Last month, South Korea finally abandoned the idea that has long organized Western policy toward North Korea.

Unification Minister Chung Dong-young said South Korea would no longer insist on North Korea’s complete and immediate denuclearization as the starting point for diplomacy. Instead, it would restrict North Korea’s nuclear program through a three-step process: halt the production of new weapons, reduce the existing stockpile, and ultimately dismantle the arsenal. A nuclear-free peninsula remains Seoul’s long-term goal, but it is no longer the price of admission.

Seoul’s announcement matters less as an offer to Pyongyang than as a signal to Washington, which—alongside Tokyo—is now one of the last parties still pushing a bargain that everyone else, including Beijing and Moscow, has quietly abandoned.

That offers a real opportunity. In his second term, U.S. President Donald Trump has not yet settled on a North Korea policy, and unlike the first one, there are no hard-liners such as John Bolton pushing to kill any deal that falls short of complete, verifiable, irreversible denuclearization—the maximalist position that scuttled the 2019 Hanoi summit. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has signaled his willingness to meet with Trump under the condition that Washington “accepts reality” and “drops the absurd obsession” with denuclearization. As Trump searches for a foreign-policy win for his party before the midterm elections, there are signs that he may be already moving in that direction.

Following the latest G-7 summit, South Korean President Lee Jae-myung told reporters that Trump had said it was “time to pay attention” ​to North Korea and that he had agreed to consider Lee’s proposal for a phased approach. This would align with Washington’s 2025 National Security Strategy, which conspicuously omitted mention of North Korea and the long-standing goal of denuclearizing it, and with Trump’s own habit of publicly calling North Korea a “nuclear power.”

Both Trump and Kim understand that this window of opportunity closes when Trump leaves office. If it closes without reaching a deal, the next chance may not come for years. By then, North Korea’s arsenal will be larger, its ties to Russia and China will be deeper, and the United States will have lost one of its last chances to prove that it can still shape events on a peninsula where its influence, like its global standing, is fading.

For 30 years, U.S. policy toward North Korea rested on the bargain that if North Korea gave up its nuclear weapons, it would get sanctions relief, diplomatic recognition, and normal relations with the world in return. Disarmament first, rewards after.

That made sense in 1994, when North Korea was reeling from the Soviet Union’s collapse and the ensuing famine and desperate enough to consider trading away its weapons program. It no longer is. And even then, the Agreed Framework did not hold because both Pyongyang and Washington failed to uphold their ends of the deal.

Since 2018, North Korea has expanded its nuclear arsenal to an estimated 60 warheads, with fissile material for at least 30 more. It has built a military partnership with Russia, sending thousands of troops and munitions for the war in Ukraine in exchange for cash and technology. Its trade with China has deepened. And it has codified its permanent nuclear status into its constitution. In June, Kim Yo Jong, the North Korean leader’s sister and one of the regime’s most prominent officials, put it bluntly: The country’s nuclear program is “final and irreversible,” not a bargaining chip to be traded away.

Sanctions and years of pandemic isolation did not break Pyongyang; they showed that it could endure. If Kim comes to the negotiating table, it will be from a position of much greater strength.

It’s worth asking why Kim would negotiate at all. For all Trump’s unpredictability, Kim may rightly calculate that no successor—Democrat or Republican—is likely to offer engagement without denuclearization, as Trump has signaled he might.

There’s also the material incentive. North Korea’s wartime windfall from Russia is not indefinite; as the war in Ukraine winds down, Pyongyang will need to replace that shrinking source of revenue. Meanwhile, North Korea has become dangerously dependent on China. According to recent data released by KOTRA, in 2025, more than 98 percent of North Korea’s trade flowed through China, giving Beijing enormous leverage over the North Korean economy.

There are early signs that North Korea is trying to reduce that dependence. In May, Singapore’s foreign minister made a rare visit to Pyongyang and invited North Korea to attend the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Regional Forum in 2027, when Singapore is the chair. Although North Korea has publicly rebuffed the forum’s denuclearization language, it has not outright rejected attending it.

Furthermore, in recent years, a handful of Western countries have reopened embassies in Pyongyang. While none of this amounts to a genuine decoupling, it is consistent with the Kim regime’s long-standing efforts to preserve its room to maneuver and avoid becoming overly reliant on any single patron.

What Kim wants is clearer today than in 2018: recognition as a legitimate state, meaningful investment rather than humanitarian aid, and—crucially—a more diversified set of trade relationships. Simply put, Kim wants North Korea to have normal relations with the world. But the insistence on denuclearization keeps getting in the way.

If Washington wants to bring Pyongyang to the table, it should stop treating ordinary diplomacy as a concession to be withheld. The National Security Strategy already moved away from denuclearization. The next step would be an explicit public statement that negotiations can begin without North Korea first agreeing to disarm, a statement that costs little but removes a key obstacle.

This is what Seoul’s shift recognizes and why critics who dismiss it as merely rhetorical are judging it by the wrong standard. A freeze proposal is unlikely to change Pyongyang’s position on its own, but it establishes that the denuclearization formula is what has kept peace out of reach, and that a key party to the conflict is now willing to say so.

From there, the United States can restart the ordinary machinery of diplomacy that North Korea so desperately wants, including easing sanctions; opening embassies; extending diplomatic recognition; and cooperating on issues such as public health, climate, and disaster response—areas where progress is possible even when security talks are frozen. The goal is not a dramatic breakthrough but a gradual normalization.

A good place to start would be lifting the U.S. travel ban to North Korea, which limits U.S scientists, physicians, business leaders, humanitarian aid organizations, and civil society groups that would do much of the practical work of rebuilding people-to-people contact. Trump put the ban in place in 2017, and he can undo it unilaterally.

Washington could also support North Korea’s participation in regional bodies such as the ASEAN Regional Forum rather than treat attendance as a reward to be earned.

Regional integration can advance even if bilateral diplomacy stalls, which it likely will if the parties do not invest in working-level diplomacy. As the previous Trump-Kim summit showed, a handshake accomplishes little if negotiators and lower-level officials are not given a clear mandate to build a broader diplomatic relationship.

And less visible but still crucial, leaders must build domestic support for diplomacy before an opening emerges. Resistance to engagement with North Korea is a bipartisan issue in the United States, rooted in a preference for pressure, concern about rewarding bad behavior, and competition from other foreign-policy crises. Sustained congressional support—including from Democrats reluctant to hand Trump a political victory—is essential if any diplomatic opening is to outlast a single administration.

There are legitimate reasons for skepticism of this approach. Russia is reportedly seeking up to 30,000 additional North Korean troops for its war in Ukraine, on top of roughly 14,000 already deployed, suggesting that Kim may still see Moscow as his most valuable strategic partner for the foreseeable future, giving him fewer reasons to make concessions to Washington.

Yet the broader regional environment is more favorable to diplomacy than it has been since the last round of talks collapsed in 2019. Japan seems willing to approach the long-standing abduction issue pragmatically. Singapore is quietly encouraging renewed regional engagement. China has signaled interest in reducing tensions and has floated the possibility of a meeting alongside the November Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit. Vietnam and India have emerged as North Korea’s largest Asian trading partners after China. The basic framework for diplomacy already exists, and political will is growing; what’s missing is initiative from the United States.

Diplomatic openings are often built by people who kept talking when high-level channels went silent. Waiting for official talks to resume before investing in these relationships risks missing a narrowing window of opportunity.

The cost of trying is low. The potential cost of another decade of drift is not.