Establishing a foreign policy task force and taking its work seriously would recognize concerns like those raised by the Quincy Institute’s Trita Parsi when he said, “The United States is in dire need of a fundamental reorientation of its foreign policy, away from the goal of dominating the globe militarily, which has mired America in endless wars, and towards a national security strategy centered on diplomatic engagement and military restraint.”

Writing in The Atlantic, Peter Beinart called Biden’s ad “a jingoistic fantasy” that may put Asian Americans in the crosshairs of racist attacks, “hastening a geopolitical confrontation that threatens progressive goals.” In The New York Times, the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft scholars Rachel Esplin Odell and Stephen Wertheim warned Biden about following Trump into a new cold war with China and argued that the United States should seek to work with Beijing on shared challenges such as pandemics and climate change.

Unlike the famine of the 1990s, the coronavirus can just as easily strike Pyongyang’s elites as the rural poor, leaving Mr. Kim susceptible to internal criticisms if the situation becomes derailed, said Jessica Lee, a Korea expert at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a Washington think tank.