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North Korea: a victory for Obama’s Asian diplomacy

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In Brief

Obama’s first visit to Asia as President has attracted widespread criticism. On everything from his decision to bow to the Japanese emperor, to his failure to achieve concessions from China on climate change and human rights, US press coverage in particular has characterised the visit as a failure (although James Fallows has attacked the mainstream US press for ‘manufacturing’ this failure).

Yet on North Korea, the Obama administration has achieved some success.

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On November 10, the US State Department announced that the US was preparing to send Ambassador Stephen Bosworth to Pyongyang. Obama added further detail to this announcement during his visit to South Korea, stating that Bosworth would engage in bilateral talks with North Korean leaders on December 8. The stated goal of these talks is to persuade North Korea to return to the Six-Party process and to affirm its commitment to the 2005 Six-Party joint statement on verifiable denuclearization of the Korean peninsula.

The most significant aspect of recent US diplomacy on North Korea is not the decision to send Bosworth to Pyongyang, but renewed US efforts to cooperate with regional partners on this issue. We are beginning to see evidence of China, South Korea and the United States using their collective influence to shape outcomes on the Korean peninsula. Whether this is by US design or simply a coincidence is less clear.

In a recent post at this Forum, Andrei Lankov argued that the North Korean regime will not abandon its nuclear program; the North needs nuclear weapons as a means of deterrence and as a means of extracting economic aid from its neighbours. Yet developments in Beijing, Seoul and Washington over the past few weeks suggest that a coordinated approach to North Korea might overcome these very deterrence and aid hurdles.

China is working principally on the deterrence front. A week after Obama’s state visit to Beijing, Chinese Defence Minister Liang Guanglie travelled to Pyongyang. There he met with Kim Jong-Il and pledged to strengthen the military alliance between China and the DPRK, and to reaffirm China’s role in ‘safeguarding the peace and stability of the Korean peninsula’. This move is significant. China can provide military reassurance for a nervous North Korean regime in the lead up to Bosworth’s visit.

South Korea has also moved in the direction of reassurance, offering the North a ‘grand bargain’ of economic aid, oil and security guarantees in exchange for surrendering its nuclear weapons. The US has given support for what is essentially South Korea’s ‘cash for nukes’ policy, while China, too, has stated that it is willing to discuss South Korea’s grand bargain in more depth.

Obama’s summits in South Korea and China signalled these states’ desire to work more closely with the US on North Korea. At a joint press conference with Obama in Seoul, South Korean President Lee Myung-bak praised the close cooperation between the two countries on North Korea, and suggested that the Six-Party states were ‘entering into a new chapter in bringing this issue to an end’. Similarly, the Chinese Foreign Ministry and US-China Joint Statement on November 17 both welcomed the US decision to hold bilateral talks with North Korea as a means of bringing the North back to the Six-Party framework.

We do not know whether the Obama administration actually sought to coordinate its North Korean diplomacy in closed-door meetings with Chinese and South Korean leaders. Some will be more sceptical about reading these developments as a sign of coordinated regional policy on North Korea. China’s focus on stability on the Korean peninsula rather than denuclearization could still disrupt any united front within the Six-Party Talks, and we have yet to hear much from the Russians and Japanese following the announcement of Bosworth’s trip to Pyongyang.

Nevertheless, Obama’s recent visit to the region shows that the administration is striving to present a common face to North Korea. Given the intractability of the North Korean nuclear issue, a coordinated regional strategy is essential. South Korea and China have much to offer in solving the deterrence and economic aid hurdles within that coordinated strategy. If the last few weeks are anything to go by, the Obama administration has made some headway on North Korea.

Amy King is a doctoral student working on Sino-Japanese relations at Oxford University.

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