AEI Scholars Predict Gloomy Future for N. Korea Policy
Dan Blumenthal, who was a senior foreign policy advisor to John McCain, has teamed up with Aaron Friedberg again to offer “An American Strategy for Asia,” one that might have gotten wider circulated had the economy not collapsed shortly before the election. Their ideas will probably experience continuous vindication as we near the mid-point of the third Clinton Administration, which by my count started around December 2006.
Unfortunately, there is little reason to doubt at this point that the Kim Jong Il regime is committed to retaining at least some of its nuclear capabilities, no matter what others are willing to offer. Kim likely regards the acquisition of nuclear weapons as the crowning achievement of his reign and the key to the continuation of his regime. As in the past, he will pocket whatever gains he can extract from the international community, making minimal, largely symbolic concessions to keep the negotiation process alive but refusing at critical moments to take real, verifiable steps toward complete nuclear disarmament.
It is possible that, once Kim passes from the scene, his successors may take a different view. In the meantime, the only way that he is likely to change course is if he feels that his own personal survival is in jeopardy. Ironically, the Bush administration actually started to make some progress in this direction when it imposed targeted financial sanctions back in 2005. These froze some North Korean accounts in overseas banks and threatened to constrict the flows of hard currency that Kim uses to reward underlings and fund his special weapons programs. One sign of the effectiveness of this measure was the furious response it provoked from Pyongyang. Nevertheless, the Bush administration dropped these sanctions and returned the North’s money in exchange for moving forward with bilateral negotiations. In October 2008, the Bush administration bargained away another piece of leverage in return for questionable gains by agreeing to remove North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism in exchange for vague and noncommittal promises from Pyongyang to permit verification of its next steps toward nuclear disarmament. This leaves the incoming U.S. administration with an even weaker hand to play in coming rounds of negotiations. [Dan Blumenthal and Aaron Friedberg, AEI]
It’s fashionable these days for people to speak of “soft power” as a euphemism for something that translates to applying no power at all, but instead pouring money on people who despise us in the hopes that they’ll stop (see, e.g., Mohammed Atta). Really, this sort of power would be better described as “flaccid.” Blumenthal and Friedberg are two of the few who understand that there really are strong, non-military options that we can apply to achieve our national interests in situations in which military force would be too risky and gentle persuasion would be ineffective. North Korea is one of those situations.
Read the whole thing.
Related: At the Wall Street Journal, Melanie Kirkpatrick relates Japan’s mixed record of engagement with North Korea:
Given that background, what is Ms. Nakayama’s view of dealing with Pyongyang? “Our experience with negotiating with the North Koreans is that they denied [that they had] abducted citizens for years, and they were very comfortable doing so,” she says. “Our experience with agreements with the North Koreans is that they’ll make excuses for not fulfilling them.”
If that sounds familiar, consider the North’s denials and obfuscations on its uranium-enrichment program, which it trumpeted in 2002 and subsequently denied. In 2007, the Bush administration backed off its claims about the North’s uranium program. Now, in a valedictory speech this month, National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley warned of “increasing concerns” in the U.S. intelligence community that the North has “an ongoing, covert uranium-enrichment program.” [WSJ, Melanie Kirkpatrick]
And yet the supply of willing victims seems inexhaustible.