A strategy without a strategy: Where is Seoul’s North Korea policy heading?

In the study of military and national security strategy, retired Col. Arthur Lykke from the U.S. Army War College established a widely taught framework decades ago: strategy is the balance of ends, ways and means. Ends are our objectives. Ways are our courses of action to reach them. Means are the resources and instruments we deploy. When aligned, strategy is coherent, but when the ends outpace available means or ways are pursued without a clear objective, the result is incoherence. Applying this framework to South Korea’s North Korea policy reveals a set of gaps that deserve closer examination.

Seoul’s primary end in recent decades has been North Korea’s denuclearization: the complete, verifiable, irreversible dismantlement of Pyongyang’s nuclear program. It remains the stated goal of successive administrations in Seoul and has historically been reaffirmed in joint statements with Washington. Yet a candid assessment of the available ways and means reveals a widening gap between the declared objective and the instruments at hand.

The first way has been diplomacy. Negotiation requires, at a bare minimum, a functioning communication channel with Pyongyang, one that is currently inactive. Inter-Korean dialogue remains frozen, talks between Washington and Pyongyang remain inactive despite Seoul’s volunteer as a “pacemaker.” The six-party talks framework has not convened in nearly two decades. Two of its key participants, China and Russia, have shifted their posture since those last sessions. Rather than serving as pressure on Pyongyang, both countries have deepened ties with North Korea, effectively reducing the multilateral leverage that diplomacy depends upon.

The second way has been economic pressure in the form of sanctions. The logic was that sustained economic strain would compel Pyongyang to recalculate the costs of its nuclear program. The U.N. sanctions regime remains in place, but its enforcement has weakened. The panel of experts responsible for monitoring violations was not renewed in 2024 following a Russian veto. Concurrently, North Korea has found significant external revenue through its support for Russia’s war in Ukraine, supplying artillery ammunition and military personnel in exchange for economic assistance and technology transfers.

The third way, military action against nuclear facilities, has rarely featured in serious policy discourse. Any strike scenario carries a high probability of escalation on a peninsula where the consequences would be borne most immediately by South Korea and its population. It is less a policy option than a marker of last resort.

With the primary end difficult to pursue through available means, two alternative ends remain on the table. The first is reengagement, restoring communication channels and creating conditions for incremental stabilization, rather than seeking transformation of the North’s nuclear posture or political system. What makes engagement distinctive is that it operates as an end in itself, offering a more modest but achievable objective. But it also functions as a potential way toward denuclearization, peaceful coexistence or eventual reunification, on the premise that sustained contact creates conditions more conducive to broader change.

This dual character gives engagement a certain strategic flexibility, though it also means that what comes after initial contact is restored is vital. Engagement as an opening move is not the same as engagement as a strategy. There are also constraints: meaningful engagement with Pyongyang has historically required at minimum tacit alignment with Washington and the means necessary to initiate even this more modest end are not fully within Seoul’s control.

The second alternative end is reunification. As a constitutional aspiration and long-standing element of South Korean national identity, it retains symbolic significance. As a policy objective, however, it faces severe obstacles. The Kim regime's official rhetoric now designates South Korea as its “most hostile state.” On the southern side, survey data indicate declining public enthusiasm for reunification, particularly among younger cohorts.

What this analysis reveals is a policy landscape defined by a misalignment between ambition and instrument. Denuclearization remains operative as a goal, but the multilateral architecture that once gave it traction has been structurally reconfigured by the deepening alignment among Pyongyang, Moscow and Beijing in ways unlikely to reverse soon. The question is no longer whether to pursue denuclearization, but whether organizing policy around it as the primary end forecloses more modest but achievable objectives.

Reengagement occupies a more ambiguous but consequential position. If pursued without a clear theory of what follows, it risks becoming a process mistaken for a strategy. If understood as a necessary precondition for larger ends, it acquires a more defensible logic. Seoul has not yet made that distinction explicit and doing so may be among the more important strategic clarifications available to policymakers now.

Lykke’s framework does not tell policymakers which end to choose. What it does is impose a discipline often absent from North Korea policy discussions: the requirement to trace the connection between what we want, how we intend to get there and what we actually have available to do it. Applied honestly, it makes visible the gaps that optimistic declarations tend to obscure, and it is in closing those gaps, or at least acknowledging them clearly, that a more coherent policy begins.

Park Jin-wan is a nonresident fellow at the University of Vienna’s European Centre for North Korean Studies.