Security on the Korean Peninsula - Scott A. Snyder Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on East Asia, The Pacific, and

As like-minded democracies, the scope of common values, interests, and actions that initially bounded the United States and South Korea together to address the North Korean threat now extends to potential revisionist security threats across the Taiwan Strait, in the South China Sea, and from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. [...] The primary security developments facing the United States on the Korean Peninsula today revolve around the implications of the changing geopolitical context on North Korea’s foreign policy and strategic aims, the impact of South Korea’s closer alignment with the United States on the relative priority of North Korea in the context of broader Indo-Pacific issues, and the implications of North Korea. [...] Alongside the deepening of trilateral cooperation, there is also the development of a tit-for-tat dynamic between rival coalitions among the United States, Japan, and South Korea on the one hand and China, North Korea, and Russia on the other hand. [...] S.-South Korean Alliance Coordination and North Korea’s Nuclear Weapons Development A third dimension of the international security challenge posed by North Korea’s enshrinement of its nuclear status in the regime’s constitution is that it further deepens the intractability of the North Korean nuclear issue and makes it possible for the North to use its nuclear program as a poison pill meant to gu. [...] Through ongoing nuclear planning consultations at various levels, the United States and South Korea must continue to bridge the gap between the global view of extended deterrence through which the United States pledges to uphold global nonproliferation norms while responding to North Korean nuclear threats and the peninsular view which focuses on the imbalance between a North Korea that has nuclea.