The United States and North Korea stand once again at the precipice of a renewed military escalation. Frustrated by the Trump administration’s negotiation tactics, Kim Jong Un has threatened the United States with a “Christmas gift.” Any escalation between Washington and Pyongyang can spiral into a devastating war between two nuclear-armed countries. In response to this threat, President Trump has hinted at the use of military force against North Korea, stating that “If we have to [use our military], we will do it.” By imposing unrealistic demands, arbitrary timelines, and openly antagonizing one another, leaders in Washington and Pyongyang are returning to the same playbook of hostility and aggression — except now there is a real possibility for an escalation in the next eight days.We are at this point primarily because the Trump administration refused to be specific about what it was willing to offer Kim. To address this problem, the Trump administration should provide a proposal with three specific elements to compel Pyongyang to cancel its “Christmas gift” and return to the negotiating table. Contrary to conventional thinking in Washington, issuing more threats will not compel Pyongyang to recommit itself to diplomacy. Rather, what is needed is clarity regarding the positive inducements Washington is willing to offer. North Korea needs to know what we are asking them to say yes to.Specifically, the U.S. should offer partial sanctions relief, declare the end of the Korean War, and offer to open a liaison office in Pyongyang in exchange for concrete steps by North Korea to suspend all weapons-related nuclear activities over a period of 12 months.Urgent Need for Concrete ActionAn escalation of tension between Washington and Pyongyang could trigger a nuclear war that would kill millions, unleashing generations of environmental and horrific health issues at a scale unseen since Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Even without using nuclear weapons, an estimated 250,000 people would die in Seoul alone from a mix of conventional artillery and chemical weapons unleashed by North Korea. The 28,500 Americans who are stationed in South Korea and 50,000 in Japan would immediately be at the frontlines of any military conflict.North Korea also possesses nuclear weapons that can now reach the mainland United States, potentially placing 300 million Americans’ lives at risk. In 2018, the U.N. Command, Combined Forces Command, and the U.S. Forces Korea confirmed that Pyongyang has successfully developed an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) that can reach the entire continental United States as well as a thermonuclear device miniaturized to fit onto an ICBM, elevating North Korea from a regional challenge to a direct threat to the U.S..Despite these costs, there are some in Washington who advocate for more escalation. For instance, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies called for a campaign of “maximum pressure 2.0” against North Korea in a recent report, which is the same strategy that led us to the current stalemate. If what we seek is a different outcome, why repeat the same mistakes?A 12-Month DealA short-term deal is urgently needed to jumpstart diplomacy between Washington and Pyongyang. Fortunately, the willingness to make a deal is already there. For example, Kim Jong Un has publicly agreed to “work toward complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula” and pledged “permanent dismantlement” of nuclear facilities in Yongbyon in exchange for “United States tak[ing] corresponding measures.” North Korea and the United States also agreed to build a “peace regime” by formally ending the Korean War and discussed exchanging liaison offices to open channels of communication. But North Korea has since stepped away from these commitments because of a lack of clarity on what exactly the United States is offering in exchange for its cooperation on denuclearization.Below are three concrete steps that the United States can offer North Korea in exchange for suspending all weapons-related nuclear activities for 12 months:1. Partial sanctions relief North Korea is one of the most sanctioned countries in the world. There are nearly a dozen U.N. Security Council resolutions preventing the country from buying arms, natural gas, coal, minerals, textiles, seafood, and certain luxury goods. In addition, the U.S. has a set of unilateral sanctions and executive orders against North Korea as well. During the first year of his presidency, Trump imposed financial sanctions on North Korea and added sanctions targeting its “construction, energy, financial services, fishing, information technology, manufacturing, medical, mining, textiles, and transportation industries.” To jumpstart diplomacy, the United States should put on hold sanctions against non-military goods for a 12-month period, with automatic snap-back measure if North Korea does not hold its end of the bargain. The U.S. financial sanctions against North Korea have had severe consequences for humanitarian activities with North Korea, cutting off access to capital for international aid organizations. A suspension of sanctions on items that do not directly contribute to the nuclear or missile program would help ordinary North Koreans while retaining pressure that prohibits illicit activities by the North Korean government.2. Declare an end of the Korean WarNorth Korea and the United States have technically been at war with each other since 1950. Though the fighting ended in 1953 -— after some five million soldiers and civilians were killed — the two countries never reached a formal peace agreement. They only signed a Military Armistice Agreement to “insure a complete cessation of hostilities and of all acts of armed force in Korea until a final peaceful settlement is achieved.” The absence of a formal end to the war has fueled North Korea’s insecurities and desire for a nuclear deterrence against the United States. To chart a new path toward peace, President Trump should state that the United States is no longer engaged in a war with North Korea and that it is willing to take steps to formalize a peaceful bilateral relationship. Ending the war would address Pyongyang’s perennial insecurities against external threats that has driven it to embrace weapons of mass destruction in the first place. It would also show that the United States is serious about transforming bilateral relations.Insisting that no such declaration can be made until Pyongyang fully denuclearized and ends its chemical and biological programs has proven futile and counter-productive. Washington cannot expect to achieve its end-goal at the outset of a diplomatic process. This step already enjoys support among members of Congress, thanks to years of grassroots advocacy by constituents, nuclear experts, veterans, and advocacy groups who have called for a nonmilitary solution to North Korea’s nuclear threat. H.Res.152, which currently has more than 40 cosponsors, expresses congressional support for a statement from President Trump to end the Korean War and calls on the President to create a roadmap for achieving permanent peace in the Korean Peninsula. 3. Open liaison offices in Washington and Pyongyang. Last June, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo stated that the U.S. “ wants to achieve a fundamentally different strategic relationship with our two countries.” Indeed, the Korean War framework that has defined U.S.-North Korea relationship for nearly 70 years is obsolete and restricts the ability of both countries to build trust. Absence of state-to-state relations handicaps Washington and Pyongyang’s ability to identify common interests and potential areas of cooperation. People-to-people exchanges at the governmental and nongovernmental levels would increase room for mutual understanding, remove cultural barriers, and overcome geographic distance.Liaison offices provide a mechanism by which more frequent interactions and discussions can take place, which increases the prospects for progress. As noted North Korea expert Suzanne DiMaggio stated, “We need vigorous diplomacy to test [Kim Jong Un’s] intentions, shape an outcome toward a less contentious relationship and make progress toward disarmament and denuclearization.” In exchange for these steps, North Korea should begin dismantling some of its nuclear facilities in Yongbyon within the next 12 months. It should also come forward with proposals to “establish new U.S.–DPRK relations in accordance with the desire of the peoples of the two countries for peace and prosperity” as agreed to at the Singapore Summit.
***
Two years ago, a mistakenly-sent emergency alert about an incoming ballistic missile attack to Hawaii received national media attention and captured the public’s imagination about the horrors of a potential war with North Korea. It is no wonder that Americans support diplomacy, not war. Last summer, a poll commissioned by RealClearPolitics and the Charles Koch Institute showed that 70 percent of Americans supported President Trump’s diplomacy with North Korea. Less than ten days after the Singapore Summit in June 2018, President Trump announced that North Korea has begun “total denuclearization" without providing any detail on what that actually means in practice. Maximum ambiguity has brought the United States to the path of minimal gain. What we need now is maximum clarity backed by concrete actions.By laying out in specific terms what the United States is willing to offer, President Trump and Chairman Kim can defy the 70 years of inertia and begin in earnest the process of achieving peace.
UPDATE: Watch Jessica Lee discuss these issues here.
Jessica J. Lee was formerly senior research fellow on East Asia at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. Previously, Jessica led the Council of Korean Americans, a national leadership organization for Americans of Korean descent. Prior to CKA, Jessica was a Resident Fellow at the Pacific Forum and a senior manager at The Asia Group, LLC
Israeli soldiers prepare shells near a mobile artillery unit, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, in Israel, January 2, 2024. (REUTERS/Amir Cohen)
The House is poised to expand the use of a secretive mechanism for funneling weapons to Israel.
Hidden deep in a must-pass State Department funding bill is a provision that would allow for unlimited transfers of U.S. weapons to a special Israel-based stockpile in the next fiscal year, strengthening a pathway for giving American weapons to Israel with reduced public scrutiny. The House Foreign Affairs Committee is set to discuss the bill Wednesday morning.
The stockpile — known as War Reserve Stock for Allies-Israel, or WRSA-I — is “the least transparent mechanism of providing arms to Israel,” former State Department official Josh Paul told Responsible Statecraft. Since Oct. 7, Israel has quietly purchased huge numbers of American weapons from WRSA-I, facilitating a wave of airstrikes that many analysts consider the most intense bombing campaign of the 21st century.
The transfer process is simple. When Israel asks for weapons from WRSA-I, the secretary of defense can approve the request without having to go through typical steps like notifying Congress or even the White House in advance. Then “Israel can just drive in, pull whatever it requires, and drive out,” said Paul, who now runs a lobbying firm called A New Policy, adding that payments for the weapons are “worked out or provided in the future.”
The legislation, crafted by committee Chairman Brian Mast (R-Fla.), would build on a 2024 law that temporarily waived restrictions on the value and type of U.S. weapons transferred to WRSA-I each year. (U.S. law previously limited such transfers to $200 million annually.) That law also gave the secretary of defense the authority to assess the value of arms transfers rather than relying on the fair market value of the article.
Even before these changes, the U.S. had already started taking advantage of WRSA-I to quietly fuel Israel’s war in Gaza. In the early days of the conflict, Biden administration officials appeared to dodge transparency rules by cutting up larger transfers from WRSA-I into smaller weapons packages that fell under the $25 million threshold for notifying Congress of the sale. This helps to explain how Israel has managed to prosecute the war in Gaza despite receiving few publicly acknowledged weapons sales from the U.S.
Some worry that these arms transfers could place additional pressure on U.S. weapons stockpiles, which have already been strained by American support for Israel and Ukraine.
According to Paul, the proposed expansion of WRSA-I risks creating “a significant drain on U.S. military readiness.”
The effort to expand arms transfers to Israel comes after a panel of United Nations experts determined that Israel is committing a genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. The Israeli government rejected that claim, which it says relies “entirely on Hamas falsehoods.”
Notably, the bill also contains a provision that would eliminate all of the State Department’s reporting requirements, meaning that the department would no longer need to submit reports to Congress on issues like human rights abroad.
“Congressional oversight would take a very big hit if this were to pass as it exists now,” said John Ramming-Chappell, an adviser at the Center for Civilians in Conflict. “Congress and the public would have less information about U.S. foreign policy and its impact.”
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Top image credit: US Secretary of State Marco Rubio (right) is seen in the Oval Office with US President Donald Trump (left) during a meeting with the King of Jordan, Abdullah II Ibn Al-Hussein in the Oval Office the White House in Washington DC on Tuesday, February 11, 2025. Credit: Aaron Schwartz / Pool/Sipa USA via REUTERS
The US-Colombia drug war alliance is at a breaking point
It appears increasingly likely that the Trump administration will move to "decertify" Colombia as a partner in its fight against global drug trafficking for the first time in 30 years.
The upcoming determination, due September 15, could trigger cuts to hundreds of millions of dollars in bilateral assistance, visa restrictions on Colombian officials, and sanctions on the country's financial system under current U.S. law. Decertification would strike a major blow to what has been Washington’s top security partner in the region as it struggles with surging coca production and expanding criminal and insurgent violence.
A recent U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime report found that coca cultivation in Colombia had increased 53% in 2023, with the country now responsible for 67% of global production. An internal security report shared with Reuters revealed that the number of combatants in the country's armed groups — mostly financed through drug trafficking and illegal mining — increased by 7% in the past year and 45% since President Gustavo Petro took office in mid-2022.
Colombian security forces have been reeling after dissident members of the demobilized FARC guerilla group shot down a police helicopter during a coca eradication operation last month, killing 12 police officers. On the same day, a truck bomb on a major thoroughfare near a military aviation school in Cali exploded, killing six civilians.
While Petro's government has sought to break with the country's militarized counternarcotics strategy through peace talks with armed actors, crop substitution programs, interdictions at more profitable nodes of the supply chain, and global initiatives to decriminalize and reduce the demand for drugs, it has been forced to revive elements of the U.S.-backed war on drugs, including manual eradication, aerial bombardments, and bounties on the heads of crime bosses.
Under the framework of Plan Colombia, Colombia has been the largest recipient of U.S. foreign assistance in the Western Hemisphere, averaging $700 million annually in security aid, development assistance, economic support, counternarcotics funding and foreign military financing through the Departments of Defense and State and the now-defunct USAID — for a total of nearly $15 billion since 2000.
The threat of decertification, which puts much of that aid at risk, comes amid a rapid deterioration in relations with the historic U.S. ally since President Trump took office. A Petro-Trump social media spat in January over conditions of deportation flights led to threats of 50% tariffs, visa revocations, and economic sanctions.
Insinuations by Secretary of State Marco Rubio that Petro was responsible for the political violence that culminated in the assassination of Senator Miguel Uribe Turbay in June, followed by a diplomatic crisis over unfounded allegations that Rubio was involved in a coup plot against Petro, have eroded once-solid ties. A proposed 50% reduction in non-military assistance to Colombia in the 2026 U.S. federal budget and the administration’s unhappiness with the conviction for witness tampering and bribery of the former rightwing president, Álvaro Uribe, have further strained bilateral ties.
Tariffs on Colombia's U.S.-bound exports and demands to extradite guerrilla leaders involved in peace negotiations have led Colombia to seek new trade and security agreements with China and the European Union, a trend that decertification could accelerate.
To mitigate some of these concerns, Colombia in August hosted a bipartisan delegation of two freshman Colombian-American senators, Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) and Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio), who told the AP before arriving that “the purpose of the trip is to understand all the dynamics before any decision is made.” After meetings with top Colombian officials, Gallego said in a statement: "Colombia will suffer more if we take away its certification because there will be more unemployed people, and then drug traffickers and criminals will have more people who want to work for them."
In July, the Colombian government tapped a former Trump aide to "[advocate] for Colombia’s position in anticipation of the forthcoming determination by the U.S. administration," documents filed with the Justice Department’s Foreign Agent Registration Unit reveal.
The one-year, $720,000 contract with DGA Government Relations is being overseen by Nicole Frazier, who served as a special assistant to the president in the last two years of Trump’s first term. She has been tasked with giving "special emphasis" to ensuring Colombia is not decertified.
For the past six months, Colombia has waged a diplomatic offensive against the pending blacklisting, with numerous high-level visits by top police and counternarcotics officials, meetings with key GOP lawmakers and Trump administration officials, and repeatedwarnings from Colombia’s defense minister that decertification would run counter to making the U.S. “safer, stronger and more prosperous,” echoing Rubio’s words from January.
“It’s a political decision,” Colombia’s foreign minister Rosa Villavicencio said this week, but “if you look at certification objectively, in terms of the social costs we’ve paid, lives lost and servicemembers killed, the just thing to do would be to maintain our certification, and we hope that it’s looked at objectively.”
After the State Department sends its recommendation to the president based on Colombia’s interdiction results, hectare reduction figures, and anti-drug policies over the past year, Rubio will send his own recommendation to Trump, who makes the final decision, which is then submitted to Congress for feedback, though typically the presidential determination stands.
Security analysts and former U.S. officials have urged the U.S. to issue national security waivers allowing certain bilateral cooperation to continue even if Colombia is formally decertified. The last time Colombia was decertified, insurgent and paramilitary violence surged.
Without these waivers, transnational criminal groups could seize the opportunity to ramp up operations across the region and narcotics flows to the U.S. may increase, according to these experts. U.S.-bound migration from Colombia could also resume and foreign investment in the country continue to wane.
Gimena Sanchez-Garzoli, a Colombia expert at the Washington Office on Latin America, says that waivers could include foreign military financing and international narcotics and law enforcement programs, as well as funds approved in the FY26 National Defense Authorization Act.
“Cooperation with the U.S. is so embedded that decertification would seriously affect all operations, including in air, maritime, intelligence and other capacities,” a Colombian defense official told the International Crisis Group. “The main beneficiaries of decertification would be criminal groups, [who] are regional, not just local, so [this] would endanger security across the hemisphere.”
Decertification could also inadvertently boost Petro’s party in the lead-up to next year's elections — contrary to the Trump administration's preference — and prove difficult to reverse if the Trump-aligned opposition wins the presidency in August.
This could be why business leaders, opposition mayors and former President Uribe’s party are, like the Petro government, warning U.S. lawmakers and the administration about the risks of decertifying the country. This week, the mayors of Colombia’s second and third largest cities visited Washington to advocate against decertification.
“It would be the U.S. shooting itself in the foot,” Sanchez-Garzoli said, because “by isolating Colombia, the U.S. would not get the intelligence it needs, which is vital for counternarcotics efforts and strategies in the region. This would have a boomerang effect and would be bad for drug policy in the region, which is why in the past Colombia has always ended up being certified.”
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Top image credit: President Donald Trump meets with Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President JD Vance before a call with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Monday, August 18, 2025, in the Oval Office. (Official White House Photo by Daniel Torok)
The U.S. military recently launched a plainly illegal strike on a small civilian Venezuelan boat that President Trump claims was a successful hit on “narcoterrorists.” Vice President JD Vance responded to allegations that the strike was a war crime by saying, “I don’t give a shit what you call it,” insisting this was the “highest and best use of the military.”
This is only the latest troubling development in the Trump administration’s attempt to repurpose “War on Terror” mechanisms to use the military against cartels and to expedite his much vaunted mass deportation campaign, which he says is necessary because of an "invasion" at the border.
Unfortunately, more than two decades of widely-accepted, bipartisan laws and norms first laid the groundwork for this to occur.
After 9/11, the Bush administration created the Specially Designated Global Terrorists list, and Congress expanded the pre-existing Foreign Terrorist Organization list. These lists allow the executive branch, at its sole discretion, to add and remove individuals and groups to standing lists of “terrorists,” a term that is defined broadly.
The Trump administration has exercised this authority to formally designate transnational cartels as “terrorists” due in part to their role in the flow of people and drugs across the southern border into the United States. They have leveraged this designation to justify a range of actions, including deploying troops to Los Angeles and deporting immigrants to a brutal Salvadorean prison without due process.
Another post-9/11 legal invention that paved the way to what the Trump administration is doing today was the USA PATRIOT Act’s updates to immigration law that allowed deportation of not just those involved in actual violent acts of terrorism, but also those loosely associated with designated “terrorist groups,” even if those associations were peaceful and law-abiding or involuntary and a result of duress. People who have previously been excluded from the United States by these provisions include Iraqi interpreters for U.S. troops, victims of forced labor by violent armed groups in El Salvador, and even Nelson Mandela. These provisions mean that not just alleged members of cartels, but also cartel victims could be denied entry into the United States or deported if already here.
These same post-9/11 immigration law amendments also allow for revoking or denying immigration benefits to foreign nationals who “endorse or espouse” “terrorist activity,” defined broadly. The Trump administration has already revoked the visas of several immigrant students and scholars solely for their nonviolent activities criticizing the U.S.-Israel genocide in Gaza, as part of what they call a “zero-tolerance” policy for terrorism. The administration has primarily leaned on an older and more obscure provision of immigration law to carry out these attacks on immigrants’ free speech rights. But if current efforts are blocked by courts, or they wish to go further, post-9/11 immigration law may give them the tools to justify doing so.
The original decision to treat the 9/11 attacks not as crime but as warfare, and to launch a literal “war on terror” in response, remains the primary post-9/11 legal innovation on which so many abuses are made possible. Under this global war paradigm, the Obama administration carried out ruthless drone killings, including one that targeted a U.S. citizen, and justified the strikes with a mish-mash of legal standards that applied rules of war outside of actual war zones, and expansively interpreted what constitutes an “imminent threat” and resulting “self-defense” powers.
Every post-9/11 president has claimed wide authority to use military force so long as it serves a vague “national interest.” We can see echoes of this in the Trump administration’s insistence that the small Venezuelan boat blown up by the U.S. military posed an “immediate threat to the United States,” that the strike complied with the laws of war, and was “in defense of vital U.S. national interests.”
Commentators are entirely correct to denounce these assertions of legal authority. But policymakers have spent more than two decades accepting a war paradigm against whomever presidents determine to be “terrorist,” making it politically and legally all the more difficult to push back against what the Trump administration is doing now.
It is also worth recalling that dragnet detentions and deportations of immigrants under the auspices of the “War on Terror” are not entirely unique to the Trump era. In the Bush administration, then-FBI Director Robert Mueller leaned on civil immigration enforcement authorities to round up more than 1,000 Arab, Muslim and South Asian immigrants without due process for secret detention until they were “cleared” of terrorism.
A year later, the National Security Entry and Exit Registration System, which some have called the original “Muslim registry,” was launched, imposing onerous registration and surveillance requirements on lawful noncitizen immigrants suspected of no wrongdoing, almost entirely from Muslim-majority countries, with a stated justification of countering terrorism. This program wasn’t fully dismantled until well into the Obama administration, and produced no convictions for acts of terrorism. It did result in the deportation of more than 13,000 people, mostly over minor immigration process violations.
There are more powers that post-9/11 legal infrastructure affords that this administration has not pursued. It is not impossible to imagine terrorism prosecutions against low-level drug purchasers at home, new hot wars across Latin America, and more dragnet deportations of immigrants, justified by a melding of the laws of war, counterterrorism law, and immigration enforcement. This is because, on a bipartisan basis, our lawmakers have built and strengthened a post-9/11 package of powers that gets handed to each successive president, ripe for potential new weaponization and abuse. The targeting of immigrants and cartels as “terrorists,” including with the tools of warfare, is not a sharp deviation from our recent history — it is its logical conclusion.
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