This year has already brought a familiar series of events on the Korean Peninsula.

U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin visited Seoul and announced an expansion of U.S.-South Korea joint military exercises.

U.S. and South Korean aircraft, including stealth fighters and a B-1 bomber, held bilateral training on Feb. 1. The next day, a North Korean government spokesperson said “the DPRK (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea) is not interested in any contact or dialogue with the U.S. as long as it pursues its hostile policy and confrontational line.”

The accusation of a U.S. “hostile policy” is a rhetoric the North Korean government has employed for decades. Seoul and Washington had actually suspended most of their joint exercises during the administration of former U.S. President Donald Trump as a conciliatory gesture to Pyongyang. Large-scale exercises resumed amid a flurry of North Korean missile tests and soon after Pyongyang had rejected South Korea’s offer of economic assistance in exchange for denuclearization by the north.

These events underscore an important point. While Washington absorbs much criticism for its failure to induce North Korea’s government to dismantle its nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs, Pyongyang’s foreign policy has also failed — and arguably more profoundly.

As a foreign policy, the Kim regime’s acquisition of nuclear missiles has three possible objectives. The first is to increase North Korea’s international standing and prestige. The second is to improve North Korea’s security by scaring off South Korean and U.S. military action. The third is to enhance Pyongyang’s ability to extract political and economic concessions from South Korea, the United States and Japan. Pyongyang has failed on all three counts.

Kim Jong Un secured meetings with several world leaders in 2018 and 2019, but strictly speaking these meetings did not reflect new deference for Pyongyang because of its nuclear weapons. Rather, they were a reward for Kim expressing willingness to dismantle his nuclear weapons program.

Xi Jinping’s meetings with Kim in 2018, which ended the period of Xi distancing himself from Kim, resulted from China’s fear that Kim would make a deal with the United States without Beijing’s input. Pyongyang did not attain greater support from China by getting nuclear weapons, which China opposes. Rather, China supports Pyongyang in spite of its nuclear weapons because Beijing’s highest priority for North Korea is the survival of the Kim regime.

Once Kim’s professed willingness to denuclearize faded away, he receded back into the status of isolated international pariah.

Still, its nuclear weapons and missile programs have not made North Korea more secure.

The need to deter an invasion from the South is a fake North Korean problem. For at least two decades prior to North Korea’s first nuclear test in 2006, South Korean and U.S. forces could have conquered the north and united the peninsula under South Korean control. They did not try, not only because the North Koreans could have devastated Seoul with artillery and rocket fire before going down in defeat, but also because Seoul doesn’t want the problem of managing northern Korea. South Koreans typically believe in principle that the Korean Peninsula should be united, but they are in no hurry to take on the hardship of rebuilding an economically backward country with an alien political and social culture.

If anything, nuclear weapons have made the Kim government less safe. North Korea has pushed South Korea toward acquiring its own nuclear arsenal, which would negate Pyongyang’s advantage and increase the risk of mutual destruction. In January, South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol said his country might consider this step despite the serious consequences, including a cutoff of foreign supplies of fuel for South Korea’s nuclear reactors and jeopardization of the U.S.-South Korea alliance. Even more striking, opinion polls now show that a majority of the South Korean public also favors developing an indigenous nuclear weapons capability.

As a condition for sharing U.S. missile technology with South Korea, starting in 1979 Washington required Seoul to limit its missiles to a maximum range of 180 kilometers and a maximum warhead weight of 500 kilograms. Under the pressure of North Korean weapons development, however, Washington repeatedly loosened and ultimately dropped the restrictions on range and payload. Seoul says this month it will test-fire the new Hyunmoo 5 missile, which can easily range all North Korean territory and carries what the South Korean government claims is the “world’s largest” conventional warhead.

The Kim regime’s highest value is presumably its own survival. Pyongyang’s actions, however, have resulted in South Korea developing its Korea Massive Punishment and Retaliation plan, announced in 2016 as a response to the north’s fifth nuclear weapons test. The stated purpose of the plan is to kill North Korea’s political and military leadership in the event of a strike against South Korea or if Seoul expects the north is preparing to launch a nuclear attack.

According to the plan, South Korea will use conventionally armed missiles to destroy the parts of Pyongyang where North Korean leaders might be hunkering down. After North Korea’s sixth nuclear test in September 2017, South Korea’s armed forces announced the creation of a “decapitation unit,” a group of soldiers tasked with entering North Korea and finding and assassinating Kim.

Although it succeeded in enticing Trump to meet with Kim, a nuclear-armed North Korea has achieved no upgrade in political relations with the United States — no liaison office, no peace treaty and no removal of the north from the U.S. government’s list of “state sponsors of terrorism.”

A 2018 military confidence-building agreement between Seoul and Pyongyang is a dead letter because of repeated violations by North Korea. South Korea paid for an inter-Korean liaison office to be built in the north’s Kaesong Industrial Region in 2018, but the North Korean government destroyed it in 2020 to express anger over civic groups in South Korea sending anti-Kim regime literature across the border via balloons. Pyongyang has won no political concessions from Tokyo since North Korea’s first nuclear test.

Kim overreached during the brief period of U.S.-North Korea summitry in 2018-19.

He miscalculated that Trump would accept a deal in which the United States would drop the most consequential economic sanctions in exchange for North Korea closing down mostly redundant and obsolete facilities at its Nyongbyon nuclear complex. Kim failed to effectively pursue a separate North Korea objective, the reduction of U.S. forces in South Korea, an idea to which Trump had already signaled that he was receptive.

The acquisition of nuclear weapons has not improved the country’s economic fortunes. South Korea was paying Pyongyang nearly $100 million annually for the wages of North Korean workers in the Kaesong Industrial Complex. In early 2016, however, South Korea pulled its personnel out of Kaesong as a protest against a North Korean long-range missile test and the country’s sixth nuclear weapons test.

In 2022, Yoon’s government offered North Korea substantial economic assistance, including modernization of infrastructure, improvement of agricultural and energy production and food aid, but only in exchange for denuclearization. Kim’s sister, Kim Yo Jong, derisively rejected the offer.

Economic sanctions imposed by both the United Nations Security Council and the United States remain in place. Washington has shown no interest in meeting Pyongyang’s demand for “arms control talks,” which in practice would mean lifting U.S. sanctions in exchange for Pyongyang agreeing to limit its nuclear weapons and missile arsenals, likely without anything close to robust verification procedures.

The Korea Institute for Defense Analyses estimated in 2022 that North Korea had spent $1.6 billion on nuclear weapons — money the government could have invested in economic development or improved agricultural efficiency. Much of the North Korean population is undernourished and at risk of famine.

Acquiring nuclear weapons may have improved the Kim regime’s domestic legitimacy among those North Koreans who did not starve to death to pay for the program. In Pyongyang’s foreign relations, however, nuclear arms and advanced missiles have on balance worsened North Korea’s circumstances. The old extortion tactic has become counterproductive. The China-Russia-North Korea political bloc has in common not only authoritarianism, but also serious foreign policy blunders.

Denny Roy as a senior fellow at the East-West Center.