Among the more overlooked geopolitical developments in 2022 was North Korea’s nuclear weapons program. During the year, it logged nearly 100 missile tests, a record for the country; several of them involved weapons of extraordinary range and potency. In November, the regime launched a Hwasong-17, an intercontinental ballistic missile that can carry multiple warheads and is capable of reaching the United States. A month later, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un personally oversaw the test of a powerful solid-fuel rocket engine—a crucial new capability for the country because solid-fuel rockets can be fired more quickly than liquid-fuel ones and are harder to detect and preempt.
Yet despite these developments, North Korea has not been a major focus for the United States in recent years. Although the country has posed a growing threat since 2006, when it first tested an atomic bomb, international efforts to slow down or stop its nuclear program have flagged. The last attempt by the United States to end the nuclear weapons program failed at the 2019 summit meeting in Hanoi between Kim and Donald Trump, and the Biden administration has not come up with any new ideas on how to achieve this. This is partly because the United States and its Western allies have been preoccupied by other pressing concerns, such as the war in Ukraine. But the West has also become, to some extent, inured to the North Korean threat.
