Russian President Vladimir Putin will reportedly visit North Korea soon following months of increasing provocations from Kim Jong Un, further highlighting the failure of President Joe Biden’s policy toward the Hermit Kingdom. Although Biden heavily criticized Donald Trump’s approach to dealing with North Korea during the 2020 campaign, the former president’s strategy now appears increasingly wise and effective.
Pyongyang has looked to forge closer ties with Moscow amid Western sanctions as a result of the Ukraine war, a relationship that Putin has appeared eager to foster. Kim visited Moscow last September for a meeting with Putin directly, and Western intelligence reports have found that North Korea is supplying artillery shells and other conventional weapons to Russia for its war effort.
At the same time, negotiations between the North and South, which reached a high point during the Trump years, have now broken down entirely. South Korea recently announced the suspension of the Comprehensive Military Agreement, a pact signed in 2018 that approved the removal of guard posts and weapons from the Joint Security Area, also known as the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ).
One of the major causes of tension is the North’s grotesque new practice of sending trash-laden balloons to bombard South Korean cities with animal feces and other waste. As a result, South Korea has restored three miles of no-fly zones along its border, which it says will last “until trust is restored.” Military training has also resumed along the DMZ.
North Korea also ramped up its weapons testing in 2023, firing an estimated 189 cruise and ballistic missiles. A congressional report additionally highlighted the North’s efforts to restore tunnels for nuclear weapons tests and develop submarine-launched ballistic missiles, along with enhancing missile interceptor technology.
In January, North Korea launched the intermediate hypersonic missile Hwasong-12, which uses solid fuel and can threaten the U.S. and allied targets as far as Guam. This missile has reportedly been referred to as the “Guam killer” by some North Korean officials.
Between February and May, North Korea’s army conducted testing of a “super-large warhead” on a cruise missile, the Hwasong-16B intermediate-range ballistic missile, and a new solid-fuel engine for hypersonic missiles, further indicating a rapid military build-up.
Additionally, the North Korean space program has recently taken several steps forward, aided by Russian technicians. Pyongyang has been on a mad dash to put satellites in orbit to guide its nuclear missile arsenal. The regime recently successfully positioned its Malligyong-1 military reconnaissance satellite, a move confirmed by Japan.
Meanwhile, North Korean sympathizers have even found a foothold in the United States among the increasingly radical anti-Israel movement – a movement enabled by Biden and his Democrat allies.
During a recent anti-Israel rally in Detroit dubbed the “People’s Conference for Palestine,” Ju-Hyun Park, a representative of Nodutol for Korean Community Development, a political group that pursues a political agenda aligned with Kim Jong-un’s priorities, referred to Israel as a “Zionist tumor” and pointed out that the North Korean regime has “never once recognized” the Jewish state.
Ju-Hyun also compared the Korean War, which rescued half of the peninsula from communist hell, to Hamas’s terror campaign against Israel. “Throughout its history, the solidarity between the Korean and the Palestinian people has not only been moral but material,” he said.
Dr. Gijs de Vroom, a former Dutch intelligence analyst specializing in political warfare, told me that it looked like Pyongyang “inspired” Ju-Hyun’s remarks “at a minimum.”
“The North is interested not only in fueling these protests but encouraging empathy for its regime,” Dr. de Vroom continued, adding that it seemed to be “a soft foreign influence” action. Notably, Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib was in attendance at the event.
All of these developments point to the utter failure of Biden’s North Korea policy, which he termed “practical diplomacy” shortly into his tenure. His approach was supposedly intended to pressure the North into giving up its nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles, but has had precisely the opposite effect.
A former senior Japanese diplomat, who spoke to me on the condition of anonymity because he still advises leaders in Tokyo, described the approach of pre-Trump America towards Pyongyang as “dancing on the ceiling.” He explained that the U.S. made demands but lacked a clear execution strategy. “Ultimately, it was a saga of failures since Pyongyang determined when and how to negotiate, an upside-down logic… Trump rightly halted it.”
He also said that the region was initially interested in Biden’s new strategy, but it soon turned out to be worse than his predecessors. “The threat for us has quadrupled,” he warned.
Professor Massimo Giosuè Gagliardi, an advisor on foreign policy to former Italian Prime Minister Amintore Fanfani, told me that Biden’s “practical diplomacy did not steer Pyongyang in the right direction.” Instead, he said, it “reinforced the dictator’s inherent viciousness and anger and pushed him further into the ring of tyrants.”
North Korea’s ties with Russia and now solidarity with Hamas are two prime examples of this. Along with sending weapons to Moscow, South Korea’s National Intelligence service also recently published pictures showing Hamas using weapons produced in North Korea.
All of this is a direct reversal of the progress seen under Trump. One former South Korean government official told me that after the Trump-Kim summit in Seoul, trust increased immensely, and there were rumors that Pyongyang was contemplating a summit in Wonsan, a North Korean city that in the 20th century was the site of a Christian revival seeded by Methodist missionaries from New Jersey.
Many observers previously believed such a development to be impossible, but Trump’s meetings with Kim caused a radical shift in what progress seemed attainable.
Now, however, the world is a more dangerous place under Biden’s leadership.
Ben Solis is the pen name of an international affairs journalist, historian, and researcher.