On Sunday, Kim Yo Jong — the powerful sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un — sharply dismissed the U.S. push for denuclearization as an “anachronistic dream.” She asserted that Washington’s efforts to “backbite” North Korea’s status hold zero legally binding force.
Declaring that Pyongyang will steadily expand its nuclear arsenal in the face of U.S.-led threats, she flatly rejected Washington’s insistence that President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping had confirmed a shared goal of denuclearization during their recent Beijing summit.
Miss Kim’s familiar, fiery rhetoric was deliberately timed, arriving just a day before Xi’s first visit to Pyongyang in seven years. It also comes as Trump faces a “seven-year itch” of his own since his historic DMZ summit with Kim Jong Un in June 2019. With the Korean Peninsula now far more combustible than during Trump’s first term, a challenging question arises: What can he actually do to contain Kim?
TRUMP’S IRAN WAR IS PREVENTING A NORTH KOREA CRISIS
To understand Trump’s limited options, one must first look at the competing, deeply entrenched desires of the regional actors.
North Korea: Kim Jong Un’s motives are entirely existential. Unlike Iran’s regime, which seeks to project regional power through a network of violent proxies, Kim’s ultimate ambition is simpler but more stubborn: dynastic survival. He wants to ensure the Kim family continues to rule North Korea indefinitely. To achieve this, he believes he requires a credible nuclear second strike capability that can deter even the United States. His immediate diplomatic goals are official recognition as a nuclear state and the removal of crippling economic sanctions.
China: Xi wants Kim to stay in power to maintain North Korea as a vital security buffer against U.S. forces stationed in the region. While Beijing detests having a nuclear-armed neighbor on its border — especially since China is already encircled by nuclear states such as Russia, India, and Pakistan — Xi fears a chaotic collapse on his northeastern border even more. This is particularly true as Beijing navigates intense maritime frictions in the East and South China seas with the U.S., Taiwan, Japan, and the Philippines.
Russia: President Vladimir Putin, bogged down in his stalled war in Ukraine, desperately needs Kim’s conventional military backup. Putin will support virtually whatever position Kim takes, even if Moscow secretly shares Beijing’s discomfort with an unpredictable nuclear wild card.
The U.S. and its allied coalition: On the other side of the ledger stand the U.S. and its core Asian allies. South Korea and Japan want a total reduction of North Korea’s military threat and the preservation of peace in northeast Asia. For Trump and the U.S., the baseline remains a completely denuclearized North Korea — the exact same rigid position Washington holds toward Iran.
Will Kim listen to Trump this time around? Absolutely not.
Kim is watching the global stage nervously. As Trump targets, isolates, or deposes legacy autocrats and adversaries such as Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro, Iran’s Ali Khamenei, and Cuba’s Castro regime, Kim is drawing a lethal conclusion: His geopolitical peers are vulnerable precisely because they lack a robust nuclear shield. For Kim, disarmament equals death.
Under such a complex, pressing, and high-stakes scenario, Trump’s traditional playbook is unlikely to achieve the desired results: A preemptive military strike is essentially out of the question; Kim already possesses the nuclear capabilities to retaliate catastrophically against Seoul, Tokyo, and U.S. assets. Reopening high-profile diplomacy is equally unlikely, as both sides are not even on the same page regarding the definition of denuclearization.
That leaves a third option: continuing and dramatically beefing up sanctions while strengthening regional deterrence.
Trump’s realistic strategy toward North Korea is not expected to be a grand peace bargain but rather the aggressive maintenance of a strict status quo — a policy defined by three guarantees and three contingencies.
The three guarantees from Washington
No recognition: A guarantee of no recognition of North Korea as a legitimate nuclear weapons state.
No premature relief: A guarantee of no sanction removal without verifiable, irreversible disarmament.
Unified deterrence: A guarantee of the U.S., Japan, and South Korea expanding intense, united military pressure to contain Kim’s forces.
The three contingencies on the ground
Beijing’s stability: Contingency upon Xi’s political stability within China and Beijing’s ultimate attitude toward denuclearization on the peninsula.
The war in Ukraine: Contingency upon the outcome of the Russia-Ukraine war and Putin’s political longevity.
The “invisible hand”: Contingency upon the “Invisible Hand of Autocracy Termination” that can maneuver and impact North Korea’s fate. (This invisible hand collapsed the Soviet Union and ended the Cold War 35 years ago, despite the fact that the USSR owned a massive military force and a sprawling nuclear stockpile.)
THE DAGGER AT CHINA’S HEART: KOREA’S ETERNAL BUFFER IN A NEW GREAT POWER STRUGGLE
What we are looking at is a fragile, hedging equilibrium. It is an uneasy containment strategy where the ultimate hope is that North Korea, acting as a ticking time bomb, can gradually be defused into a dud.
Trump cannot force Kim to give up his nuclear weapons through sheer force of personality or economic pressure alone. Instead, it is a long game for the U.S. to play — betting that Kim Jong Un will eventually discover his regime’s greatest threat is not an invasion from the outside but a slow, inevitable dismantlement from within.
David W. Wang is a senior international business executive, geopolitical affairs consultant, analyst, and writer based in the Washington, D.C., metro area. David can be reached on X @DavidWWang203.