Presumably the Trump administration understands there is no reason to talk seriously with North Korea for another couple of years, when they're utterly broken. Kim Jong-un needs to understand the sanctions pain is just getting started. When Pyongyang is burning, then we talk.
Or, if Kim would like to head off that grim future, he can quit fooling around with theatrical gestures and commit today to immediate, verifiable, and irreversible denuclearization. Those are the only choices that should ever be on the table for him.
The sanctions haven't really *hurt* North Korea all that much yet. The hurting will begin next year. Right now, Pyongyang is running its usual shell game and expecting a payoff. Not even the smallest shred of sanctions relief should be tolerated by the U.S. government.
Next year, the confident smirk will slowly begin fading from North Korean faces when they realize we're serious this time. This time it doesn't end until either the nukes are gone, or the Kim regime is. Those MUST be the only options.
We know the North Koreans are barbarians, so we have no reason to take anything they say seriously until they start feeling some real agony. Preliminary diplomatic gestures are fine, but we haven't really started talking about the serious stuff in earnest yet.
The bottom line is sanctions that actually do real, lasting damage to the North Korean economy. Absolutely nothing else matters except the persistence of those sanctions and North Korea accepting there is only one way to lift them. Everything else is preliminary theatrics.
North Korea has developed a surprisingly strong urban upper-middle-class. It wants profitable trade with the outside world. The Trump administration did a great job of dangling that carrot before them. Now the carrot must be snatched away and the urban elite reduced to beggars.
Make no mistake, Pyongyang has cards to play next year as this gets more serious. They'll make their rural population suffer and starve, then denounce sanctions as a humanitarian horror. China and Russia will echo that call. They must both be punished severely if they answer it.
Which is one reason why it's useful right now to be showing Beijing and Moscow that the United States CAN punish them. Some of what's happening with sanctions and trade right now is a prelude to next year's big North Korean drama, when the world's resolve is truly tested.
If this is truly an era when American influence is declining and a new, malevolent superpower in China is rising, there are some things we must do quickly and decisively with that power while we have it. Denuclearizing North Korea is definitely one of them.
In sum, we're not quite at the end of Act One of the three-act play on denuclearizing North Korea. Act Two begins next year, and it will be rough. /end
