North Korea welcomes Trump back with ‘strategic’ cruise missile test: What’s next?

A Yonhap news TV broadcast shows test-firing of a sea-based (underwater) ground-to-ground strategic cruise guided missile in North Korea. (Photo by Kim Jae-Hwan/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

SYDNEY — North Korea’s test launch of a “strategic” underwater-launched cruise missile within a week of President Donald Trump’s inauguration brought back into the spotlight a key geopolitical relationship from Trump’s first term: How he will approach North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

The American president’s relationship with Kim was a source of soundbites and drama between 2017 and 2021. It was the origin of “fury and fire” as a nuclear crisis between the two countries escalated in 2017. It was also the core of Trump’s 2019 meeting at the DMZ, when Trump became the first US leader to step foot into North Korean territory. And this last week, Trump said he would reach back out to Kim, saying of the dictator, “He liked me.”

But while that relationship warmed over Trump’s term, North Korea has a tendency to want to make sure it’s seen on the world stage with proverbial fireworks — or as close to proverbial as one can get when it involves missile launches. Which means the Jan. 25 launch, which was “succesfu” according to the Korean Central News Agency, could very well have been timed to catch the attention of the newly-sworn-in American leader.

Experts seem to agree that Kim is in a much stronger position than he was when Trump was first elected in 2016, a reality that will impact how Washington and Pyongyang interact in the coming years. Meanwhile, they say, the American president is much more likely to press ahead on ending the war in Ukraine, pursuing Chinese tariffs and domestic priorities before pressing ahead with efforts to reshape relations with Kim.

Start with the situation in North Korea itself. Kim has repositioned his country over the least year, scrapping all cooperation with the South and declaring his country was on a war footing.

“Kim has already signaled a change in state policy vis a vis South Korea, to turn away from any sort of reunification and instead to prepare the DPRK military for war. So his military build up will continue, including investing in advanced missile capabilities,” Malcolm Davis, an expert on the Indo-Pacific at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) in Canberra said in an email, “These include a range of delivery systems for tactical and strategic nuclear forces, including hypersonic weapons, submarine-launched ballistic missiles and cruise missiles.”

What has long been the unachieved goal of the West — North Korea abandoning nuclear weapons and allowing inspections of its facilities to prove it — is unlikely to happen, both Davis and Leonid Petrov, a North Korea expert at the Australian National University in Canberra, told Breaking Defense.

“From Donald Trump’s point of view, he’s not going to gain anything by denuclearizing North Korea. North Korea is not posing any plausible threat to US territory,”  Petrov said. “Yes, it can create trouble to South Korea, to Japan, to US bases in the Pacific, but that’s probably it. I don’t think North Korea is actually a threat, any threat to the US homeland.”

The CIA’s former deputy division chief for Korea, Bruce Klingner, said last week that there are conflicting signals coming from the Trump administration towards Pyongyang in its early days. “Everyone has to be prepared for a wide variety of course changes and high speed changes. And we’ll just have to wait and see on some of these,” the Heritage Foundation expert said during an event sponsored by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Michael Allen, a former National Security aide to George W. Bush and managing director of Beacon Global Strategies, noted on the CSIS panel that Trump’s comment about talking to Kim was in reaction to a question. “I don’t hear him proactively raising this issue,” he said.

Allen added that Trump “may have made the assessment that a deal is just not possible.” He said he didn’t know if talks with North Korea are “going to be a big thrust of what President Trump wants to be able to do, because I think a lot of people look at this and they say, this is a huge problem.”

Part of that problem is how to manage US and allied relations with the isolated leader.

“As for how Trump and US allies ‘manage Kim’ — I don’t think they do. Trump may be tempted to do a summit, but he’ll get nothing out of it, and probably come under pressure to make concessions,” Davis said. He noted that South Korea, under disgraced leader Yoon Suk Yeol had discussed the need for nuclear weapons.  Now that he appears likely be removed from office and the opposition opposes nuclear weapons and favors engagements with Pyongyang, Davis says the situation grows even more complicated for Trump.

But perhaps the biggest change in Kim’s posture is not an internal shift, but a new powerful friend: Russian strongman Vladimir Putin.

Petrov pointed to the fact that “things have changed dramatically,” since Trump stepped briefly into Kim’s country, thanks to Putin serving as Kim’s new “benefactor … Putin gives them money and technology and protection.”

Of course, it’s not been free. Kim has sent at least 11,000 North Korean troops to help Russia in its war against Ukraine. In return, Kim is getting billions of dollars in advanced weapons, food and oil from Russia.

“He already has secured his regime through Russia’s commitment to secure it, and North Korea will get enough technology and recognition and sanctions can be diverted through Russian border and the Chinese border,” Petrov said.

For his part, Kim followed the missile test up with a Jan. 29 visit to a nuclear weapons facility, which he praised for “epochal successes” in producing material for nuclear weapons and “strengthening the nuclear shield of the country,” the state-run Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said. Kim said 2025 will be “a watershed year” for improving his nuclear forces.

North Korean Technical Capabilities

So, about that missile…

Perhaps the most important question is whether this cruise missile can carry a nuclear warhead. North Korea has claimed it has a warhead that is small enough to fit onto the weapon, but like so many things about North Korea, no one is really sure.

“The DPRK has shown several purported nuclear weapons. In 2016 and 2017 they showed two designs in relation to ballistic missiles. It is unclear whether these were real, but in any case they were too large to fit inside a cruise missile. However, more recently, in March 2023, they unveiled the much smaller ‘Hwasan-31’ nuclear warhead. This would fit inside a cruise missile,” Ralph Savelsberg, a missile expert with the Netherlands Defence Academy said, adding that he “cannot assess whether these are real, though.”

The KCNA announcement of the launch, published in English late on Jan. 26, included alleged details of the test, which it says Kim watched.

“Based on the press statement, the missile flew 1,500 km,” Savelsberg said. “If that is its range, when launched from the DPRK, that would put all of Japan, including Okinawa, in range. If it can indeed be launched from a submarine, depending on the range of the submarine, it could threaten Guam. They claim to have launched a nuclear submarine in September 2023 and that could theoretically even threaten Hawaii or the US West Coast.”

In some ways a smaller missile like this poses a more difficult threat to the US, South Korea, Japan and other countries in range because cruise missiles are “difficult to defend against. They don’t fly as fast as a ballistic missile, but they are small and fly at low altitudes, which makes them difficult to detect. Furthermore, they can fly an unpredictable path and thus attack from a direction which you might not anticipate,” Savelsberg said.

One of the interesting tidbits in Pyongyang’s news story is that “the test-fire had no negative impact on the security of the neighboring countries.” According to Savelsberg, the North Koreans “seem to fly them in circles or figure-8 patterns, in order not to overfly any of their neighbors.”

That may be a clear indicator of how much North Korea wants to remind the world of its weapons without sparking serious reactions to its actions.

Yonhap, South Korea’s semi-official news agency, said the South Korean Joint Chiefs of Staff sent a text message to reporters saying that, “Detailed specifications are currently being closely analyzed by the intelligence authorities of South Korea and the United States.” No statements or comments have been made by US Indo-Pacific Command since the launch. Breaking Defense requested comment.