North Korea now has 57 “very powerful” nuclear weapons, according to an August 20, 2026, statement by U.S. President Donald Trump. Whatever the precise number and lethality of these weapons, it is now beyond doubt that the arsenal is sizeable and not going away anytime soon.
The realistic and practical task in Northeast Asia is therefore not disarmament but risk reduction. The longer North Korea’s arsenal remains unaddressed, the louder the voices in Seoul and Tokyo calling for developing a nuclear weapons capability of their own will grow. The real danger in the region is a proliferation cascade, with three or four nuclear-armed states packed into one corner of Asia, with no arms control architecture, no functioning hotlines, and broken channels of communication. Amid this darkening picture, one country – Mongolia – offers a rare opening for dialogue.
Nuclear proliferation in this part of the world is not a distant problem for Canada. Ottawa’s Indo-Pacific Strategy identifies North Korea as the principal security challenge in the North Pacific, recalls that 516 Canadians died in the Korean War (1950–53), and notes that Canada "has never left" the Korean Peninsula — a reference to Canada’s continuous presence in the United Nations Command in South Korea and its deployment, since 2018, of ships and aircraft to support the enforcement of sanctions against North Korea as part of Operation NEON.
The Indo-Pacific already has four nuclear-armed states: China, India, North Korea, and Pakistan. If Japan and South Korea join them, the region's security calculus would change profoundly. Both are among Canada's most important trade partners in Asia, anchored by the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) and the Canada-Korea Free Trade Agreement, respectively. A more nuclearized Northeast Asia would strike at the non-proliferation order Canada has spent decades defending and unsettle the stability on which its trade with the Pacific depends. Preventing that outcome requires Japan, South Korea, and the U.S. to talk to Pyongyang, and that would need to happen at a venue that Pyongyang does not distrust.
Singapore, Hanoi — and now Ulaanbaatar?
Seoul appears to have reached the same conclusion about Mongolia’s viability as a dialogue host. Under South Korean President Lee Jae Myung’s progressive government, which favours dialogue with Pyongyang over deterrence, Seoul now embraces a policy of engagement. What it lacks, however, is a channel that can connect North Korea with other key stakeholders in Northeast Asia, including the U.S. It is looking to Ulaanbaatar to provide that channel.
In July, Lee made a state visit to Mongolia, the first by a sitting Korean president in nearly 15 years. The headlines focused on co-operation around critical minerals and a joint declaration proclaiming a "golden age" in bilateral relations, but there was also a quieter and more consequential agreement between the two presidents to strengthen co-operation on establishing peace on the Korean Peninsula. Lee, in an interview with Mongolia’s state news agency on the eve of the July 9 summit, called Mongolia a "trusted partner" in his effort to normalize relations with North Korea.
In addition to Lee, there have been other South Korean dignitaries who have recently bolstered ties with Mongolia. In June, Chung Dong-young became South Korea’s first Minister of Unification to attend the Ulaanbaatar Dialogue, Mongolia’s annual security forum, where he asked his hosts to help bring Pyongyang back to the table, making the possibility of Ulaanbaatar hosting the next U.S.-North Korea summit appear more likely than ever.
A rare window of opportunity for peace talks
For three decades, engagement with North Korea has tracked the political calendar in Seoul. Progressive administrations have pursued dialogue, while their conservative successors have set it aside in favour of deterrence, as Lee’s predecessor, Yoon Suk Yeol, did. In February 2026, the Lee administration unveiled its Policy for Peaceful Coexistence on the Korean Peninsula, the fullest statement yet of its approach to North Korea.
The policy rests on three commitments: respect for the North Korean system, no unification by absorption, and a halt to hostile acts. On the nuclear question, South Korea dropped the old demand that disarmament precede dialogue. Seoul has also halted loudspeaker broadcasts across the Demilitarized Zone, blocked leaflet launches, and, in the president’s March 1, 2026, address, articulated the above-mentioned pledge that it will no longer pursue unification by absorption of the North. This is the most accommodating posture any South Korean government has adopted in a generation.
Pyongyang has not yet responded. Kim Jong Un continues to treat the two Koreas as hostile states, dismisses the Lee administration’s overtures, and leans on his alignment with Moscow and Beijing while waiting to see what Washington might offer.
That strategic ‘waiting it out’ may be ending. On August 18, it was reported that Trump had ordered a scaling back of the U.S.’s annual joint military exercise with South Korea, citing his good relationship with Kim Jong Un. Trump said he expects to meet the North Korean leader again this year, possibly during his trip to Asia in November.
Kim Yo Jong, Kim Jong Un’s influential younger sister, said the relationship between Kim and Trump “remains excellent.” Lee, for his part, pledged to do his utmost to support Trump’s peacemaking. But the window will not stay open forever. South Korean presidents serve a single five-year term, and President Lee’s ends in 2030. Pyongyang thus has an incentive not to let the opening lapse. What is missing on both sides is not motive but access. And access is precisely what Mongolia can supply.
Ulaanbaatar as a venue for the next Trump-Kim summit
Mongolia’s credentials to host a Trump-Kim summit are real. It was the second country in the world to recognize North Korea (in 1948), and the two countries’ diplomatic presence in each other’s capitals has never been interrupted, even during the Korean War and the COVID-19 pandemic.
As a former socialist state, Mongolia is more familiar than others with Pyongyang’s political and bureaucratic culture. As one of only a few functioning democracies in Eurasia, Mongolia also shares South Korea’s values of liberal democracy and a free market economy.
Ulaanbaatar hosted Japan–North Korea talks in 2012, and it was in the Mongolian capital that the parents of Megumi Yokota, a Japanese citizen who had been abducted by North Korea in 1977, met their granddaughter in 2014. More recently, in 2024, Ulaanbaatar reportedly hosted secret meetings between a Japanese politician and North Korean intelligence agents. The Ulaanbaatar Dialogue, which has convened annually since 2014, is virtually the only standing venue where North Korean, South Korean, Japanese, and U.S. officials have sat across the table from one another. Finally, Mongolia holds a UN-recognized nuclear-weapon-free status, the only country in Northeast Asia to do so, giving it standing on the nuclear question that none of its neighbours currently possess.
Seoul has begun to make the case for Mongolia’s role out loud. At the June 2026 Ulaanbaatar Dialogue, Minister Chung proposed a four-party dialogue among the two Koreas, the U.S., and China that would expand over time to include Mongolia, Japan, and Russia. He called on North Korea to rejoin the Greater Tumen Initiative, the regional economic grouping that Pyongyang left in 2009, following its second nuclear test. South Korea now sees Mongolia as an integral part of the architecture of engagement between the two Koreas.
Canada has good reason to support this initiative. In 2018, it co-hosted, with the first Trump administration, the Vancouver Foreign Ministers’ Meeting on the Korean Peninsula, which was the last time Ottawa convened diplomacy on this issue at such a scale. Yet since 2010, Canada’s “controlled engagement” policy has kept official contact with Pyongyang to a minimum. Ottawa, in other words, shut its own door to North Korea and cannot simply reopen it.
But Ottawa need not remain outside the process. Canada could play a historic role in ensuring that the next summit takes place where it has the best chance of success. In his 2024 memoir, From The Periphery to The Center, former South Korean president Moon Jae In revealed that when the first Trump-Kim summit in 2018 needed a third-country venue, North Korea “hoped for Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia as their choice,” as it could be reached by train from Pyongyang. However, Washington refused, offering Mar-a-Lago, Hawaii, or Geneva.
The two sides settled on Singapore, even though the city lay beyond the flying range of Kim’s aircraft. This limitation forced Kim to borrow a Chinese plane and, in Moon’s telling, pushed a then-estranged Pyongyang further back into Beijing’s orbit. That mistake need not be repeated. The logistical, symbolic, and geopolitical considerations that pointed to Ulaanbaatar in 2018 have only strengthened since. With Seoul now pushing in the same direction, a fourth Trump-Kim meeting — in Ulaanbaatar — faces only one significant obstacle, which is to convince Washington to reconsider a venue that has fewer fancy hotels.
Canada’s contribution does not need to end with helping to secure the venue. Prime Minister Mark Carney has spent this past year assembling a coalition of middle powers to defend a rules-based order that has come under strain. A nuclear risk reduction track in Northeast Asia is precisely the kind of work such a coalition can do. Canada could demonstrate the kind of leadership it promised at Davos at the start of the year and show Washington that a Canadian-led middle-power coalition in the Indo-Pacific complements American power rather than competes with it.
The cost of Canada and Mongolia testing this proposition is close to zero. It offends no allies, breaches no sanctions, and concedes nothing on deterrence. The cost of not testing it, however, is another year subtracted from a window that may close as early as 2028, when Trump’s presidency ends and the proliferation clock keeps ticking.
Mongolia, the land that once launched the largest contiguous land empire in history, could now host the peaceful resolution of one of the gravest security risks of our time. That outcome will not arrange itself. It will take deliberate decisions in Seoul and Washington, and Canada is well placed to champion them in both capitals. Reducing nuclear risk through Ulaanbaatar would be middle-power diplomacy at its best.
• Edited by Jeehye Kim, Senior Program Manager, Northeast Asia, and Ted Fraser, Senior Editor, APF Canada.
