In an op-ed entitled “A New North Korea Strategy” published in yesterday’s USA Today, authors Stephen J. Solarz and Michael O’Hanlon argue that the latest round of U.N. Security Council sanctions against North Korea are capable of successfully resolving the North Korean nuclear crisis - dependent of course upon Chinese support. While it remains unclear how exactly this idea is a new strategy, the authors write that
The only real hope of getting North Korea to relinquish its nuclear weapons is to apply such significant economic pressure that the regime is forced to make a choice between economic collapse and the verifiable dismantling of its nuclear weapons and facilities.
The authors’ plan for this is that
After consultations with Japan and South Korea, we should approach China to tell its leaders that our objective is not to bring down the North Korean regime but to change its policy. If the application of tough sanctions by Beijing led to a regime collapse, we’d undertake to give China guarantees…
Essentially, what Solarz and O’Hanlon envision is a situation in which either economic pressure leads to denuclearization, or economic pressure leads to regime change (and with that, denuclearization). On the surface, this appears to be a winning situation for both the U.S. and China regardless of which is the final outcome. Problematically, the picture is not that rosy. First off, obtaining actual Chinese support for and enforcement of sanctions has always been problematic - and Resolution 1874 is no different, as an earlier post noted. Ignoring for the moment the fact that, as an article in The Korea Times recently noted, North Korea has spent most of the past sixty years living with sanctions and economic restrictions, there is an additional factor to the China piece that Solarz and O’Hanlon fail to consider.
The standard argument as to why China is reluctant to aggressively pursue sanctions against the DPRK is that China prefers a nuclear, but stable, North Korea on its border over a failed state and the subsequent tsunami of refugees. Solarz and O’Hanlon work around this issue by proposing to offer China guarantees that in the event of a regime collapse, the U.S., South Korea, and other allies will work together to deal with the refugee crisis and other problems. The caveat to this though is aptly acknowledged by Andrei Lankov in the previously-mentioned Korea Times article:
China is not exactly happy about the final outcome of the crisis [in reference to regime collapse because of economic pressure from enforced sanctions]: the emergence of a unified Korea that is likely to be a U.S. ally.
Even Solarz and O’Hanlon admit that a North Korean economic collapse would likely lead to the unification of the Korean Peninsula - a point which, if correct, throws a rather sizeable wrench into the machinery of the authors’ claim.
The inherent problem at hand (aside from North Korea) is that there is a near complete lack of options for confronting belligerent and oppressive regimes short of military action, which is obviously undesirable. Unfortunately, it’s very difficult to deal rationally with an irrational adversary, especially one who is as unconcerned with the well-being of his people as is Kim Jong-Il. And, while there are no easy answers to the questions at hand, it is difficult to imagine the sanctions contained in Resolution 1874 running a different course than Resolution 1718, its predecessor and near-identical twin.