea’s efforts to "be objective and keep its friendship with China," and several weeks later, Chinese scholars commended South Korea’s “kindness to China” in a time of “U.S. suppression.” But after South Korean President Moon Jae-in discussed Taiwan with Biden at their May 2021 summit, China’s Foreign Ministry warned South Korea not to “play with fire.” It is telling that Chinese scholars at a government-affiliated institute are arguing openly that China needs to raise the cost of South Korea’s cooperation with the United States on Taiwan.

North Korea’s missile capabilities are helping accomplish this task. The newer rockets more effectively threaten South Korea, and they increase Seoul’s doubts about the efficacy of U.S. deterrence. North Korea has explicitly tied its menacing assets to the issues surrounding the island. Pyongyang has publicly criticized the United States policies’ on Taiwan and threatened that “tragic consequences” will result from U.S. support. “The indiscreet meddling by the U.S. into the issue of Taiwan entails a potential danger of touching off a delicate situation on the Korean peninsula,” North Korea’s vice foreign minister said in a statement. These words could make Seoul think twice about backing the United States in the Taiwan Strait.

Japan is more difficult to split from Washington. But North Korea’s activities can certainly draw some of Japan’s attention away from Beijing. Although Tokyo was getting onboard with playing a greater role in deterring China and defending Taiwan, Japan’s Ministry of Defense has identified North Korea’s military capabilities as a “grave and imminent” threat, and there is no doubt that the government’s focus will shift if Pyongyang escalates its provocations. In the White House’s statement regarding Biden’s January 21 meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, Taiwan was mentioned only once. In comparison, the two leaders cited North Korea three times, condemned the country’s recent missile tests, and committed to work with South Korea more closely. Although Tokyo could theoretically focus on both North Korea and China, in practice it might struggle. Pyongyang poses a far more direct threat to Japanese lives and territory than does Beijing, and it would be hard for Japanese leaders to concentrate on China if North Korea grows more belligerent.

Drawing the Heat

North Korea’s new capabilities don’t help Beijing just diplomatically. The tests provide tangible, military benefits. The United States has been attempting to enlist South Korea in its efforts to strengthen deterrence across the Taiwan Strait. But Pyongyang’s new missiles mean Seoul is less likely to focus its military somewhere other than North Korea, especially if it continues the provocations. Indeed, a South Korean expert on Chinese politics has argued that when Washington asks for support in its contest with Beijing, Seoul should explain that it is too busy handling Pyongyang.

To reassure its allies, the United States may also need to refocus military attention on the Korean Peninsula, reducing its ability to operate in other parts of Asia. In 2017, when North Korea conducted ICBM and nuclear tests, the United States responded by sending more strategic assets, including heavy naval power, near the Korean Peninsula. If tensions rise high enough, Washington may have to do so again, including by shifting the Seventh Fleet’s operational focus to the area. Stationed in the middle of Japan, this fleet has been one of the United States’ primary tools for deterring Beijing, conducting patrols near the Taiwan Strait and promoting freedom of navigation in the South China Sea. But given past positioning patterns, a crisis on the Korean Peninsula would also most certainly drag the fleet farther north, undermining Washington’s ability to carry out operations elsewhere.

A major war on the Korean Peninsula would prove particularly devastating to the United States’ competition with Beijing. In addition to the Seventh Fleet, the United States Forces Korea’s 28,000 soldiers, 40 F-16 fighters, 90 military aircrafts, 40 attack helicopters, and other assets would immediately become unavailable for operations beyond the peninsula. A majority of the United States Forces Japan’s aircraft, ships, and approximately 55,000 military personnel would also be deployed to Korea. Japan’s own military, which could help the United States if it needed to fight China, would grow busy providing combat support to protect U.S. naval forces—including antisubmarine operations and sea minesweeping—as U.S. troops prepared for an amphibious landing on the peninsula.

Beijing, by comparison, is in a better position. The United States has to worry that China will use a North Korea–spurred crisis to invade Taiwan, but the inverse isn’t true: Beijing isn’t concerned that Seoul or Washington will start a war over Taiwan if Pyongyang launches an attack. China’s commitment to North Korea is also not as comprehensive as the United States’ is to Seoul. In the event of a renewed Korean war, China plans to send mostly ground forces into the North. Its air and naval assets would remain focused across the Taiwan Strait.

For China, therefore, a crisis on the peninsula—especially one that evolves into a conflict—would be a golden opportunity to expand its power. It may even make it possible to defeat Taipei. With U.S. intelligence assets supporting troops in Korea, a Chinese amphibious force might be able to move on the island without giving the United States advanced warning. China could establish beachheads on Taiwan long before U.S. forces, bogged down on the peninsula, have time to arrive. The war’s eventual outcome would be a fait accompli.

North Korea’s latest tests may have already made a Chinese attack more likely. As Chinese media happily pointed out, Pyongyang’s January 11 missile launch briefly confused the United States Northern Command’s warning system, grounding some commercial airplanes for 15 minutes. China has the most advanced ballistic and cruise missile program in the world. If North Korea’s offensive strike capability can jeopardize the U.S. early warning system, it surely bodes well for Beijing’s ability to surprise and defeat Washington’s forces.

Better Together

To counter North Korea’s new missile threats and prevent them from helping China, the Biden administration needs a stronger North Korea strategy—one that deters further provocations, reassures South Korea, and demonstrates Washington’s continued resolve and credibility to Beijing. That means Washington must support South Korea’s efforts to advance its offensive capabilities, such as the development of nuclear-powered submarines. South Korea, meanwhile, must scale up its combined exercises with the United States. A stronger U.S.–South Korean alliance will improve the two countries’ combat readiness, which is especially critical at a time when North Korea appears to be building up to another round of ICBM and nuclear tests. Finally, closer ties would make it easier for the United States to marshal allies in its competition against China, including in the Taiwan Strait.

The United States should also use the renewed tensions on the Korean Peninsula to encourage closer Japanese–South Korean cooperation. Seoul has long had highly fraught relations with its former colonial ruler, and the two states have especially struggled to get along in recent years. But for better or worse, the Korean Peninsula, East China Sea, and Taiwan Strait are increasingly intertwined in the current era of strategic competition. Pyongyang's provocations against the United States and its allies on the peninsula can embolden the Chinese Communist Party to act in other regions. And if Beijing can weaken or defeat the United States and its Asian allies anywhere, both the Chinese Communist Party and the Kim regime will be emboldened to act on the peninsula. To cope with this changing security environment, it makes sense for strategists in Washington, Seoul, and Tokyo to package these issues together. By demonstrating greater coordination, the three countries would also make it harder for China or North Korea to fracture Washington’s East Asia alliances, regardless of the contingency.

Finally, these three states must prepare for simultaneous provocations in East Asia, including concurrent conflicts in Taiwan and on the Korean Peninsula. In consultation with one another, the United States and its allies must demonstrate a strong willingness to cooperate and take strategic risks. They should hold more trilateral defense minister meetings, more thoroughly review various contingency scenarios, and discuss how to enhance their combined capabilities. Hopefully, these countries will never need to put these plans and abilities into practice. But to deter Kim Jong Un and Xi Jinping, they need to prove that they can fight two wars—and win both—if the need arises.

Despite the coronavirus pandemic, North Korea continues to carry out weapons testing and to declare that not a single COVID-19 patient has emerged in the country. Analysts and medical experts, however, are highly skeptical of Pyongyang’s claims. A coronavirus outbreak would overwhelm the North’s weak healthcare system and would be devastating to its people, who suffer from relatively high levels of malnutrition and have no access to information about the pandemic.   

North Korea is one of the worst human rights violators in modern history. In February 2014, the United Nations Human Rights Council published the landmark Report of the Commission of Inquiry (COI) on Human Rights in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, a comprehensive account of human rights abuses committed by the authoritarian country’s leadership against its people. It was seen as a major milestone in the effort to shine a light on the gravity and scope of the problem and to hold the perpetrators accountable by bringing them before the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity.

Over the past three years, however, the momentum for action on the report’s recommendations has faded and the human rights issue has been largely viewed as less serious a concern than the regional and global security threat posed by the North Korean nuclear program and long-range missiles.

Coinciding with the sixth anniversary of the COI report, it was the goal of the Korea Program’s twelfth annual Koret Workshop to regenerate awareness of the role of human rights in policy toward North Korea by gathering experts at Stanford to discuss the topic and generate concrete recommendations for action. In this post, we share highlights from select presentations prepared for this workshop that was canceled due to the COVID-19 crisis.

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Human Rights and Denuclearization

As the Trump administration shifted from a “war of words” with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un to prioritizing summit diplomacy, the focus on the human rights problem receded and many stakeholders, both within and outside the administration, preferred to play it down so as not to jeopardize the negotiation over a denuclearization agreement.

Yet the irony, argues Asian affairs and security expert Victor Cha, is that the denuclearization and human rights agendas are inextricably intertwined. “Human rights is an integral and unavoidable component of a comprehensive North Korea strategy,” he says. Cha, professor of government and holder of the D.S. Song-KF Chair in Government and International Affairs at Georgetown University, joined APARC as the Koret Fellow in Korean Studies for the winter quarter of 2020.

Cha notes that revenues gained from forced labor exports and other human rights abuses help the Kim regime finance its proliferation activities. Furthermore, improvements in the country’s human rights condition would reflect the leadership’s commitment to reform and make a denuclearization commitment by the DPRK more credible. The United States, claims Cha, must take actionable steps to include the human rights issue in bilateral relations with Pyongyang: establish a rights-first approach in future negotiations, resume humanitarian assistance, and fill the position of a Special Envoy for Human Rights as mandated by the Congress.

Watch Professor Cha discuss these issues in our recent virtual Q&A:

Tae-Ung Baik, professor of Law and director of the Center for Korean Studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, calls for a step-by-step approach, advancing small, concrete changes that will have a cumulative effect toward better protection of the rights of the people of North Korea. For example, cooperation and consultation on human rights protection should be exerted to promote reform in specific areas such as the North Korean judicial and criminal justice systems.

Ambassador Robert King, who served as a special envoy for North Korean human rights issues at the U.S. Department of State in the Obama administration, also stresses that addressing the human rights problem is essential to making progress toward denuclearization and security goals. King argues that North Korea must accept international norms and standards for denuclearization, but its acceptance of international human rights standards is necessary if it is to win international legitimacy.

Listen to highlights from King’s talk at the Korea Program’s seminar, which he delivered in the fall quarter of 2019 while being affiliated with APARC as the Koret Fellow in Korean Studies:

Freedom of Information

Although the human rights condition in North Korea has not improved, the information landscape in the country has changed significantly over the past quarter-century. Nat Kretchun, deputy director of the Open Technology Fund, describes the transformation as “trending up from an extremely low base toward greater openness and access before, more recently, retrenching.”

In the years following the famine of the mid-1990s, information flowed into the country like never before, exposing North Korean citizens to a range of new content via an array of non-networked technologies, including information from China, South Korean entertainment media, radio broadcasts from NGOs, and outside broadcasts by Voice of America and Radio Free Asia. As they regained some measure of economic stability, however, the North Korean authorities began to reestablish control over information flows. The recent available data demonstrates that access to information is falling off and the era of more socially normalized consumption of outside information is over, says Kretchun. “The government has begun implementing a far more technologically savvy information control strategy than it previously had the capacity to do […in an] effort to move communications and media consumption onto state-controlled networks via state-controlled devices.”

Indeed, Martyn Williams, a veteran watcher of North Korea’s information technology sector, shows that, while the digitization of media was the catalyst that led to the mass spread of foreign content across the country, so too has the same technology been employed to help the government combat it. For example, every Android tablet and smartphone in North Korea logs every page a person visits with the web browser and randomly takes screenshots during his/her use of the device. Users are allowed to see this database of collected screenshots but cannot delete them. “The system is sinister in its simplicity. It reminds users that everything they do on the device can be recorded and later viewed by officials […] it insidiously forces North Koreans to self-censor in fear of a device check that might never happen.”

Furthermore, the security software pre-loaded onto North Korean phones and computers cannot be replaced and the state’s digital certificate system makes mobile devices little more than consumption tools for state propaganda and personal memories. “While digital technology has created new pathways for foreign content, the increased networking of products could work against information freedom and eventually lead to the creation of an even more Orwellian society,” concludes Williams.

Minjung Kim, director of the South Korean NGO Save North Korea, emphasizes that a key to addressing the human rights problem in the country lies in discrediting the regime’s ideology in the minds of the North Korean people. It is, therefore, necessary to further produce and deliver content that educates citizens on how the regime shapes and manipulates ideology.

The Role of the United Nations

The Kim Jong Un regime responded to the 2014 COI report with outrage and denunciation, and Pyongyang has continued to refuse to cooperate with UN Special Rapporteurs.

For three consecutive years following the publication of the report, the UN Security Council returned to consider the North Korean human rights record. Since 2018, however, the issue has not been placed back on the Security Council agenda, while the U.S.-DPRK summit denuclearization diplomacy has not included a single statement regarding improving the lives of North Korea’s people.

The North Korean human rights problem has long been subject to political debates. Still, claims Joon Oh, former ambassador of South Korea to the UN and former president of the UN Economic and Social Council, future efforts can focus on helping the North Korean people realize economic and social rights, as these do not necessitate political reforms that threaten the regime. The challenge here, though, Oh recognizes, is that such efforts require technical cooperation and humanitarian assistance, which, in turn, have been narrowed down since the UN security council imposed sanctions on North Korea in 2017 for its nuclear and ballistic missile development.

Former Justice of the High Court of Australia Michael Kirby, the chair of the COI report, who has argued that there will never be peace on the Korean peninsula as long as there are grave human rights abuses occurring in North Korea, claims that “When a state is unwilling or unable to halt or avert [mass atrocity crimes], the wider international community has a collective responsibility to take whatever action is necessary. […] It is not acceptable simply to wring our hands and cry ‘never again.’ Action must be taken, however difficult and even dangerous is the path of pursuing such action can sometimes be.”

Granted, the international community must urgently reduce and eliminate the dangers posed by North Korea’s nuclear weapons and intercontinental missiles. However, says Kirby, turning a blind eye to human rights crimes because their mention will upset those who are alleged to have committed them or permitted them to be committed in their name is neither a rational nor a just response.

North Korea continues to declare that it has not had a single case of COVID-19, but health experts find it inconceivable that the infectious disease would not be in the country given its proximity to China and South Korea, two early victims of the pandemic. A coronavirus outbreak in the North could be devastating, says Asian affairs and security expert Victor Cha, as it would act on an extremely vulnerable population with already-compromised immune systems and outdated health care infrastructure.

Cha, professor of government and holder of the D.S. Song-KF Chair in Government and International Affairs at Georgetown University, has joined Shorenstein APARC as the Koret Fellow in Korean Studies for the winter quarter of 2020. He spoke with APARC via videoconferencing about the threat of COVID-19 to North Korea, the deadlock in the diplomacy of denuclearization, and the North Korean human rights problem.

COVID-19 or not, the Kim regime has recently stepped up again its weapons testing. The North typically resorts to missile tests, notes Cha, in periods of non-dialogue with the United States, and the data also shows that North Korea will bolster weapons testing before and after U.S. presidential elections.

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What is to be done about engagement with the North? Cha believes that any new U.S. administration should prioritize three areas: first, focus not only on North Korea’s nuclear program but also on its ballistic missile delivery capability; second, enable the flow of humanitarian assistance into the country; and third, genuinely work with our allies and partners in the region, “who have tended to be neglected lately and seen in largely transactional terms.”

While at Stanford, Cha has been researching a project that he calls “Binary Choices” and that examines how U.S. allies and partners in Asia react when they are forced to choose between the United States and China over various issues. Regardless of how one feels about the U.S.-China trade war, Cha concludes, the question is if we are “calculating the other externalities, in terms of how our allies make choices, into our net assessment of whether a policy towards China is working or not.”

Watch the Q&A with Cha above or on our YouTube channel:

The recent escalation of diplomatic and trade disputes between South Korea and Japan has alarmed numerous observers and is rather confusing to many around the world to whom the two countries seem to have much to lose and little to gain by the deterioration of the bilateral relationship. What underlying forces are driving the conflict? Are these new forces, or the same historical forces coming to a head? How much are factors from the international environment, such as the behavior of the United States, influencing the current escalation?

These were some of the questions that took center stage at a recent conference, “Japan and South Korea on the Brink: Escalating Friction Amidst an Uncertain World,” convened jointly by APARC’s Japan Program and Korea Program. The conference brought together experts in the international affairs and trade relations of South Korea, Japan, and the United States to shed light into the current conflict between the two U.S. allies. 

In his welcome remarks, APARC Director and Korea Program Director Gi-Wook Shin reminded the audience that Japan and South Korea have experienced tensions over colonial and wartime history and hence, in that sense, the recent conflict is nothing new. In the past, however, the tensions were mostly kept under control because the two countries well understood that it was in their mutual interest to maintain a cooperative relationship and keep history issues separate from other important economic and security issues. Over the past year, however, tensions over history have permeated economic and security issues amid rising nationalism in both countries.

A Problem of Alliance Management

The conference opened with a panel on diplomacy and international relations. Kak-Soo Shin, former Korean ambassador to Japan, situated the current crisis in the context of the regional strategy environment, noting that the Northern triangle – composed of North Korea, China, and Russia – has been gaining influence, while the Southern triangle – composed of South Korea, Japan, and the United States – has weakened. “The souring Japan-Korea relationship is a big blow to the maintenance of the Southern triangle and its ability to cope with the volatile security environment in Northeast Asia,” Shin cautioned.

Hitoshi Tanaka, chairman of the Institute for International Strategy at the Japan Research Institute, ltd., offered an overview of the reasons underlying the escalation in the bilateral relationship between Japan and South Korea, foremost of which, he said, is the declining mutual importance of the two nations to each other vis-à-vis China’s emergence as their largest trade partner. “Unless we feel that the future relationship is essential to both nations there is no way to address the conflict,” he said.

Joseph Yun, former deputy assistant secretary of state for Korea and Japan and former special representative on North Korea, emphasized that Tokyo and Seoul are “eroding the trilateral security arrangement that the United States has led in Northeast Asia since the end of the Second World War” – an arrangement that has been responsible for prosperity throughout Northeast Asia. The root problem, he argued, is alliance management, from which the United States “has been conspicuously absent.”

Watch the panel:

A Conflict in an Age of Changing Global Trade Order

The second panel turned eyes to the trade issues involved in the conflict between Japan and South Korea. Professor Yukiko Fukagawa of the School of Political Science and Economics at Waseda University, an expert in Korean economic development, observed that the friction between the two countries has escalated since 2000, when Korean global businesses like Hyundai and Samsung rose to fame. Since then, she argued, what has happened in Korea is a process of economic nationalism and “Korea seems to find it or interpret it as a kind of transitional justice against Japan.”

Seokyoung Choi, former Korean ambassador to the WTO and UN and former deputy minister for trade, explained the background for the Japan-Korea trade row and each side’s arguments. As a way forward, he said, both countries must consider several important imperatives, including the needs to cooperate in an era of tectonic changes to the global trade order, to address expanding fault lines in East Asia given the spillover effects of the U.S.-China trade war, and to complement for deficits of leadership and trust in Northeast Asia. 

Aiko Lane, executive director of the U.S.-Japan Business Council, discussed the main concerns the Japan-Korea friction poses for U.S. businesses, including regulatory uncertainty, supply chain disruptions, and delays in shipment. Further escalation in the relationship, she argued, could potentially inflict long-term damage to the regional ICT and manufacturing industries. Potential impacts include driving costs up for consumers and making it more lucrative for other countries to supply semiconductor materials to Korea.

Watch the panel:

On the heels of the abrupt ending of the Hanoi summit between President Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, with the future of the diplomacy of denuclearization in question, the Korea Program at Shorenstein APARC convened the 11th Koret Workshop, appropriately titled this year “North Korea and the World in Flux.”

The workshop, an annual gathering made possible through generous funding from the Koret Foundation, brought together international experts in Korean affairs for a full day of panel discussions. Participants assessed the U.S.-DPRK summit diplomacy, examined the challenges and opportunities in media coverage related to the negotiations between the two countries, and considered the prospects and pitfalls for summitry with North Korea in the near term. A report on the workshop proceedings is forthcoming.

At a midday public keynote, General Vincent Brooks, U.S. Army (Ret.), spoke before a packed audience about the challenges and opportunities in Korea. Brooks, who recently retired from active duty as the four-star general in command of all U.S. Forces in Korea, provided his unique and very-timely assessment of the situation on the Korean peninsula, and offered his insights on where the diplomacy of denuclearization may go next.

Gen. Brooks’ public address was followed by a conversation with Karl Eikenberry, director of APARC’s U.S.-Asia Security Initative.

Watch the video recording of Gen. Brooks’ remarks:

Following the abrupt ending of the highly anticipated second bilateral summit between President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in Hanoi, APARC and CISAC scholars evaluate the result of the summit, its implications for regional relations in Northeast Asia, and the opportunities moving forward towards the goal of denuclearization of the Korean peninsula.

This Q&A with Noa Ronkin features Andray Abrahamian, the 2018-19 Koret Fellow in Korean Studies at APARC, whose work with the nonprofit Choson Exchange has taken him to the DPRK nearly 30 times; Siegfried S. Hecker, top nuclear security expert, former Director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Research Professor of Management Science and Engineering, Emeritus, and Senior Fellow at CISAC/FSI, Emeritus; and Gi-Wook Shin, Professor of Sociology, William J. Perry Professor of Contemporary Korea, Director of APARC, and founding Director of the Korea Program.