The usual talking heads are upset that President Trump has ordered the U.S. military to scale back its participation in joint exercises with South Korea. Their alarm is predictable and misplaced. More than seven decades after Presidents Truman and Eisenhower chose stalemate over victory against North Korean aggression, the Korean War remains a frozen conflict. Neither Pyongyang nor Seoul has formally renounced the aspiration to reunify the peninsula under a single government. That formal claim persists even as the economic and military gap between the two states has radically widened.

Some observers now point to growing military and strategic cooperation among North Korea, China, and Russia—most visibly North Korea’s decision to send troops to fight in Russia’s war against Ukraine—and detect the outlines of an emerging alliance. Yet neither Russia, China, nor North Korea maintains foreign allies in the sense of partners whose interests they rank above their own transient calculations. Russia does have clients in the “near abroad,” though recent events in the Caucasus have shown how little that status is worth when Moscow’s priorities shift. Russians do not regard North Korea as part of that near abroad. The war in Ukraine has demonstrated that Russia is not a superpower in conventional, symmetric warfare. North Korea’s overriding objective remains regime survival; it secures that survival externally through calibrated blackmail. Its options have not materially expanded. What we are witnessing is China associating itself with lesser states for limited, temporary gains. It is not the formation of a durable anti-American bloc in Northeast Asia.

The recent U.S. clash with Iran illustrated a more fundamental point. As Iran’s utter military prostration has shown, the disparity in capacities between a second- or third-rate power and those of the United States is so vast that Pyongyang’s tanks, artillery, and special forces matter far less for battle purposes than is commonly assumed. What matters strategically is North Korea’s nuclear arsenal: whether the weapons actually work, whether they can be delivered, and whether they have been successfully hardened against conventional preemption.

How, then, should the United States respond to closer working relations among North Korea, China, and Russia? How can Washington prevent the frozen conflict from turning hot while deterring escalation in Northeast Asia? The answer is not to pretend that the Korean War can still be “won” against a nuclear North Korea by the instruments of 1950, nor to continue subsidizing South Korea’s security as if reunification of Korea under Seoul remains an operational American objective. South Korea itself has not treated unification as a serious policy goal for a generation. The United States should stop pretending otherwise.

A better approach is a Helsinki-style arrangement for the North Pacific. In 1975 the Helsinki Final Act extracted paper commitments to human rights and democratic norms from the Soviet bloc in exchange for Western acceptance of existing borders and a mutual pledge of non-aggression. The arrangement “froze” the division of Germany on paper. Fifteen years later, that division unfroze when the underlying balance of power shifted. The same logic can be applied to the Korean Peninsula and its surrounding waters.

Under such an arrangement, the United States, South Korea, Japan, China, Russia, and North Korea would formally acknowledge the existing de facto borders, commit to non-aggression, and exchange reciprocal language about human rights and political liberalization. Taiwan need not be included. The point is not to settle every outstanding territorial or ideological dispute in East Asia; it is to lock in the status quo on the Korean Peninsula in a form that removes the perpetual pretext for crisis. Once the borders are formally recognized and non-aggression is pledged, the United States gains a standing justification for refusing to pay further North Korean blackmail. No new rationales need be invented each time Pyongyang tests a missile or seizes a fishing boat.

Critics will object that any formal acceptance of the status quo legitimizes a totalitarian regime and abandons the long-term hope of a free, unified Korea. That objection confuses paper with power. The Helsinki Accords did not make the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe permanent. They bought time for change, delegitimated Communist tyranny, and created a framework within which peaceful change could later occur when conditions permitted.

It is true that, as far as we know, there is no milieu of dissidents within North Korea prepared to exploit such a delegitimation in order to subvert Kim’s tyranny comparable to the “Moscow Helsinki Group,” Soviet citizens who, at grave personal risk, tried to hold the Soviet regime to its paper promises. Nonetheless, without hoping simplistically for history to repeat itself, in terms of the American security interest, a durable freeze is preferable to the current arrangement. Today, South Korea cozies up to China and distances itself from the United States, yet the United States continues to underwrite South Korean security with an effective blank check. The Northeast Pacific Accords would allow American policy to focus on the only military fact that actually matters for U.S. security—North Korea’s nuclear weapons—without the constant distraction of exercises and crises staged around a war that should have ended in 1953.

President Trump’s decision to scale back joint exercises is a useful first step. It signals that American policy need not be held hostage to the rituals of a frozen conflict. A Helsinki-style settlement would complete the logic of that signal. It would end the Korean War as a live diplomatic and military problem for the United States, leaving the peninsula’s ultimate fate to be decided by Koreans and by the larger shifts in power that no conference can freeze forever.