North Korea: Statesmanship, Not Brinkmanship
Guest post by Andy Yee
“If we are serious about the ambition of a nuclear-free world we will need statesmanship, not brinkmanship,” Gordon Brown said today as he told the UN General Assembly that Britain was preparing to cut its nuclear arsenal and warned Iran and North Korea of further sanctions. North Korea’s missile launch nuclear test this year shocked the world. Experts had it that they were tied to the country’s leadership succession process after Kim Jong II fell ill. Sound like a familiar script? Indeed. In 1998, Kim Jong II became DPRK’s paramount leader in September following the country’s first launch of a Taepodong missile in August.
Being one of the poorest countries in the world, with millions in starvation, the ‘Dear Leader’ must be crazy to maintain a nuclear programme. Not really, if you put yourself in their shoes. Faced with diplomatic isolation and economic calamity, the nuclear weapons programme is perhaps their only deterrent against foreign attacks and visible success vital to internal stability.
Above all, it is a powerful diplomatic tool. Although the UN Security Council criticised the launch in April, and Pyongyang quit the Six-Party Talk, things have improved in the past two months. Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Wu Dawei and State Councilor Dai Bingguo visited North Korea for talks on regional issues. The US has also said it is prepared to hold direct talks to try to coax North Korea into the Six-Party negotiations. Meanwhile, Pyongyang is giving out mixed signals, making conciliatory gestures in August followed by more nuclear threats in September.
It is a typical cycle: crisis escalation followed by renewal of diplomacy, then unwillingness to implement concession in return for more economic aids. DPRK has played this game for two decades with remarkable success.
Nuclear deterrence worked because any attack was an unthinkable event. Thomas Schelling, one of the earliest theorists of nuclear deterrence, pointed out that nuclear weapons had power, not so much in their use, as in the threat of their use. It is for this reason that the US and USSR achieved a stable, albeit horrible, equilibrium. The reason that the Cold War did not become a hot war is because both sides had the belief that nuclear weapons are a Pandora’s box not to be opened. Most importantly, each side believes that its opponent is rational and unwilling to sacrifice its own citizens’ interests.
The example of China in the 1950s and 1960s also suggests that the nuclear deterrence theory has some credibility. Developing nuclear weapons was a rational policy choice for China, given its unreliable alliance with Soviet Union and the nuclear diplomacy of the US, whereby President Dwight Eisenhower threatened to use atomic weapons to end the Korean War and to defend Quemoy several times in the 1950s. Given Mao Zedong’s bizarre behaviour which led to disasters like the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, and the subsequent boiling tensions between China and the Soviet Union, earlier concerns that China might recklessly deploy nuclear weapons appeared more legitimate than such concerns over North Korea now.
The root cause of the deadlock in the North Korean crisis is that people do not believe that it is rational. Bush II once characterized Kim Jong Il as a ‘pygmy’. ‘We don’t negotiate with evil,’ said Cheney. Hilary Clinton’s response to the drama this year is to liken the North Koreans to ‘small children and teenagers and people who are demanding attention.’ Her advice is: ‘Don’t give it to them.’
The fundamental question of what North Korea really wants is rarely posed. Policy makers are predominated with forcing the country to make concessions, using a mix of military threats and economic sanctions. We never explore North Korea’s real intention, but treat it as a non-communicable, irrational entity. No wonder we are trapped in a perpetual cycle of nuclear blackmail.
Just as nuclear deterrence is governed by rational existential concerns in face of irrational mutually assured destruction, there is rationality behind DPRK’s irrationality. We dare not tempt a nationalistic tyrant with weakness, but neither can both sides take comfort from our present course. So let us begin to alter that uncertain balance of terror. Let us treat North Korea as a normal, rational country, engaging it in a constructive dialogue to enhance mutual understanding and bring it from brinkmanship to statesmanship.
But perhaps the most important benefit will be domestic. If we start to deconstruct the wall of isolation, we will create an environment where contacts between the isolated population and the outside world steadily increase. Only in this way can negotiations and aid expose to North Koreans the total lie they have to live in, bringing a radical transformation of the regime and hopefully denuclearisation of the peninsula.
Reader Comments
This is similar to a post I did following the detonation of a Nuclear device a few months ago.
I don’t think the problem is that the outside world sees N.Korea as totally irrational, I think some see the state engaged in some very rational realpolitik. But I do think that they are happy to wait it out and hope that N.Korea collapses in on itself.
Many media commentators have speculated that North Korea only really took the idea of possessing a nuclear weapon seriously after the moronic ‘axis of evil’ speech. Whether that’s true or not, I bet Saddam, wherever he is, is wishing he actually did have weapons of mass destruction back in 2003. The message the Bush government sent to crackpot dictators around the world is that WMDs are a get out of invasion free card.
While I understand where the impulse for this approach comes from, I think a number of important events in the US North Korean relationship have been omitted that makes this account far too charitable to North Korea. For instance, the Clinton administration and the 1994 Agreed Framework, North Korea was cheating nearly from the start by pursuing a uranium enrichment program. In addition, via AQ Khan’s network, North Korea was selling missile tech to Pakistan in exchange for centrifuges – more cheating. The Agreed Framework was precisely the diplomatic vehicle you advise.
Compare North Korea’s behavior – defection from the start – to that of the Clinton administration, dispatching Madeleine Albright to North Korea in an attempt to pursue the statesmanship line you advocate. Clinton himself considered visiting North Korea in 2000. Numerous carrots were on the table, from assistance with a space program (satellite launches) to help with the North Korean economy. Furthermore, Clinton supported South Korea’s engagement policy under Kim Dae-jung.
In terms of balance of terror – North Korea already has the ability to do serious damage to South Korea. North Korea’s pursuit of nuclear weapons is particularly perverse because they don’t need them. That is to say, they had enough conventional forces to be a serious threat to US allies. Moreover, North Korea has China as an ally/mediator. Altogether North Korea has chosen the path of brinksmanship, not the US. Of course I’d say the Bush administration, especially in its first term, didn’t help matters – but North Korea was cheating long before Bush. The root cause of the deadlock was / has been / is North Korea.
The credibility of the US after the 1994 Agreed Framework was by no means fail-proof. Article I of the Framework stipulated that both sides would replace DPRK’s graphite-moderated reactors and plutonium-reprocessing facilities with light-water reactors (LWRs), with a target date of 2003. North Korea agreed to freeze and eventually dismantle its nuclear programs upon receipt of US assurances for the provision of LWRs and heavy oil shipments. Article II said the two sides agreed to move towards full normalization of political and economic relations. In Article III, the US agreed to provide formal assurances to the DPRK against the threat of nuclear weapons, in return for DPRK to take steps to implement the North-South Joint Declaration on the Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, which has a broader scope than the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT).
Both sides only partially implemented the agreement. The construction of the LWTs was delayed by at least 5 years, well before the collapse of the framework in 2002. The US did not take any proactive measures to improve relations until Albright’s visit to Pyongyang in 2000, which was after the historic summit of the Koreans in 2000. And any positive momentum generated by this was dissipated by skepticism of the Bush administration, especially the adoption of the pre-emption doctrine after 9/11. For its part, North Korea freezed its plutonium-reprocessing program after the framework was agreed, but secretly embarked on a uranium enrichment program in 1997. Some analysts claimed that it was motivated by North Korea’s disillusionment with the US.
I am no apologist to North Korea’s blackmail. But on the whole, US’s track record is not good either. There may be many reasons behind. For them, the idea of implementing agreements involving mutual concessions between a superpower and a rogue state is too much. But more importantly, the US can use North Korea as a convenient justification for their weapons programs, and keeping Japan and South Korea as a junior partner of the US in Asia.
Unless the US makes a credible commitment to improve relations, North Korea is not likely to abandon its nuclear program. Yet it is more often a rule that the US is just paying lip service to “dialogue”, resulting in North Korea faithfully playing the role of an irrational state.