North Korea’s behavior is unsettling for so many reasons and on so many levels. Such is life in a world where ego-maniacal despots still exist, however bizarrely. Speaking to the IAEA’s Board of Governors, Mohamed El Baradei lamented on the consequences of North Korea’s recent nuclear test.
I deeply regret this, particularly at a time when the prospects for progress on nuclear disarmament are far better than they have been at any time in the recent past.
Reflecting on the broader consequences of North Korea’s test and the latest round of sanctions embodied in UNSCR 1874, United Nations assistant secretary-general for policy planning, Robert C. Orr, insists that the P5 needs to “get North Korea right.”
Orr was almost surely referring to the skillful employment of sanctions and pressure to rollback Kim Jung Il’s nuclear program, but his choice of words is interesting, maybe a little more than he intended. A timely op-ed in the Korea Times by Andrei Lankov reminds us that getting North Korea right and getting it to give up its nuclear program are not exactly the same things. Speaking specifically to the use of sanctions, he writes:
North Korean society is designed in a way that makes sanctions politically irrelevant . . . Sanctions will have almost no impact on the lifestyle of the top North Korean families ― and those are the only people who matter in the political decision-making . . . In other countries, however, the top elite has to take into account popular feelings. In North Korea, such feelings can be safely ignored.
It’s actually a little worse than that because we don’t have a good way of knowing what the popular sentiment in North Korea really is. In any case, driving the point home, Lankov grimly suggests that even an economically damaging round of sanctions would “merely help another few hundred thousand North Korean commoners to starve to death without producing any desired effects.”
There is definitely an argument to be made that many of the reasons why North Korea is pursuing a nuclear weapons program are exactly the reasons why sanctions cannot and will not work. In theory, there is a sweet spot where we can cause the regime enough pain to denuclearize yet not directly contribute to a humanitarian disaster. In reality, there may be no such place. If that’s the case, then our approach towards North Korea (and the Korean peninsula in general) would benefit from some serious thinking on a wider range of issues than just nuclear nonproliferation, for example, how to improve – even marginally – the political and humanitarian situations.
On that front, China has denied recent reports that Kim Jong Il’s son and appointed successor, Kim Jong Un, visited President Hu Jintao last week. China has myriad reasons for keeping these meetings – assuming they actually do happen – a secret; but they’re not necessarily a bad thing. Nothing else has worked so far, and to “get North Korea right” requires a lot more than rolling back its nuclear program and getting it to rejoin the NPT. The notion of upholding a nonproliferation regime allegedly on the brink doesn’t necessarily lend itself to thinking creatively and long-term – but that might be what we need.
As for that nonproliferation regime, El Baradei’s dismay is understandable; but whether or not a nutty North Korea going nuclear is really an utter catastrophe for the NPT is not altogether clear. In fact, if you’re inclined to think that withdrawing from the treaty and testing nukes are the hallmarks of an idiotic security strategy pursued only by the desperate and foolish, then North Korea and all its strangeness speaks to your point. In a sense, it’s almost a model proliferator and poster child for the ridiculousness of nuclear blackmail. No doubt, the situation is bad, but despair would be premature.
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Also related and worth reading, Mark Fitzpatrick’s new Proliferation Paper, published by IFRI, considers whether or not even the use of a nuclear weapon would destroy the nuclear taboo or, alternatively, strengthen it. In short, it all depends on why and where the weapon was used, and by whom.
Finally, the Lankov piece also makes a much more sophisticated version of that argument attempted by Anne Applebaum in the Washington Post a few weeks ago in describing how China’s incentive structure for framing North Korea policy looks a lot different than ours. Lankov’s view is that when faced with a choice of a nuclear North Korea or a failed state on its border, China views the former as the lesser of two evils. He maybe goes a little far in calling the united front against North Korea a “fiction,” and I wouldn’t agree that a nuclear North Korea is more acceptable to China than a unified and presumably stronger, Korean peninsula, but his treatment of the issue is more cerebral than Applebaum’s indictment, which was indicted itself subsequently.