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In previous US presidential votes, it typically took the North a couple of days to mention or issue a statement on the results.
Pyongyang apparently wanted to see the re-election of President Donald Trump, who has boasted of his friendly relations with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. Trump and Kim have tried to project their personal ties as friendly, although the three meetings between them in 2018 and 2019 did little to reach an agreement on the denuclearization of the North. Pyongyang’s unusually long silence may be due in part to caution about giving an official response to the election results, while Trump has yet to admit defeat.
The North has been antagonistic towards Biden, and his state media ridiculed him as a “low IQ fool” and a “jerk deprived of elementary quality as a human being.”
During a presidential debate with Trump, Biden said he would not meet Kim without substantial progress in denuclearizing the North, calling him a “bully.”
The Biden administration is expected to focus on working-level negotiations with Pyongyang to dismantle the recalcitrant regime’s nuclear arsenal.
Biden’s emphasis on conventional “principled” diplomacy in contrast to the top-down manner of his predecessor is generating speculation that he will revert to the strategic patience approach adopted by the administration of former US President Barack Obama, in which he was vice president.
Some observers raise the possibility that Biden’s team deviates from the strategy, if you can call it one, of waiting for the North to return to the negotiating table while tightening sanctions against the isolated state. They note that it should be noted that Pyongyang’s nuclear capabilities have advanced significantly since Obama began his first four-year term in 2009.
The administration of President Moon Jae-in, concerned about inter-Korean reconciliation, appears to be hopeful that the Biden administration will move in that direction. Since Moon took office in May 2017, his government has stuck to its peace agenda for the peninsula, inviting criticism that it is lukewarm to a fundamental resolution of North Korea’s nuclear issue.
It should be noted that, despite the changes in power, Washington has stood firm and will continue to pressure Pyongyang until it achieves the complete and irrevocable denuclearization of the North. Even Trump abandoned his second summit with Kim in Hanoi in February 2019, rejecting Kim’s demand that the United States lift most of the sanctions in exchange for a partial scrapping of the North’s nuclear weapons development program.
In its latest effort to show a firm stance, the US Treasury Department added two companies involved in the export of “forced labor from North Korea” to its list of entities subject to sanctions imposed on the totalitarian state for their nuclear weapons and ballistics. missile tests.
Moon and his aides must now discard their illusions about inter-Korean ties and prepare to be in tune with the Biden administration to achieve the denuclearization of North Korea, which is a prerequisite for lasting peace on the peninsula.
It won’t help if the Moon administration continues to pander to Pyongyang in an effort to bring it back to the inter-Korean talks.
It has remained inactive, and Pyongyang rejected its call for a joint investigation into the killing of a South Korean fisheries official by North Korean troops near the western maritime border in September.
Seoul did not co-sponsor a resolution recently adopted by a UN committee calling for an improvement in human rights conditions in the north.
South Korean Unification Minister Lee In-young said last week that he would make a formal offer to hold talks with North Korea once the coronavirus pandemic subsides. He went on to say that the South should share COVID-19 vaccines with the North, drawing criticism for being overly eager to improve inter-Korean ties as the South has yet to secure vaccines for its own people.
A day after he made the remarks, Rodong Sinmun, the spokesman for the ruling North Korean Workers’ Party, said the communist state would not accept any foreign aid.
The North could resort to its previous tactic of provocation shortly before or after a new US administration takes office. Seoul should take Pyongyang’s possible return to a provocative mode as an occasion to strengthen cooperation with the Biden administration in denuclearizing the North, not to ask it to follow in the steps taken by Trump.
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