'Nukes Are Here to Stay'- Kim Unlikely to Shift Strategy After Biden Win

Business Standard 'Nukes are here to stay': Kim unlikely to shift strategy after Biden win

Kim Jong Un is one of the few world leaders who has yet to congratulate -- or even acknowledge -- the president-elect

North Korea has greeted the last two U.S. presidents with tests of missiles or nuclear bombs within weeks of taking office. And experts see the same happening with Joe Biden, whom the regime has called “a rabid dog.”

Kim Jong Un is one of the few world leaders who has yet to congratulate -- or even acknowledge -- the president-elect, particularly after Chinese President Xi Jinping did so on Wednesday. While it’s not unusual for North Korea to stay silent on the results of U.S. elections, Kim held unprecedented meetings with President Donald Trump that broke the mold of relations between the longtime adversaries.

Ties now are poised to revert to the frostier days of the Obama administration, when the U.S. deployed “strategic patience” to avoid rewarding North Korea for provocations -- a policy that stayed in place after Kim took power in 2011.

For North Korea, it may not make too much of a difference: Under both Barack Obama and Trump, Kim steadily increased his ability to threaten the U.S. homeland with nuclear weapons even in the face of ever-tighter sanctions.

“Regardless of the U.S. presidency, the North Korean regime is unlikely to change its behavior or shift its strategy toward the U.S.,” said Soo Kim, a Rand Corp. policy analyst who previously worked at the Central Intelligence Agency.

“The nukes are here to stay, Kim will continue to build and extort, and the strategy has proven to work for decades. So why change what works?”

North Korea tested Obama with the launch of a long-range rocket and a nuclear device within months after he took power in 2009. Trump was welcomed to the White House with a series of ballistic missile tests that culminated with the launch in November 2017 of an intercontinental ballistic missile that experts said could deliver a nuclear warhead to all of the the U.S.