Mick Hartley

Business – of a sort – goes on as usual in Washington. Yesterday saw a hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on North Korea, with presentations from Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute and Scott Snyder of the Council on Foreign Relations. 

Eberstadt, in particular, provided some excellent analysis:

At this juncture, as so often in the past, serious people around the world are calling to “bring North Korea back to the table” to try to settle the DPRK nuclear issue. However, seeing the DPRK for what it is, rather than what we would like it to be, should oblige us to recognize two highly unpleasant truths.

First, the real existing North Korean leadership (as opposed to the imaginary version some Westerners would like to negotiate with) will never willingly give up their nuclear option. Never. Acquiescing in denuclearization would be tantamount to abandoning the sacred mission of Korean unification: which is to say, disavowing the DPRK’s raison d’etre. Thus submitting to foreign demands to denuclearize could well mean more than humiliation and disgrace for North Korean leadership: it could mean delegitimization and destabilization for the regime as well.

Second, international entreaties—summitry, conferencing, bargaining, and all the rest—can never succeed in convincing the DPRK to relinquish its nuclear program. Sovereign governments simply do not trade away their vital national interests.

Now, this is not to say that Western nonproliferation parlays with the DPRK have no results to show at all. We know they can result in blandishments (as per North Korea’s custom of requiring “money for meetings”) and in resource transfers (as with the Clinton Administration’s Agreed Framework shipments of heavy fuel oil). They can provide external diplomatic cover for the DPRK the nuclear program, as was in effect afforded under the intermittent 2003–07 Six Party Talks in Beijing. They can even lure North Korea’s interlocutors into unexpected unilateral concessions, as witnessed in the final years of the George W. Bush Administration, when Washington unfroze illicit North Korean overseas funds and removed Pyongyang from the list of State Sponsors of Terrorism in misbegotten hope of a “breakthrough.” The one thing “engagement” can never produce, however, is North Korean denuclearization.

Note, too, that in every realm of international transaction, from commercial contracts to security accords, the record shows that, even when Western bargainers think they have made a deal with North Korea, the DPRK side never has any compunction about violating the understanding if that should serve purposes of state. This may outrage us, but it should not surprise us: for under North Korea’s moral code, if there should be any advantage to gain from cheating against foreigners, then not cheating would be patently unpatriotic, a disloyal blow against the Motherland.

Yes, things would be so easier for us if North Korea would simply agree to the deal we want them to accept. But if we put the wishful thinking to one side, a clear-eyed view of the North Korea problematik must be resigned to the grim reality that diplomacy can only have a very limited and highly specific role in addressing our gathering North Korean problem.

Diplomacy must have some role because it is barbaric not to talk with one’s opponent—because communication can help both sides avoid needless and potentially disastrous miscalculations. But the notion of a “grand bargain” with Pyongyang—in which all mutual concerns are simultaneously settled, as the “Perry Process” conjectured back in the 1990s and others have subsequently prophesied—is nothing but a dream.

It is time to set aside the illusion of “engaging” North Korea to effect nonproliferation and to embrace instead a paradigm that has a chance of actually working: call this “threat reduction.” Through a coherent long-term strategy, working with allies and others but also acting unilaterally, the United States can blunt, then mitigate, and eventually help eliminate the killing force of the North Korean state.

That includes getting tough with China:

China has been allowed to play a double game with North Korea for far too long, and it is time for Beijing to pay a penalty for all its support for the most odious regime on the planet today. We can begin by exacting it in diplomatic venues all around the world, starting with the UN. NGOs can train a spotlight on Beijing’s complicity in the North Korean regime’s crimes. And international humanitarian action should shame China into opening a safe transit route to the free world for North Korean refugees attempting to escape their oppressors.

If North Korean subjects enjoyed greater human rights, the DPRK killing machine could not possibly operate as effectively as it does today. Activists will always worry about the instrumentalization of human rights concerns for other policy ends—and rightly so. Today and for the foreseeable future, however, there is no contradiction between the objectives of human rights promotion and nonproliferation in the DPRK. North Korea’s human rights situation is vastly worse than in apartheid South Africa—why hasn’t the international community (and South Korean civil society) found its voice on this real-time, ongoing tragedy?

And pushing for increased contact:

Many in the West talk of “isolating” North Korea as if this were an objective in its own right. But a serious DPRK threat reduction strategy would not do so. The North Korean regime depends on isolation from the outside world to maintain its grip and conduct untrammeled pursuit of its international objectives. The regime is deadly afraid of what it terms “ideological and cultural poisoning”: what we could call foreign media, international information, cultural exchanges, and the like. We should be saying: bring on the “poisoning”! The more external contact with that enslaved population, the better. We should even consider technical training abroad for North Koreans in accounting, law, economics, and the like—because some day, in a better future, that nation will need a cadre of Western-style technocrats for rejoining our world.

This brings us to the last agenda item: preparing for a successful reunification in a post-DPRK peninsula. The Kim regime is the North Korean nuclear threat; that threat will not end until the DPRK disappears. We cannot tell when, or how, this will occur. But it is not too soon to commence the wide-ranging and painstaking international planning and preparations that will facilitate divided Korea’s long-awaited reunion as a single peninsula, free and whole.

More here.

To what extent this advice will be taken on board by the new Trump regime is of course, at this stage, anyone's guess. There are indications that Trump will take a hard line, but, given the competence his team has shown so far, it would be unwise to raise hopes.