and U.S. security guarantees were the only path toward North Korea’s abandonment of nuclear weapons. Almost everyone who had been worried about a nuclear war breaking out on the Korean Peninsula was relieved at this off-ramp for Kim, Trump, and Moon to tone down the rhetoric. But as Jackson pointed out, “South Korea, the United States, and the media were responding to North Korean overtures radically differently than in decades past, but the style and substance of North Korea’s overtures were entirely consistent with what it had historically done.” He called the scenario “collective amnesia disguised as a hubristic refusal to be bound by history.”
What was behind Kim’s pivot to diplomacy? The president and others in Washington were convinced it was Trump’s tough talk and maximum pressure policy that got Kim to cave. After all, the South Korean envoys who delivered Kim’s invitation told him so, and Trump seemed excited about the opportunity, tweeting, “Great progress being made but sanctions will remain until an agreement is reached. Meeting being planned!” The Republican chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee stated, “Kim Jong Un’s desire to talk shows sanctions the administration has implemented are starting to work.” And Senator Lindsey Graham stated, “I am not naive. I understand that if the past is an indication of the future, North Korea will be all talk and no action. However, I do believe that North Korea now believes President Trump will use military force if he has to.” The president and these officials were expressing a very human tendency to look for causal explanations—something Heuer cautioned his analysts against accepting at face value—and as a consequence, this assumption inclined them to overestimate the power of the United States to influence Kim. “When another country’s actions are consistent with US desires, the most obvious explanation,” Heuer wrote, “is that US policy effectively influenced the decision.”
Washington was right, but only to a certain degree. Kim doubtless understood that international sanctions had never been sharper and global unity on pressuring North Korea had never been greater than they were under the U.S. maximum pressure campaign, which had its genesis in the last year of the Obama administration. But he could hardly have been surprised at this response, given the scope and pace of his strategic provocations in 2017 and accompanying belligerent language. U.N. sanctions cut off North Korea’s most lucrative exports, including coal, iron ore, seafood, and textiles, worth approximately $2.7 billion, and reduced North Korea’s importation of oil.
Intensive diplomacy by Washington with countries that had political, economic, and military ties to North Korea led to more than twenty of them closing Pyongyang’s embassies, downgrading or expelling North Korean ambassadors, and clamping down on the ability of businesses owned by the North Korean government to make money to fund regime priorities, such as the nuclear weapons program, and to purchase luxury items for the elite. A September 2017 U.S. executive order authorizing broad secondary sanctions against individuals and companies that did business with the rogue country had the potential to squeeze North Korea’s ability to generate enough revenue to fund the nuclear weapons program and Kim’s other priorities. Maximum pressure also had the potential not only to suppress the ability of the elites to make money for themselves, and therefore to make loyalty payments to the regime, but also to undermine Kim’s ability to reward the elites, a key element of keeping them invested in his rule. North Korea does not publish its own statistics, but the South Korean central bank estimated that in 2017 the North’s economy shrank by 3.5 percent, its worst performance since 1997, during the famine. North Korea’s most important exports—coal, iron ore, and textiles—declined by 40 percent.
The sanctions pressure surely played a role in Kim’s decision to pivot, a standard North Korean tactic to ease international pressure, even as the regime continued to covertly develop its weapons program. Kim’s reported agreement to denuclearize and focus on turning the armistice into a peace treaty is an iteration of his father’s and grandfather’s playbook, and an attempt to divide and conquer through bilateral exchanges with South Korea, China, the United States, and potentially Russia, while keeping Japan at arm’s length. For example, Kim’s agreement to work with South Korea to advance peace is reminiscent of past attempts by his predecessors to entangle Washington in long, drawn-out discussions on nonnuclear issues. Pyongyang calculates that these discussions serve to solidify the North’s claimed status as a nuclear weapons power, garnering the prestige of