Foreign & Public Diplomacy

Last month, South Korea finally abandoned the idea that has long organized Western policy toward North Korea.

Unification Minister Chung Dong-young said South Korea would no longer insist on North Korea’s complete and immediate denuclearization as the starting point for diplomacy. Instead, it would restrict North Korea’s nuclear program through a three-step process: halt the production of new weapons, reduce the existing stockpile, and ultimately dismantle the arsenal. A nuclear-free peninsula remains Seoul’s long-term goal, but it is no longer the price of admission.

Last month, South Korea finally abandoned the idea that has long organized Western policy toward North Korea.

Unification Minister Chung Dong-young said South Korea would no longer insist on North Korea’s complete and immediate denuclearization as the starting point for diplomacy. Instead, it would restrict North Korea’s nuclear program through a three-step process: halt the production of new weapons, reduce the existing stockpile, and ultimately dismantle the arsenal. A nuclear-free peninsula remains Seoul’s long-term goal, but it is no longer the price of admission.

Seoul’s announcement matters less as an offer to Pyongyang than as a signal to Washington, which—alongside Tokyo—is now one of the last parties still pushing a bargain that everyone else, including Beijing and Moscow, has quietly abandoned.

That offers a real opportunity. In his second term, U.S. President Donald Trump has not yet settled on a North Korea policy, and unlike the first one, there are no hard-liners such as John Bolton pushing to kill any deal that falls short of complete, verifiable, irreversible denuclearization—the maximalist position that scuttled the 2019 Hanoi summit. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has signaled his willingness to meet with Trump under the condition that Washington “accepts reality” and “drops the absurd obsession” with denuclearization. As Trump searches for a foreign-policy win for his party before the midterm elections, there are signs that he may be already moving in that direction.

Following the latest G-7 summit, South Korean President Lee Jae-myung told reporters that Trump had said it was “time to pay attention” ​to North Korea and that he had agreed to consider Lee’s proposal for a phased approach. This would align with Washington’s 2025 National Security Strategy, which conspicuously omitted mention of North Korea and the........

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