(16.04.2021)

Biden set the nonconfrontational tone on North Korea at his March 25 news conference, when he was asked about Pyongyang’s short-range missile tests the previous week. He said that the United States would respond “if they choose to escalate,” but that he was ready for “diplomacy . . . conditioned upon the end result of denuclearization.”

Biden’s stance, suggesting that denuclearization was an eventual goal, not an immediate one, was repeated in a joint U.S.-Japanese-South Korean statement on April 2, which called for progress “towards denuclearization.”