The premise that the United States and other stakeholders in Northeast Asia should accept the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) as a de facto nuclear weapons state has steadily gained increasing support among North Korea pundits. Many argue that policy should shift away from denuclearization and instead focus on deterrence, management, and coexistence.
The May/June 2026 issue of Foreign Affairs features three articles by prominent scholars that converge on the conclusion that denuclearization is no longer a realistic near-term objective, with Victor Cha advocating instead a strategy of “cold peace” based on deterrence and crisis management. In the same issue, Jung H. Pak contends that Kim Jong Un has transformed North Korea from an isolated dictatorship into a more influential regional actor by skillfully exploiting competition among the major powers. Oriana Skylar Mastro, meanwhile, warns that the deepening Russia-DPRK partnership has further complicated deterrence dynamics in Northeast Asia and reduced the prospects for a coordinated international approach.
This emerging consensus, however, is not based on a coherent theoretical framework of the North Korean system. It treats the DPRK’s nuclear status as a prevailing strategic reality rather than analyzing why the regime requires nuclear weapons in the first place. The DPRK is an extractive system built on a hostile ideology that promises a prosperity it can never deliver. This internal contradiction is the greatest threat to the regime, necessitating increased repression and belligerent provocations, both of which are critical to its survival. In such a system, nuclear weapons serve not only as a means of deterrence but as a means of waging a confrontational foreign policy. They increase the scale of the threat the regime can project, but neither resolve its underlying purpose nor compensate for the absence of economic well-being. Enduring peaceful coexistence is therefore not a rational endpoint as long as the system remains unchanged.
The argument presented here challenges the central tenets of the Foreign Affairs authors and advances an alternative thesis. It proceeds in three parts. First, it argues that the failure of previous policies to achieve denuclearization on the Korean Peninsula stems from a misunderstanding of the nature, purpose, and functions of North Korea’s nuclear arsenal. Second, it rejects the proposition that the international community should recognize the DPRK as a de facto nuclear weapons state. Third, it contends that denuclearization remains achievable, but only through a comprehensive and coordinated approach based on properly calibrated carrots and sticks – through cooperation between all major stakeholder states.
Why Previous Denuclearization Efforts Failed
Past policies for the denuclearization of the DPRK have been unsuccessful for two principal reasons.
First, many policymakers have misunderstood the nature of nuclear weapons in the North Korean context. For the DPRK, nuclear weapons are not an end in themselves, but an essential means for survival. As a consequence, previous policies have frequently focused on managing or constraining the arsenal without addressing the functions that the arsenal performs for the regime.
The DPRK’s nuclear arsenal serves five functions. First, it serves as a means of credible deterrence against perceived American military threats, both real and imagined. Second, it provides a cost-effective means of achieving strategic parity with South Korea despite the North’s overwhelming economic weakness and conventional military disadvantages. Third, as Kim Jong Un’s signature achievement, it serves as a source of regime legitimacy and as a means of securing elite loyalty. Fourth, it constitutes one of the pillars of the byungjin line, which seeks to pursue economic development and build a militarily strong state armed with nuclear weapons in parallel. Finally, it enables Kim Jong Un to pursue his aggressive belligerent foreign policy, backed by weapons of mass destruction. Importantly, this function differs from the first one in the sense that deterrence is a defensive function of the nuclear arsenal, whereas waging a confrontational foreign policy is an offensive function.
Second, according to James W. Davis’ theory of international influence, successful coercive diplomacy depends upon the effective combination of threats and promises – euphemistically referred to as “sticks” and “carrots.” Over the past three decades, however, successive U.S. administrations, including President Trump’s 2018-2019 attempts, have relied too heavily on sticks while offering far less credible carrots, a strategy that has consistently failed to persuade the DPRK to relinquish its nuclear arsenal.
The United States alone does not possess the capacity to offer either the credible sticks or the credible carrots necessary to achieve peaceful denuclearization. A viable policy initiative therefore depends upon a coordinated approach among the principal stakeholder states. Such an approach must satisfy two conditions.
First, it must offer the DPRK a distinctly better prospect of survival without nuclear weapons than with them. In practice, this requires an agreement that more than compensates for the five functions performed by the nuclear arsenal, thereby convincing the regime that denuclearization enhances, rather than diminishes, its long-term security.
Second, it must be aligned with the strategic interests of the principal stakeholder states – China, South Korea, Japan, Russia, and the United States. Only a policy that accommodates the strategic interests of all five stakeholder states can generate the combination of credible pressures and incentives necessary to make peaceful denuclearization feasible.
Previous American administrations did not satisfy either condition. Their inability to achieve denuclearization therefore reflects not the inadequacy of denuclearization itself, but the failure of the strategies they pursued. They sought to negotiate away North Korea’s nuclear arsenal without addressing the political system that made it indispensable.
Why North Korea Should Not Be Accepted as a De Facto Nuclear Weapons State
In his article, Victor Cha argues that denuclearization has become an increasingly distant objective and that policy should instead focus on managing the risks posed by a nuclear North Korea through deterrence, arms control, and crisis management – a strategy he describes as a “cold peace.”
The principal weakness of this proposition is that it mistakes the consequence for the cause. It assumes that North Korea’s nuclear arsenal is the source of instability when, in reality, the arsenal is a product of a deeper political and ideological system: peaceful coexistence with the DPRK cannot be achieved while its extractive system and hostile ruling ideology of class struggle and juche (self-reliance) remain intact. Accepting the DPRK as a de facto nuclear weapons state therefore addresses the symptom rather than the disease.
The hostility that characterizes North Korea’s foreign policy did not begin with the acquisition of nuclear weapons. It long predates them. During the Korean War, the DPRK possessed no nuclear capability, yet relations on the Korean Peninsula were already defined by invasion, ideological confrontation, and military conflict. Nuclear weapons have magnified the threat posed by the regime, but they did not create its belligerence. Rather, that belligerence emanates from the regime’s ruling ideology.
Former Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze identified the problem with remarkable clarity in his 1991 book The Future Belongs to Freedom: “Coexistence based on such premises as nonaggression, respect of sovereignty, non-interference in internal affairs, and so on is incompatible with class-struggle. Equating intergovernmental relations with class struggle places an insurmountable barrier in the way of mutual cooperation between countries with different sociopolitical systems.” He continued: “Returning to the absolute of class origin means to resurrect the ‘image of the enemy,’ internal or external, and thus justifies repressions inside and outside the country. Presupposing a totally hostile encirclement means cultivating a siege mentality, preparing for war, and engaging in confrontations and conflicts without respite.”
This observation goes to the heart of the North Korean problem. The DPRK inherited a Soviet-style socialist system that gradually evolved into a highly dysfunctional political and economic order organized around centralized control, extractive institutions, and centralized political mobilization. Remarkably, this system has survived for more than seventy-five years despite famine, economic collapse, and diplomatic isolation.
That order promises collective prosperity, yet has no chance to deliver it. The widening material gulf between North and South Korea makes this contradiction more visible over time, threatening the regime’s legitimacy more deeply than any external adversary can.
Its survival has depended not on economic performance but on repression, mobilization, and the continual construction of external threats. To survive internally, the regime must maintain and periodically intensify surveillance, coercion, and control while suppressing alternative centers of authority. To survive externally, it must adopt a hostile foreign policy characterized by recurring crises, military provocations, and confrontation. The resulting tensions and instability are then used to mobilize the population against a common enemy and reinforce domestic legitimacy.
For such a system, peace is not necessarily an objective; in important respects, peace is an enemy to the regime’s survival. A political order built upon permanent external hostility requires enemies in order to justify repression at home and mobilization abroad. As long as this ideological foundation remains intact, conflict and belligerence are not temporary deviations but structural necessities. In this sense, peaceful coexistence is not merely difficult; but under the present system, it would create internal destabilization and threaten the regime.
The persistence of this misconception has important implications for policy. The conflict on the Korean Peninsula did not arise because the DPRK possesses nuclear weapons. Rather, the regime’s adversarial worldview produced the conflict first, while nuclear weapons merely increased its capability to sustain it. Iran illustrates the same distinction. Weapons capability changes the degree of danger, but where ideology shapes a regime’s behavior, the intent to threaten does not begin or end with what weapon systems are at its disposal. Recognizing this distinction is essential, because nuclear weapons are ultimately instruments of regime security, not solutions to the structural weaknesses that underpin the regime itself.
Nuclear weapons cannot generate economic growth, attract investment, increase productivity, or create prosperity. Nuclear deterrence can enhance regime security, but it cannot substitute for a functioning economy or provide a sustainable basis of political legitimacy.
The experience of the Soviet Union is instructive. Despite possessing a nuclear arsenal larger than that of the United States, it was unable to prevent economic stagnation, political decay, and eventual collapse. Nuclear weapons are instruments of deterrence, not solutions to structural weaknesses embedded within an extractive political economy.
If the DPRK is to achieve long lasting peace and stability along with prosperity, it will ultimately have to revise the ruling ideology that continues to impede economic modernization and international integration. China’s experience under Deng Xiaoping illustrates the opposite path. Deng recognized that sustained economic development required abandoning the primacy of class struggle in both domestic and foreign policy. Rather than defining relations with other states through ideological confrontation, China adopted a pragmatic foreign policy designed to facilitate trade, investment, technological exchange, and economic modernization. The result was one of history’s most remarkable episodes of economic development while preserving political continuity.
North Korea faces the same fundamental choice. Lasting peace will ultimately require more than denuclearization. It requires replacing an ideology that depends upon permanent confrontation with one that permits peaceful coexistence and economic development. Unless the DPRK renounces the primacy of class struggle as the organizing principle of its external relations, conflict will continue regardless of whether it possesses nuclear weapons.
Accepting the DPRK as a de facto nuclear weapons state would also carry profound regional consequences. South Korea and Japan would inevitably face growing pressure to acquire independent nuclear deterrents of their own, setting in motion a new cycle of proliferation and instability in Northeast Asia. Recognizing North Korea as a de facto nuclear state is therefore not realism but a form of defeatism.
What is Required to Achieve Denuclearization
To avoid repeating the failures of the 2018-2019 negotiations, President Trump’s renewed efforts to denuclearize North Korea must present Pyongyang with a joint policy devised and agreed upon by all five principal stakeholder states. Any policy presented to Kim Jong Un must provide the DPRK with a distinctly better chance of survival without nuclear weapons than with them. Without this, negotiations will remain fragmented, incentives will continue to lack credibility, and the United States alone will be unable to offer what only the five stakeholder states can collectively provide. Any future denuclearization strategy must therefore satisfy four essential conditions.
First, any deal must secure the unyielding support of China. Among the five stakeholder states, China occupies the pivotal position. As North Korea’s only treaty ally under the 1961 Treaty on Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance, and by far its largest trading partner and principal supplier of energy, Beijing possesses political and economic leverage unmatched by any other external actor. Approximately 95 percent of North Korea’s external trade is conducted with China, while Beijing supplies the overwhelming majority of the DPRK’s crude oil. Any denuclearization strategy that fails to secure China’s sustained commitment is therefore unlikely to succeed.
Securing that commitment requires recognizing China’s own strategic objectives. Beijing seeks peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula, opposes both war and regime collapse, rejects further nuclear proliferation in Northeast Asia, seeks to lessen U.S. military influence in the region, and favors an environment conducive to regional economic development. The United States possesses two important sources of leverage that align with these interests.
First, to succeed where previous administrations have failed, President Trump must pursue a bold and audacious strategic bargain with China. Denuclearization cannot be achieved without Beijing’s active cooperation, and that cooperation will only be forthcoming if Washington addresses China’s core strategic interests. In exchange for China’s support in securing North Korea’s denuclearization, the United States should commit to the complete withdrawal of its ground forces from South Korea. Second, the United States should commit to forestalling South Korea and Japan from developing independent nuclear weapons, thereby preserving Northeast Asia as a non-nuclear region. Together, these measures would provide China with compelling strategic incentives to support a comprehensive denuclearization agreement. In return, Beijing would employ its considerable political and economic leverage to secure North Korea’s compliance. Denuclearization would thus become a strategic bargain through which both Washington and Beijing advance their respective security interests while promoting lasting peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula.
Second, the principal stakeholder states must develop a common strategic policy under a renewed Six-Party framework which aligns with the interests of the stakeholders. No single stakeholder possesses all the instruments required to construct a viable denuclearization package. As carrots, the United States can formalize diplomatic relations with the DPRK, provide security guarantees, and lift military threats, but it cannot unilaterally neither lift nor impose sanctions via the UN Security council. To impose such sanctions the cooperation of both China and Russia is required, while tangible economic assistance would necessarily come from South Korea and Japan. A comprehensive settlement can therefore only emerge through coordinated action among all five stakeholder states.
Despite their broader geopolitical differences, the United States, China, South Korea, Japan, and Russia continue to share important strategic objectives, including preventing war on the Korean Peninsula, rejecting the DPRK’s nuclear weapons program, limiting nuclear proliferation, preserving regional stability, avoiding a regional arms race, and promoting long-term peace and economic prosperity in Northeast Asia. Equally important, none has an interest in the collapse of the DPRK, which would generate acute political, economic, and humanitarian instability while removing North Korea’s role as a strategic buffer. These shared interests provide the foundation for a coordinated negotiating strategy.
That strategy must combine credible carrots with equally credible sticks. Previous negotiations have consistently failed because they relied too heavily on pressure while offering incentives that were either insufficient or lacked credibility. The principal weakness of past diplomacy was therefore not the absence of sticks but the failure to combine them with sufficiently compelling carrots. The sticks already exist in the form of sanctions, diplomatic isolation, and military deterrence, including joint military exercises, all intended to increase the costs of retaining nuclear weapons. The corresponding carrots would include a formal peace treaty ending the Korean War, diplomatic normalization by the United States and Japan, credible security guarantees, permanent sanctions relief following complete, verified, and irreversible denuclearization (CVID), a credible economic development package funded principally by South Korea and Japan, renewed Chinese and Russian security assurances, and North Korea’s gradual integration into the regional economy.
Third, the agreement must compensate for the strategic functions currently performed by North Korea’s nuclear weapons. For the DPRK, nuclear weapons are not an end in themselves but a means of survival. They provide credible deterrence against external threats, strategic parity with South Korea, regime legitimacy, elite cohesion, and support for a confrontational foreign policy. Any successful strategy must therefore convince Pyongyang that abandoning its nuclear arsenal offers a greater probability of regime survival than retaining it.
The proposed settlement must more than compensate for the functions currently performed by North Korea’s nuclear arsenal. It must convince Kim Jong Un that denuclearization strengthens, rather than undermines, the long-term security and stability of the regime. Acceptance of the agreement must increase the regime’s prospects for survival; rejection must instead lead to mounting economic stagnation, political isolation, and ultimately increasing risks to regime survival. In practical terms, the stakeholder states must present North Korea with an offer it cannot refuse – a comprehensive package that provides the DPRK with a better chance of survival as a non-nuclear weapons state than as a nuclear one.
Fourth, the agreement must be transformational rather than merely transactional. Unlike previous negotiations, which treated denuclearization as a transactional exchange of concessions, the proposed settlement must fundamentally transform North Korea’s strategic, political, and economic environment. A settlement limited to security guarantees, sanctions relief, and economic assistance would be unlikely to produce a prosperous and economically viable North Korea. Lasting denuclearization requires more than the dismantlement of a nuclear arsenal; it requires a transformation of the system that made nuclear weapons appear necessary in the first place. Its objective should not simply be the elimination of the DPRK’s nuclear arsenal, but the creation of conditions under which nuclear weapons are no longer perceived as essential to regime survival. Denuclearization should therefore become the foundation for North Korea’s gradual integration into the international community, replacing permanent confrontation with lasting security, economic modernization, and international legitimacy.
Should Pyongyang accept such a settlement, it would gain a credible pathway toward lasting security, international legitimacy, and sustained economic prosperity. Such a transformation would require the gradual abandonment of class struggle and permanent confrontation as the organizing principles of state policy, creating the political space necessary for market-oriented reforms and deeper integration into the regional and global economy. Economic assistance alone cannot generate sustained development without corresponding institutional reform. By embracing a socialist market economy and normalized relations with its neighbours, the DPRK could redirect resources from military competition toward economic modernization, foreign investment, trade, and rising living standards. Prosperity, rather than perpetual external confrontation, would become the principal source of regime legitimacy.
With a well-educated population, abundant mineral resources, and access to the Chinese, Russian, South Korean, and Japanese economies, the DPRK possesses the foundations to achieve a transformation comparable to China’s reform and opening, South Korea’s Miracle on the Han River, and Taiwan’s export-led industrialization. The objective should be to place North Korea on a development trajectory capable of sustaining average annual GDP growth of approximately 10 percent over a decade. Such a performance would rank among the most remarkable episodes of economic development in modern history, exceeding the pace of these transformative experiences. More importantly, it would provide Kim Jong Un with a new source of political legitimacy. Rather than deriving his authority from the possession of nuclear weapons, the regime could instead base its legitimacy on rising living standards, sustained economic growth, and national prosperity. Denuclearization would therefore represent not merely the dismantlement of a nuclear arsenal, but the beginning of North Korea’s political and economic transformation.
Only after the stakeholder states have forged such a common strategy should they present North Korea with a comprehensive settlement. Kim Jong Un would then face a genuine strategic choice.
That choice would extend far beyond denuclearization itself. It would be a choice between embracing the reforms necessary for national transformation or preserving the DPRK’s extractive political and economic system. As Nobel laureates Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson argue in Why Nations Fail, extractive systems such as North Korea are incapable of generating sustained prosperity, and are, by their very nature, destined to fail. This is not an indictment of the North Korean people, but rather of the DPRK’s defective political and economic system.
September 15, 2026 at 08:58AM
by DailyNK(North Korean Media)