Four more years: Why North Korea’s Kim Jong-un is hoping for a Donald Trump re-election

North Korea’s leader and South Korean conservatives form an unlikely alliance in hoping for a second term for the US president, reports Donald Kirk in Seoul

The US president meets with his North Korean counterpart at their summit in Singapore in June 2018 (AFP/Getty)

President Donald Trump would defeat Joe Biden, the former vice president, by a landslide if North Korea’s Kim Jong-un had any say in the US presidential election.

The fact that Biden leads in the polls two days before the final voting, however, means all sides have to think about going back to square one in talks on North Korea’s massive programme for building nuclear warheads and the missiles to send them to distant targets, including the US.

Biden, having called Kim “a thug” in his final campaign debate with Trump, undoubtedly infuriated Kim still more by promising to “stand with South Korea” in a strongly worded statement to South Korea’s Yonhap news agency before the campaign’s final climactic weekend.

In remarks intended to show his disdain for Trump’s three meetings with Kim, in which Trump said they “fell in love” in their first summit in Singapore two years ago, Biden declared he would work toward “strengthening our alliance to safeguard peace in East Asia and beyond”.

Those words suggest that Biden would return to the tough tactics employed while he was vice president when the US conducted large-scale joint exercises with South Korea, staged mock “decapitation” missions against North Korea and sent bombers flying over the South on intimidation missions against the North.

North Korea, at the same time, could be expected to renew long-range missile tests. Two of them, a massive intercontinental ballistic missile and a submarine-based long-range missile, were trundled out for the world to see in a parade of armed might in Pyongyang on 10 October, marking the 75th anniversary of the founding of the ruling Workers’ Party.

The North Koreans have conducted a number of tests of short-range missiles since Trump and Kim signed their pledge to work for a “nuclear-free Korean peninsula” in Singapore on 12 June 2018, but they have refrained from testing long-range missiles since November 2017. 

Kim ordered the North’s sixth and most recent underground nuclear test in September 2017 after Trump denounced him as “rocket man” and threatened to unleash, “fire and fury” on the North.

Trump in his debate with Biden claimed, as he had done previously, that he averted a second Korean war by his meetings with Kim in Singapore and then in Hanoi, the capital of Vietnam, a communist nation that, unlike North Korea, has come to appreciate the benefits of capitalism since defeating the US-backed South Vietnamese in 1975.

“Guess what,” Trump told Biden in their debate. “It would be a nuclear war” for which Kim has “plenty of nuclear capability”. He acknowledged Kim was “a different kind of guy” with whom he had formed “a different kind of relationship” but did not claim, as he did the day after his Singapore summit, to have persuaded Kim to give up his nukes.

North Korean scientists and engineers have gone on fabricating nuclear warheads despite Trump’s meetings with Kim.

Biden, in his latest remarks, left no doubt that he views Trump’s talks with North Korea as having been a failure. Kim has ordered four nuclear tests since inheriting power in 2011 after the death of his father, Kim Jong-il. While Kim has refrained from ordering more nuclear tests since 2017, North Korea scientists and engineers are assumed to have gone on making them. The North by now is believed to have as many as 60 warheads.

“I’ll engage in principled diplomacy and keep pressing toward a denuclearised North Korea and a unified Korean peninsula,” Biden told Yonhap, making plain that he would order a review of US policy toward North Korea that might take months.

All of which deepens the sense that Biden as president would be anathema to North Korea, as indicated a year ago in a commentary carried by the North’s Korean Central News Agency. “Rabid dogs like Biden can hurt lots of people,” said the dispatch, quoted by NK News, a North Korea-watching service here. “They must be beaten to death with a stick.”

If nothing else, said Chad O’Carroll, NK News president, those remarks highlighted North Korea’s “preference” of Trump. He doubted Kim would appreciate “a slow drawn-out traditional diplomatic process”.

Kim could be expected to order more missile tests during that period but might continue to hold off on ordering another nuclear test while focusing on economic development. One drawback to testing another nuke is that the last test, believed to have been of a hydrogen bomb, reportedly caved in portions of a mountain, killing about 200 people.

Although Biden would appear to want to get quite tough on North Korea, South Korean conservatives, hostile to the liberal President Moon, still seem quite supportive of Trump’s re-election bid. The basic reason is that Trump appears far tougher than Biden on dealing with China, viewed with increasing suspicion if not hostility here.

“Trump is the only person who can destroy China,” said an office worker who did not want his name used. “The Chinese are really arrogant and do not know how to cooperate with other countries. They play political and economic games with South Korea while supporting North Korea. You can never trust Chinese.”

“Donald Trump has a hard line toward China and the DPRK,” said Choi Tae-hyun, an engineer whose outlook is basically conservative.”

“A lot of Koreans like Trump,” said Michael Shim, a salesman. “He’s dynamic and clear on what he said.”

Maeng Ju-seok, a businessman, believes Trump, capitalising on his relationship with Kim, might eventually persuade him to give up his nuclear programme. By taking “a very strong line,” Maeng predicted, “he might do some good”.

The liking for Trump among many Korean conservatives is a puzzle to Korea watchers considering Trump’s relationship with Kim. “It really doesn’t make sense for South Korean conservatives to support Trump over Biden,” said David Straub, former political counsellor in the US embassy here, but he’s “the ‘strongman’ type of authoritarian, demagogic personality that tends to appeal to some conservatives”.

Straub added: “Historically, conservatives in South Korea have tended to identify with American Republicans as being in the same ideological camp with them, including being more sceptical of the North Korean regime, taking right-wing positions on domestic cultural issues, and being pro-business/anti-social welfare.”  

Evans Revere, another former senior diplomat at the American embassy here, believes that South Korean conservatives “have overlooked the fact that the biggest threat to the stability of the US-ROK alliance these days isn’t North Korea or South Korean progressives”.

Koreans seem unaware, Revere observed, that Trump “cares little about the alliance, is prepared to cut US troop levels, criticises and insults Korea regularly, looks the other way as North Korea builds up its nuclear and missile forces, and has undermined the alliance’s military readiness by ending large-scale joint exercises”.

Trump’s tough stance on China is what counts, said Revere. Korean conservatives see him as “vigorously anti-China, which accords with their ideological preferences” while Moon “is very solicitous of the Chinese” but forget that Trump earlier this year “was heaping praise on China”, praising President Xi Jinping, while “ignoring China’s ongoing human rights violations.” Then too, they “take pleasure in the growing friction between Washington and Seoul on a range of issues, since it undermines the popularity of Moon Jae-in and enhances conservatives’ chances in the next election”.

In fact, Trump has aroused concern by his demand for a vast increase in the amount of money that South Korea pays for having US troops and bases here.

Negotiators reportedly remain several hundred million dollars apart after Trump originally demanded South Korea raise its outlay from $927m last year to $5bn.

Biden in his statement to Yonhap vowed to focus on “strengthening our alliance to safeguard peace in East Asia and beyond, rather than extorting Seoul with reckless threats to remove our troops”. That remark should be welcome both to the liberals in power here and to their conservative foes, but Korean officials are if anything more worried that Biden would reverse the pattern of North-South rapprochement.  

One basic problem, said Steve Tharp, who made his career here watching North Korea as a US army officer and then a civilian official with the US command, is that Korean conservatives just can’t see the difference between their own conservatist outlook and that of Trump and the Republican Party.

“Hardcore conservatives here love Trump because he appears to be a hardcore conservative,” said Tharp. “I don't think that they are putting much mental effort into it. Trump support, or anti-Trump hatred on the other side of the coin, seem to both be more emotionally fuelled than anything achieved through intuitive logic.”