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 long-time
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.
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