Even China has become more and more frustrated with North Korea’s failure to take its cautionary advice and now appears more willing to join tougher collective sanctions, if not take unilateral action, to put the squeeze on its troublesome neighbour.
In this week’s lead essay one of China’s leading foreign affairs analysts, Jia Qingguo of Peking University, points out that ‘China has persistently tried to help North Korea to sustain its economy and shield it from tougher international reactions to its unpredictable and threatening behaviour on the development of nuclear weapons and missiles. But despite this help, Pyongyang does not seem to listen to Beijing’. Pyongyang’s going ahead with another nuclear test — against Beijing’s advice — ‘has led to significant changes in the Chinese debate over how to deal with the North Korean problem’.
Jia argues that Beijing’s policy on North Korea has always sought a balance between two objectives: stability and denuclearisation. ‘Beijing desires stability in the Korean Peninsula because it believes that a stable and friendly North Korea is in China’s long-term strategic interest. It also believes, as a practical matter, that conflict in the Korean Peninsula would not only jeopardise China’s security but also bring with it a serious refugee problem’.
But like the rest of the international community, China does not want a nuclear-armed North Korea, both for strategic and practical reasons. Beijing believes, according to Jia, that Pyongyang’s efforts to develop nuclear weapons would undermine the nuclear non-proliferation regime in which China is invested strategically. China also has four very practical reasons for avoiding a nuclear North Korea: Pyongyang’s efforts to develop nuclear weapons would prompt China’s neighbours, especially Japan and South Korea, to do the same and increase the chance of a nuclear war along Chinese border; Pyongyang’s efforts to develop nuclear weapons threatens to invite a pre-emptive strike from the United States; given Pyongyang’s dire economic circumstance, North Korea may also be tempted to sell nuclear technology or even nuclear weapons to recover some of the costs of its development — the likely buyers being international terrorist groups; and, even if Pyongyang does not sell nuclear technologies or weapons to terrorists they could fall into the wrong hands if Pyongyang collapses, which is not implausible given the mounting political and economic problems in the country.
The dilemma for China’s policy strategists, given these concerns, has been whether to choose stability or denuclearisation. Stability emphasised opposition to pre-emptive attacks against North Korea and resistance to tough international sanctions that threaten to bring down the North Korean government. Denuclearisation required the endorsement of tougher sanctions that sought to force Pyongyang to give up developing nuclear weapons. Beijing has so far opted for stability over denuclearisation, but following the latest test, the mood in Beijing has shifted discernibly towards emphasising the denuclearisation objective. Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi called in North Korea’s Ambassador to China to issue a stern warning. Even the generally anti-Western Global Times argued that China should cut back its aid to Pyongyang.
Whatever new sanctions Beijing signs on to, it will nonetheless do whatever it can to avoid the chaos that would follow a North Korean collapse. So what can the international community really do about North Korea, even with a little more help from China though perhaps rather less from Russia?
What has always been clear is that its nuclear capacity has no security value to North Korea except as a lever to extort resources or extract a peace accord with the United States and the other Parties to the Six Party Talks. It is of little value as a weapons system in the near future. North Korea needs substantial inputs of food, fuel, fertiliser, foreign currency, and other things, simply to survive. And if its aim is to attain long-term economic and political security it must secure a peace agreement with the United States. Trade embargoes, other international sanctions and the tight United States-South Korea-Japan policy coordination, now have North Korea on a Chinese drip that is likely to offer less and less sustenance now. North Korean regime survival increasingly points to the one way out — to negotiate terms for stopping, rolling back, and relinquishing its nuclear and missile programs in return for peace and economic as well as political security.
This sharp reality does not mean that the time for negotiation with Pyongyang has ended. Rather that time for negotiation is more urgent and its purpose is more sharply focused. It certainly doesn’t mean, as Emma Campbell’s piece on this Forum made clear, that this is a time to reject diplomatic initiative from Pyongyang (including through its desire to re-open its embassy in Canberra). It is a time, as the Obama administration has made clear, for pause, but also for intensification of, not for stopping, active negotiations preconditioned on a nuclear development freeze.
Peter Drysdale is Editor of the East Asia Forum.
Two points if I may.
I would take issue with your assertion that a nuclear weapons capacity has no security value to North Korea, and little value as a weapons system in the near future.
What it will mean when further developed (and probably means already) is that North Korea will not be able to be pushed around. Every time South Korea and the United States hold joint military exercises on the peninsula (and they have been held at least annually, since the armistice), the North Koreans feel threatened with the spectre of invasion and regime change. Like all countries with nuclear weapons in their armouries, they will feel a bit safer from this threat. If these deliberately provocative exercises had not been held, the North may not have advanced so far along the road towards a nuclear arsenal. Equally, if George W Bush and Jesse Helms had not, separately, been so determined to dismantle the Framework Agreement negotiated on behalf of President Clinton by Jimmy Carter in the early 1990s, we might now be witnessing a more stable, nuclear-free Korean peninsula.
Second, in using the word ‘extort’- for either food, fuel or a peace agreement – you use the vocabulary of the more belligerent western observers who insist North Korea is a gangster, a rogue state without principle, predictability or intelligent moral direction. Other countries, notably the United States, frequently ‘extort’ in pursuit of their foreign policy objectives, but we don’t condemn them for doing so. The good news is that Pyongyang still wants a peace agreement with Washington, one that guarantees it against invasion or regime change, and it may not yet be too late to get them to dismantle their fledgling nuclear weapons program in exchange for one. But it will be increasingly unproductive for Washington to lay down conditions for nuclear disarmament before sitting down to talk, either bilaterally, or in future Six Party talks.
For several years, Pyongyang acted in good faith under the Framework Arrangements – adhered to the NPT, invited US technicians and nuclear engineers in to North Korea to oversee the dismantling of a reactor at Yongpyon, and devised a safe way to dispose of spent fuel rods without turning the plutonium into weapons fuel. They only stopped when it became clear that they would never get the two Westinghouse power reactors promised them.
All the other disadvantages your article enumerates about North Korea going nuclear – instability on the peninsula, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan being tempted to weaponise, selling nuclear components to terrorists – are dismal possibilities. But with more diplomatic flexibility, they may not have figured on the present horizon. Talk about missed opportunities!
Richard Broinowski
Perhaps I did not communicate clearly enough. I meant deliverable military value in a narrow sense, Richard.
On the word ‘extort’, I agree I am using the language of others not language I would wish to endorse.