A Tale of Two Koreas

I stumbled across this rather interesting opinion by novelist (no idea what kind) Bok Koh-ill in the Joongang Daily:

If North Korea strikes us with nuclear arms, would the umbrella over our heads really work as planned? It is a question none can answer as the umbrella has never been tested.  But whether the American president would actually order the firing of ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads against North Korea remains unknown. The U.S. chief executive may hesitate to chance nuclear apocalypse over a relatively small North Korean nuclear provocation if it doesn’t pose immediate danger to Americans. Washington may close the affair with sanctions or similar action if the North gives an explanation and apologizes for its attack. There is no guarantee that North Koreans won’t exploit this weakness in the American nuclear umbrella. They have gotten away with atrocious terrorist attacks before. Even if they don’t actually launch a strike, they could use the threat to achieve other ends. Whatever the case, we cannot tolerate North Korea as a nuclear power . . . If North Korea becomes a nuclear weapons state, we too have to develop a doomsday machine, or nuclear weapons.  We must speak up. The weakness in the American umbrella is too risky and perilous and the North Koreans are too belligerent.  We must pronounce that if North Korea is recognized as a nuclear power, we cannot do anything but develop weapons ourselves. That is the only deterrence against North Korea becoming a nuclear arms state. [Emphasis Mine]

This account is obviously a bit extreme, perhaps somewhat intentionally so, but it gets at two interesting points:

1. If North Korean talks, particularly bilaterally start to heat up, our East Asian allies need some TLC as well.  There appears to be some renewed momentum for discussions on the North Korea issues based on Kim Jong Il’s comments to Wen Jiabao about joining the Six Party Talks after bilateral talks and Tong Kim’s assessment that “Judging from several indicators, the U.S. administration is about to start direct talks with Pyongyang now that it has garnered the active or passive support of the four other concerned countries.”  While any bilateral talks would likely be caveated by support from the other 4 members of the 6 Party Talks and an effort to use the bilateral talks to resuscitate the 6 Party Talks, it still puts the U.S. in the driver’s seat.  These bilateral rumors come on the heels of South Korea's efforts to play a key role in talks with their “grand bargain” that was apparently not shared with the Americans and then hastily rejected by the North Koreans.  At the same time, North Korea is claiming it is in the final stages of restoring its nuclear facilities and South Korea intercepted North Korea cargo for the first time as part of the June UNSCR resolution.  As such, it is important for the allies to make sure they are in sync on the threat assessment of the situation and how they intend to handle the negotiation process, even if the United States has the lead.  There was a rather surprising italicized section of the new Joel Wit lead SAIS paper on North Korea given to the Cable that reads:

Rather than eliminating extended deterrence completely, Washington’s objective should be to encourage the decreasing salience of these weapons in East Asia through a normalization of relations between North Korea and the United States (as well as with Washington’s allies), an end to the danger of war on the peninsula and the elimination of the North’s nuclear program.

While the report is correct in starting to tug out how the United States can focus on a broader view of its relationship with North Korea to help break some ground on the nuclear issue and other problems in the relationship, it is vital to engage key allies in the region like South Korea and Japan on their security views of the situation.  The quoted framework views enhancing North-South relations as part of the larger framework which can help assuage South Korean concerns to some degree but the frank claim to reduce extended deterrence almost completely, or so it is hinted, could very well be too large or a bargaining chip to consider place on the table according to our allies, given the less than stellar empirical record of successfully being able to denuclearize the Korean peninsula.

2.    What are the chances for success of a cap and trade strategy?

If there is one thing that seems to be clear about the North Korean nuclear program it seems to be that it ain’t going anywhere in the short term.  Wit’s paper notes:

Because of Pyongyang’s security policy and doubts about Washington’s reliability as a negotiating partner, quickly eliminating the North’s nuclear arsenal will be difficult, requiring the United States to live with, but not accept a de facto nuclear North Korea

The United States holding firm on its official line that it will not accept anything other than verified denuclearization, despite de facto acceptance otherwise, should be enough to convince key allies the U.S. has not accepted a nuclear DPRK.  That said, the trendy cap and trade strategy, getting North Korea to cap their nuclear program as part of a package that would be seen as a starting point towards eventually seeking reversal and complete abandonment, needs to be better defined. While a freeze on the arsenal may represent one of the more realistically achievable goals to try to deal with the nuclear program in the short term, it also runs the risk of falling into the buying the same horse trap that Gates (and Obama it seems) are dedicated to avoid.  Many of the possible concessions either side could make are so quickly reversible (sanctions, terrorism black list, strong multilateral enforcement of UNSCR 1884) or difficult to permanently enforce (caps or bans on fissile material production, nuclear testing, missile launches, starting and stopping nuclear facilities) that coming up with a strategy to avoid the standard pattern of DRPK behavior will be a surprisingly difficult, perhaps impossible, task.