The Case for a Cold Peace with North Korea | The Capital Cable #133

After three decades and seven presidential administrations of the same denuclearization framework, North Korea's arsenal has only grown. In the May/June 2026 issue of Foreign Affairs, CSIS Korea Chair Dr. Victor Cha makes the case that U.S. policy toward North Korea must move beyond the denuclearization-first framework and toward what he calls a "cold peace" — a relationship short of normalization that manages the threat as it actually is.

In this episode of The Capital Cable, host Mark Lippert sits down with Victor Cha and three former U.S. government officials, Ambassador Robert L. Gallucci, Dr. Thomas Wright and Mr. Anthony J. Ruggiero to unpack the argument. The conversation covers the four priorities Dr. Cha argues should anchor a new U.S. strategy: protecting the homeland, reducing the number of U.S. adversaries, minimizing the chances of North Korean nuclear first use, and weakening the ties between Beijing, Moscow, and Pyongyang.

Ambassador Gallucci is currently a Distinguished Professor in the Practice of Diplomacy at Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service. He previously served as U.S. Ambassador-at-Large and Special Envoy for the U.S. Department of State, focused on the non-proliferation of ballistic missiles and weapons of mass destruction. He was the chief US negotiator during the North Korean nuclear crisis of 1994 and served as Assistant Secretary of State for Political Military Affairs and as Deputy Executive Chairman of the UN Special Commission following the first Gulf War. Upon leaving public service, Ambassador Gallucci served as Dean of the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University for 13 years before he became president of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Thomas (Tom) Wright is a senior fellow with the Strobe Talbott Center for Security, Strategy and Technology at the Brookings Institution. Tom most recently served as special assistant to the president and senior director for strategic planning at the National Security Council in the Biden administration.  At the White House, Tom worked on a wide range of projects and issues, including the 2022 U.S. National Security Strategy, the Russia-Ukraine war and European security, U.S.-China relations, the global south, foreign economic policy, and countering the growing alignment between U.S. adversaries and competitors (China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea).

Anthony Ruggiero is a Senior Vice President at American Global Strategies leading the firm’s Economic Security and Financial Services Practice. Anthony served in the United States Government for nearly 20 years in both Democratic and Republican administrations. In the first Trump administration, he was Deputy Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs and National Security Council (NSC) Senior Director for Counterproliferation and Biodefense (2019-2021). In this capacity, he advised the President, National Security Advisor, Deputy National Security Advisor, and White House leadership on a wide range of issues, including counterproliferation, weapons of mass destruction terrorism, nonproliferation, export controls, conventional arms transfers, biodefense, arms control, chemical weapons use in Syria, proliferation issues in Iran and North Korea, Ebola outbreaks in Africa, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the investigation into COVID-19 origins. Before being promoted to senior director, he served as the NSC Director for North Korea (2018-2019) where he worked on the President’s maximum pressure policy and summits with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

Read the essay: North Korea as It Is: The Case for a Cold Peace, Foreign Affairs, May/June 2026.

The Capital Cable is made possible through general support to CSIS.