It looks like the
U.S. State Secretary nominee Antony Blinken hinted Tuesday (local time) that the Joe Biden administration may entirely rethink its policies toward North Korea, claiming that under Donald trump the situation with Pyongyang has deteriorated considerably.
Blinken did not specify what policies the United States will adopt in dealing with the totalitarian state during his confirmation hearing, however, as Biden and members of his foreign policy team have been critical of Trump’s handling of the Kim Jong-un regime, his comments are seen as heralding a big shift from their predecessor’s dealings with the North.
“I think we have to review and we intend to review the entire approach and policy toward North Korea because this is a hard problem that has plagued administration after administration, and it’s a problem that has not gotten better,” Blinken said before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
“In fact, it’s gotten worse.”
Kim Yeoul-soo, chief of the Security Strategy Office at the Korea Institute for Military Affairs, said the remarks broadly meant a shift in foreign policy in accordance with the change of administration from Trump to Biden.
“I think Blinken meant a shift from top-down diplomacy to a bottom-up approach and from bilateral negotiations to multilateral talks,” he said.
Kim also said that the nominee’s remarks at the hearing likely indicated the Biden team may pursue a nuclear deal similar to the one with Iran in 2015 when dealing with the North’s nuclear program as he wrote in an op-ed piece in the New York Times in 2018.
Korea Times
You can read more at the link, but the Iran deal would pretty much give the Kim regime what they want, keep their nukes and get sanctioned drops for just playing nice for awhile. They can then reinvest all the money coming in from the dropping of sanctions into their military and strategic programs.
The real item of interest will be if the Biden administration will pursue a peace treaty. If so this will once again play into the Kim regime’s confederation strategy and signal the beginning of the end for USFK.
