Does our State Department want denuclearization or an exit strategy?

I’ve long wished that I could attend more ICAS events, but they tend to coincide with busy times in my work schedule. That was also the case when Assistant Secretary of State Danny Russel spoke to ICAS earlier this week. The State Department has since published . A reader (thank you) forwarded it, and asked for my views. 

Sending a consistent message to North Korea and China is very important at this moment, and it hardly serves that purpose to try to be Jimmy Carter and John Bolton in a single speech. Russel’s message begins with a lengthy defense of Jimmy Carter, Chris Hill, and the failed Agreed Frameworks of the past, and strongly suggests that our goal now is a freeze deal and another agreed framework — in other words, a return to business as usual. He eventually gets around to threatening stronger sanctions enforcement, but says that sanctions are designed “to bring [North Korea’s] leaders to their senses” but “not to destroy North Korea.”

As one of the designers, I’d respectfully ask Assistant Secretary Russel to speak for himself. But the greater problem with Assistant Secretary Russel’s statement is that it reveals a fundamental misapprehension of the nature of our problem. North Korea’s leaders haven’t taken leave of their senses; they’re deliberately and methodically pursuing nuclear weapons to extort their way to hegemony, and with obvious success. As long as we mirror-image their interests in terms of our own logic, we will continue to misapprehend them. If Kim Jong-un is as invested in his nuclear weapons programs as most observers think he is, and if we’re unwilling to use sanctions to undermine and destroy his misrule, then the message we’re sending to Pyongyang and Beijing is that they should cut a freeze deal, get the sanctions relaxed, wait a few months for the administration to leave town, and renege on the next president’s watch.

The irony is that diplomacy stands little chance of success unless we openly consider other alternatives — alternatives that frighten Pyongyang and Beijing more than the idea of a negotiated denuclearization.

In my youth back in South Dakota, on the way to the used car lot one day, I learned an expression that’s as wise as it is ungrammatical: if you want a deal real bad, a real bad deal is what you’re going to get. Next year, we will have another president. Let’s not throw away her leverage just yet.