Is North Korea Serious About Denuclearization as a Costly Signal?: A Reality Check on the Pyongyang Thaw of 2018

• Published in: 글로벌정치연구 Vol. 11; no. 1; pp. 127 - 153
• Main Author: Er-win Tan
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: Korean
• Published: 한국외국어대학교 글로벌정치연구소 30.06.2018
• Subjects: costly signaling; North Korea; Panmunjom Summit; Trump
• ISSN: 2005-1352

The early months of 2018 have seen North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un making apparent overtures of peace toward the ROK and US. Whilst such developments have been hailed as signs of a potential Pyongyang thaw, there are grounds to take a more skeptical assessment. As a comparable example, Gorbachev’s arms control concessions during the late 1980s, is particularly illustrative. Andrew Kydd argued that the concessions Gorbachev made to Reagan posed risks to Soviet security, thereby building trust with Reagan and ending the Cold War. It is questionable if such costly signals can be replicated on the Korean Peninsula. The different geostrategic circumstances of the USSR in the 1980s and North Korea today will pose great challenges to any attempt at trust-building with North Korea. Nonetheless, North Korea’s overtures do mark a welcome de-escalation from the ‘War of Words’ between Kim Jong Un and Trump in late 2017. It is possible to be cautiously optimistic in predicting that, whilst the denuclearization of North Korea is unlikely for the foreseeable future, US-North Korean interaction is unlikely to spill over into armed conflict, as none of the principal policymakers involved has any interest in such an outcome.