The seeds of this year’s crisis on the Korean Peninsula were sown in 2019, when Kim Jong-un’s offer in his New Year’s address was disdainfully spurned by U.S. president Donald Trump. After the 2018 Singapore Summit and the 2019 address, Kim attempted to forge a totally new relationship with Trump. 2018’s address had been all bombast and bravado, threats, and ultimatums. The 2019 address was misheard as continuity, not change. Mass production of ICBMs and nuclear weapons were abandoned in favour of arms conversion in a “tanks into tractors” moment. Kim abandoned sales and proliferation, Syria, and “first use” policy.

Return on this investment was to be an end to joint military exercises on the peninsula and strategic arms sales to the South. All this in parallel with “multi-party negotiations to replace ceasefire in close contact with the signatories of the armistice agreement” to “build a lasting and durable peace regime and advance towards complete denuclearisation,” leaving the United States, China, and the DPRK at the core of a peace process.

If this was the new calculation, Kim’s American interlocutors proved innumerate. Late February’s Hanoi Summit and Trump’s walkout were calamitous. Kim set the clock to tick down. In December’s Plenum speech, he gained in clarity what was lost in charity. The denuclearisation process with Washington was over, abandoned for the moment, as Pyongyang had seen the future and saw that it didn’t work.

Kim has set his own deadline. He promised to publicly demonstrate his return to deterrence. His scientists and engineers continue to advance the North’s nuclear and missile capabilities. Despite tight American and Chinese red lines around any new nuclear weapons tests and an ICBM launch, Kim’s Plenum speech stated “not yet but this year.” Beijing’s red lines have more slack than Washington’s. Xi Jinping can wear a satellite launch in a manner that Trump cannot.

Does Seoul offer hope? Not if Trump is to be believed. As he said at the beginning of the year, “they do nothing without me,” refiguring the alliance politically and financially, sucking the South deep into Washington’s “Free and Open Indo-Pacific” Strategy.

President Moon Jae-in’s unexpected landslide in April’s elections strengthened his domestic position enormously. All this points to a degraded U.S. military capacity in the short-term. The combination of coronavirus and the ongoing American presidential campaign means there’s no longer political space for North Korea on the U.S. agenda in the run-up to November. The question is whether Kim is willing and able to wait until then. If Joseph Biden wins, it's all too late for 2020. He wouldn’t be inaugurated until late January, would be in no position to engage before the short summer, and would need to be seen by the North as something more than Obama part deux.

If the Republicans prevail in the general election, a newly unrestrained “Trump-at-Large” will need to be freed of those “adjutants” and “subalterns” who previously frustrated his efforts. If he signals he's willing to rewind the tape back to Singapore and go forward from there with a new calculation, it’s game on. There might be light at the end of the tunnel, but as of yet there is no tunnel. The peninsula needs to find a political span that will straddle the six months between now and November 3.

To have any chance of doing this we require Pyongyang back at the table. The North wants security guarantees that have a passing resemblance to the JPCOA, and the United States wants an institutional home for the donors that will provide the money for a $15–20 billion infrastructure fund that will anchor the deal. The institution that might eventually carry both and the interim load is the United Nations.

Glyn Ford is the director of the NGO Track2Asia and the author of Talking to North Korea.

Image: Reuters.