Approximately halfway into his first term, President Joe Biden has been given a wake-up call from Kim Jong Un that North Korea continues to remain a primary national security threat. Some policymakers, pundits, the press, and the public are concerned the administration has placed insufficient focus on in the first two years he has been in office due to the strategic competition with China, tensions over Taiwan and South China Sea, Putin’s War in Ukraine, and the threats emanating from Iran. 
Adding to these challenges are Kim Jong Un’s new major policy directions for 2023 that he laid out at the plenary session of the ruling Korean Worker’s Party meeting. He announced that he plans to exponentially increase his nuclear arsenal and develop a new ICBM in 2023. He also characterized South Korea as his “undoubted enemy.”  With Kim announcing his new policies, it is time for the U.S. and the ROK/U.S. alliance to implement a new strategy.
Such rhetoric is emblematic of Kim Jong Un’s tried and true political warfare tactics in employing hostility and aggression to gradually alter the status quo and extort concessions from South Korea and the U.S. to divide and break the ROK/U.S. all …