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Slow Boil: What to Expect from the DPRK in 2024
Update: 2024-01-31
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In this episode, Dr. Ellen Kim is joined by Dr. Victor Cha to discuss the Korea Chair's latest publication, Slow Boil: What to Expect from the DPRK in 2024, the likelihood of increased North Korean belligerence in 2024 and how it ties to the upcoming U.S. election.
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Transcript
00:00:00
[MUSIC PLAYING]
00:00:02
North Korea is the impossible state.
00:00:05
It's a place that stumped leaders and policymakers for more than three decades.
00:00:10
It has a complex history, and it has become the United States top national security priority.
00:00:17
Each week on this show, we'll talk with the people who know the most about North Korea.
00:00:21
[MUSIC PLAYING]
00:00:24
[MUSIC PLAYING]
00:00:28
Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Impossible State CSIS podcast.
00:00:39
My name is Victor Cha, senior vice president for Asia, and Korea Chair at CSIS, professor at Georgetown University.
00:00:46
This is our second show of 2024.
00:00:49
And today,
00:04:22
we're going to be discussing a recent paper that we here at CSIS published on the question of North Korea in 2024.
00:00:58
What should we be expecting?
00:01:00
I'm joined on today's podcast by someone else from CSIS, Dr.
00:01:05
Ellen Kim, who is senior fellow and deputy director of the Korea Chair.
00:01:10
Someone who used to be at CSIS for many years and then went off, and she went and got her PhD.
00:01:17
Why she would do that?
00:01:18
I just don't know.
00:01:19
But she went and got her PhD and has come back to CSIS as a senior fellow and as deputy director, and has been integrally involved in all the work of the Korea Chair.
00:01:31
So Ellen and I are going to discuss this new paper.
00:01:34
We hope that will be of interest to our viewers and to our listeners.
00:01:39
So why don't we get started?
00:01:40
So Ellen, let me just turn it over to you.
00:01:43
Sure.
00:01:43
So first of all, thanks for having me today.
00:01:46
I am very glad to be back in the Impossible State.
00:01:49
For our listeners, let's discuss the new report that CSIS published this week, slow boil, what to expect from North Korea in 2024.
00:01:58
So Dr.
00:01:58
Cha, what is the key takeaway from this report?
00:02:02
So I think the main takeaway from the report is that we should expect 2024 to be a rocky year in terms of North Korean actions,
00:02:13
North Korean provocations, testing, these sorts of things.
00:02:17
There are a bunch of indicators that lead us to believe that North Korea is not going to be quiet in 2024.
00:02:26
So let's talk about some graphs in the report.
00:02:30
Maybe we can start with figure one in the report, which you can see on the screen.
00:02:34
Can you tell us about what this is showing us?
00:02:37
Yeah, sure.
00:02:38
So it's pretty self-evident.
00:02:39
This is about North Korean provocations under the past four administrations.
00:02:45
So what we did was we simply took the annual average number of provocations in a year during the George W.
00:02:53
Bush administration.
00:02:54
You see here the Obama administration, the Trump administration, and the Biden administration.
00:03:00
We took the average annual number, of course, because Trump only served four years.
00:03:05
Obama served eight, Bush served eight, Biden served four.
00:03:08
But just this very simple longitudinal analysis, you can see that there has been a steady rise in the annual average number of North Korean provocations under each of these administrations.
00:03:21
So under George W.
00:03:22
Bush very clearly here was only 3.5.
00:03:25
That seems very low to me.
00:03:26
I remember I was in that administration, and I felt like North Koreans were doing provocations every other week.
00:03:33
But it was on average only 3.5.
00:03:36
During the eight years of Obama, this was during the period of strategic patience.
00:03:40
North Korea was very active.
00:03:42
During the Trump administration, of course, they were also quite active.
00:03:45
Almost the, I'm sure President Trump would not like to know that the average annual provocations by North Korea were similar, were similar.
00:03:55
Basically, similar as they were during eight years of strategic patience when he was doing all this summit diplomacy.
00:04:00
Now, of the less, there's a lot of parity there.
00:04:03
But of course, the big change is here, right?
00:04:06
That we see under 3 1/2 years, well, almost 3 1/2 years of the Biden administration, the number has increased dramatically.
00:04:15
Yes, indeed, very dramatically increased there.
00:04:19
So let's move on to the second graph.
00:04:20
Then we have a figure too.
00:04:25
Oh, yeah.
00:04:26
So we think of the first year of Trump year as the fire and fear with North Korea's significant provocation.
00:04:35
But what is this graph showing here?
00:04:37
It seems like there's a huge increase in, you know, as you said, there's a number of, a lot of a number of messed up tests under Biden administration.
00:04:44
Yeah.
00:04:45
Yeah, so again, so this breaks down sort of year by year, the North Korean provocations during the Trump administration and the Biden administration.
00:04:56
And for those of our viewers and listeners who have been, you know, following this closely, this may not seem like a surprise to you, but it's still interesting to look at.
00:05:04
Some of you may remember, in the first year of the Trump administration in 2017, this was the so-called year of fire and fury where it seemed as though North Korea was doing missile tests every other week.
00:05:18
And they were, and Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump were locked in sort of a rhetorical battle between the two of them calling each other names, like,
00:05:29
I think-- Rocket man.
00:05:30
Rocket man and do tarred or something.
00:05:33
It was senile or whatever it was.
00:05:35
And so I remember this very well.
00:05:37
That were-- you know, there were about 20, right?
00:05:39
You had nuclear tests, you had 70 missile tests, and you had other provocations.
00:05:44
And then, of course, the summer tree started in 2018 and 2019.
00:05:47
And this is-- to me, always still a very interesting period.
00:05:50
I think in all of our analysis of this, this is the only year of 2018 in which there is nothing.
00:05:56
There are no-- there are no-- there's no provocations.
00:05:59
And of course, that was during the period of the summit diplomacy where Kim Jong-un had this self-imposed testing moratorium.
00:06:07
In 2019, we start to see the situation changing as the summit tree fails to produce anything.
00:06:13
And Northgrid does a lot of testing.
00:06:15
I think many of these, if I remember correctly, in 2019 were short-arranged ballistic missile tests.
00:06:22
Because every time they did one, Trump would say, that's not a violation of my agreement with Kim Jong-un because they're not long-range missile tests, which then raised decoupling concerns for Japan and Korea.
00:06:35
If we go to the Biden administration, some of you remember when the Biden administration started in 2021, Northgrid was relatively speaking quiet.
00:06:46
We didn't see a lot of activity by North Korea in 2021.
00:06:51
But where we really see it to start to emerge is from the second year of the Biden administration where there's this massive jump, right?
00:06:57
There's this massive jump.
00:06:59
And this continues in 2022, 2023.
00:07:03
And like I said, we expect it's going to be pretty bad in 2024.
00:07:06
All in total, this is 91.
00:07:09
This even needs to be updated now.
00:07:10
So there's more than 91 provocations during the Biden presidency compared with the 40s during the Trump administration.
00:07:21
So this raises a question of why we are seeing this dramatic increase in testing and provocations.
00:07:29
Yeah, so it's a good question.
00:07:31
I think there are a couple of possible reasons that we talk about in the report.
00:07:35
One of them is that North Korea is working very hard to improve and perfect new classes of weapons, moving from stationary missiles to mobile launch missiles,
00:07:50
moving from liquid propellant missiles to solid propellant missiles, trying to develop longer range missiles, trying to develop missiles that have hypersonic warheads.
00:08:02
This is all part of a sort of scientific developmental testing pattern that we see from North Korea that has clearly accelerated.
00:08:11
And I think that's certainly one of the reasons.
00:08:14
But that's not the only reason.
00:08:16
As North Korea is testing more and more capabilities to improve their weapon systems, they are also exercising, I think, through missile demonstrations that are designed to sort of combine short range ballistic missile exercises with longer range ballistic missile exercises with bomber activities.
00:08:38
So one piece of this increased activity has to do with scientific developmental testing.
00:08:45
Another piece of it has to do with operational exercising, just like the United States and the ROK.
00:08:52
Do military exercises?
00:08:53
This is North Korea is doing missile exercising.
00:08:55
And I think that's another reason.
00:08:58
And then a third reason that we talk about in the paper that we cannot discount is also the absence of diplomacy.
00:09:07
The absence of diplomacy, we have another longitudinal study where we've looked at, going back to the Clinton administration, where we've looked at patterns of North Korean behavior when it comes to missile demonstrations,
00:09:21
provocations, testing.
00:09:23
And one of the patterns that's very clear is when the United States is not in dialogue with North Korea, the level of activity by North Korea in this area goes up.
00:09:34
And that when we are in dialogue with them, it goes down.
00:09:38
Whether we're talking about negotiations taking place during the agreed framework in 1994, during the six-party talks in 2005 to 2007, during the Bush administration,
00:09:50
during the leap day deal under the Obama administration, although that was curtailed and ended by a North Korean rocket launch, or during summit diplomacy under Trump with Singapore Hanoi,
00:10:03
Pon Wenjum, generally, when we're talking with the North Koreans, the level of testing goes down.
00:10:10
We're not talking with the North Koreans now.
00:10:11
And so that's another possible reason that the testing has increased.
00:10:16
We, you know, these studies, if we were listeners are interested, you can find them on the CSI's Korea Chair website.
00:10:25
One of the interesting things that we found in addition to that was there actually wasn't a relationship between inter-Korean dialogue and North Korean provocations,
00:10:38
or the absence of North Korean provocations.
00:10:41
In fact, while there was a pattern with the United States in periods of inter-Korean dialogue, you could very well see provocations, or you might not see provocations.
00:10:51
So we could not discern a similar pattern when it came to inter-Korean dialogue.
00:10:56
It was largely negotiations that involved the United States, whether it was in a bilateral format, or whether it was in a multilateral format.
00:11:04
- We have one more figure that we'd like to go over.
00:11:09
Can you have a graph next slide?
00:11:12
Yeah.
00:11:13
- Okay.
00:11:13
- This one, right here.
00:11:14
- Yeah, what do we see here then?
00:11:17
- So this is a graphic that looks at North Korean provocations during major US election years.
00:11:24
So for our viewers, what we did was we looked at sort of made, what we divide major US elections as basically midterm elections or US presidential elections.
00:11:36
And again, a very simple calculation.
00:11:37
Like we're not, you know, we're not computer science majors here at Creature, CSIS, we're political scientists.
00:11:43
And so we counted, you know, we basically counted the number of provocations that took place during election years under Kim Jong-un and under Kim Jong-il.
00:11:52
And so we looked at this number, we tallied them all up and again, we took the average.
00:11:58
And so under Kim Jong-un, the average number of provocations in a major US election year was about four.
00:12:04
If we go to, if we look at Kim Jong-il, if we look at Kim Jong-un, it's a shorter period of time of course, but we look at the major elections again in 2012, 14, 16,
00:12:14
18, 20 and 22.
00:12:16
And here we see there is a similar pattern where there's a lot of provocations taking place, but you can see the numbers are getting much larger.
00:12:26
Again, 2018 is the outlier year, right?
00:12:29
Because of the Singapore summit, but these numbers start getting much larger.
00:12:34
So again, the differences in the average under Kim Jong-un has gone up.
00:12:39
I mean, we have a smaller sample size, but they've gone up.
00:12:43
So now there's almost 20 that we see during the US election year.
00:12:47
During the US election year.
00:12:49
- So is this increase largely because of the continuation, the strategic patients of the Obama administration and Biden administration,
00:12:59
or what is your thoughts on it?
00:13:01
- You know, I think it's hard to say.
00:13:04
I mean, I think what this particular graph suggests is that in 2024, because it is a US election year, we will see more North Korean provocations.
00:13:17
Again, this is a pattern.
00:13:19
It's pretty evident.
00:13:21
And this is, you know, everybody who's been watching this is a big election year in the United States.
00:13:26
It's also an election year in Korea.
00:13:28
And so we expect to see more of these provocations.
00:13:32
I think what also makes us concerned about 2024 is that in addition to it being a US election year,
00:13:43
and in addition to the absence of diplomacy, making North Korea more inclined to be active in this regard, the third factor is US ROK military exercises.
00:13:56
Regularly scheduled exercises.
00:14:00
There's usually a major military maneuver exercise that takes place in February or March.
00:14:06
And there's no suggestion that this won't happen.
00:14:11
And again, our work shows that when there are major military exercises and they are preceded by the absence of any sort of diplomacy,
00:14:23
North Korea reacts very strongly to those exercises.
00:14:26
And that's kind of the situation that we're in right now.
00:14:28
So in addition to it being an election year, in addition to the fact that there's no diplomacy taking place, and we have these exercises coming up, which North Korea is likely to respond to.
00:14:39
In the past, when we have been in dialogue with North Korea and we've exercised, they actually did not respond as severely.
00:14:47
In some cases, it was small token response.
00:14:50
In some cases, not at all.
00:14:51
So this is, I think is another concern.
00:14:56
In terms of strategic patience, you know, again, there was lots of criticism of the Obama administration that strategic patience was one of the reasons North Korea became so belligerent.
00:15:15
But as we saw, and I think it was the second graph, actually if we look at the average, there were just as many provocations during Trump as there was during Biden.
00:15:25
So I don't know if I blame strategic patience so much for that.
00:15:30
I think some of these other factors we talked about are a better explainer of what we're seeing.
00:15:36
- So then what can the US administration do now?
00:15:41
- Yeah, I mean, it's certainly not an easy situation.
00:15:45
I mean, it's bad news, but I think one of the messages of this work is that we should expect North Korean provocations and it would be a very tall order for the Biden administration to say their goal in 2024 is to try to stop these provocations,
00:16:04
testing, demonstrations, exercising, whatever you wanna call them.
00:16:09
I think that's very difficult to do and it would be setting the policy up for failure because there are manufacturers that are leading them in this direction.
00:16:18
It certainly means that there should be an effort, and I'm not saying that there hasn't been, but there should continue to be an effort to try to pursue diplomacy.
00:16:28
I think Bob Goluchi didn't call it strategic patience in a recent piece, he wrote, he called it patient engagement.
00:16:38
That is certainly something that's necessary for all the reasons that we've talked about 'cause it could help to sort of reduce this level of testing provocations, exercising,
00:16:49
however you wanna describe it.
00:16:50
I feel like I have to use all three words because if I say testing, I'll get an email from somebody saying, they're not tests, they're exercising, right?
00:17:00
So I feel like you have to say all three words now.
00:17:04
So I think that's certainly something that should be continued.
00:17:10
And I say, I don't think it's the Biden administration's fault.
00:17:15
I mean, they have been trying, as you know, as many of us know, the administration has been trying in many different ways to try to open channels of dialogue with North Korea and they're just not answering at this point.
00:17:27
It could change, but they're not answering at this point.
00:17:31
The other thing I think is, because we know these provocations are coming, provocations testing, exercising, we know that it's coming, we should be prepared to make lemonade out of the lemon,
00:17:43
which is to use this as a platform for accelerating, improving, augmenting, US rock, US rock, Japan, exercising,
00:17:54
US rock, Japan, Australia, exercising.
00:17:57
We should use this as a platform to try to continue that a pace or accelerate the pace or come up with new ideas for exercising.
00:18:05
And then, you know, try to use these expected provocations as a platform for engaging China more on this issue, China has not been very helpful on this issue,
00:18:18
but I think we have to keep trying.
00:18:24
We have to use this as an opportunity to try to get China to help more.
00:18:27
It's been reported that China has played a role in getting North Korea not to do the seventh nuclear test.
00:18:34
So if they still have influence on North Korea, I think this activity will provide an opportunity to try to work with the Chinese to have some impact on the way North Korea is behaving.
00:18:47
And even further along, if we can use these provocations as a way to try to get other actors to try to impede the growing cooperation that's taking place between DPRK and Russia in terms of ammunition in Ukraine and who knows what the Russians are providing in North Korea's in terms of sensitive military technology.
00:19:13
So again, in government, it's all about, and especially on North Korea policy, it's all about making lemonade out of the lemon.
00:19:21
And so I think these are some of the things that we can pursue.
00:19:24
- I have a warm final question.
00:19:27
As you know, the North Korean leader has been making a series of very hostile remarks to our South Korea.
00:19:34
He calls South Korea as a number one enemy.
00:19:36
He declared the unification is not possible.
00:19:40
And he also ordered the dismantlement of the inter-Korean institutions.
00:19:44
So what is Kim Jong-un is doing here?
00:19:48
- Yeah, a lot of people have been asking that question lately.
00:19:52
And of course, we don't know clearly what the answer is.
00:19:56
But it seems to me that this is proactive decoupling taking place on the Korean peninsula.
00:20:04
I think the combination of the change in South Korea from the Moon government to the UN government, from our progressive to a conservative government in combination with heightened USROK alliance activity,
00:20:20
camp David, as well as both Korea's involvement in the war in Ukraine, I think this has sort of led to really very little opportunities for inter-Korean dialogue.
00:20:34
And I think what Kim Jong-un is doing is just formalizing something that we knew was happening.
00:20:38
Anyway, this isn't the first time as you know where North Korea has done things like this.
00:20:43
They blew up the inter-Korean family reunion, whatever it was, built by the South Koreans on the North Korean side.
00:20:52
They literally blew the thing up.
00:20:54
So, I mean, relative to that sort of the dismantling these dialogue channels that were not active at all,
00:21:05
that pales in comparison to like physically blowing up the facility.
00:21:09
So, I think it is a political statement for sure about decoupling, and I think it's sort of been informed by all of these things that have been happening both on the Korean peninsula,
00:21:23
as well as in terms of the war in Europe.
00:21:25
- Well, this is very interesting and insightful discussion.
00:21:30
Thank you so much for sharing your poor and sharing insight.
00:21:34
- Yeah, no, it was a lot fun to do.
00:21:36
So, this was the title of the report is Slow Boyle, What to Expect from the DPRK in 2024.
00:21:43
Of course, Ellen, you helped with it.
00:21:45
Andy Lim, our associate fellow also helped with it.
00:21:49
And it's not good news about North Korea, but it's I think important news for people to understand.
00:21:55
- Yeah, certainly, for sure.
00:21:57
- Great, so thanks again for joining us for another episode of the Impossible State.
00:22:03
We hope that you'll all be safe and stay warm in the days ahead and we look forward to seeing you on the next episode.
00:22:09
- If you have a question for one of our experts about the Impossible State,
00:22:20
email us at impossiblestate@csis.org.
00:22:23
If you wanna dive deeper into the issues surrounding North Korea, check out Beyond Parallel.
00:22:30
That's our micro website that's dedicated to bring a better understanding of the Korean Peninsula.
00:22:35
You can find it at beyondparallel.csis.org.
00:22:40
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