, reportedly met with retired US ambassador Thomas Pickering in Sweden. So do these diplomatic movements mean we should expect some change on the Korean peninsula? Unfortunately, they do not.
To see why, the political atmosphere surrounding Northeast Asia issues and US policy needs to be more central to understanding policy. There is a profound deficit of consequential leaders with a vision and a realistic plan for progress in Northeast Asia, just when tensions are growing. Much discussion — even among government and policy experts — is dominated by assumptions and policy alternatives that are fundamentally political and short term. Any breakthrough before the US presidential election seems unlikely.
After the US election there may be a short window for a policy re-think, but the most important window will open 13 months later, when South Korea elects a new president. At that time, the country’s next leader could decisively change policy, signalling the beginning of a realignment of players that would see strategy more closely match power and interests.
Only South Koreans can lead this. China’s leaders cannot force the United States to provide acceptable channels for North Korea to evolve. And, since Bill Clinton, US presidents have lacked the insight or capabilities to return to the great Korea regional project of the 1990s. After North Korea, the country with the most at stake is South Korea.
China is in some ways the most predictable of the key players. It has never made sense for Chinese leaders to encourage or allow real instability in North Korea. Meanwhile, the United States has not matched Chinese cooperation on UN Security Council resolutions by re-engaging North Korea on broad strategic issues. And those, rather than oil, food, or secret promises, are the only issues that matter. The US has also not suggested any endgame after squeezing the North through sanctions and isolation, except the fantasy of its capitulation.
South Korea, for its part, is winding up a decade of post-democratisation conservatism. It has been a divisive lost decade for politics, ideology and North–South interaction. Democratic institutions have been undercut and freedoms have been curtailed. Yet broader recognition of the multiple misjudgements of President Park Geun-hye has created the possibility for a newly ambitious leader.
The United States must be part of the solution to the destabilising pattern of statements, policies and politics surrounding the Korean peninsula. It controls much of the economic machinery required to integrate North Korea into global systems. North Korean leaders for at least 30 years have logically seen formal (as opposed to close or good) relations with the United States as the key to their regional security. And the United States has diplomatic tools that — when wisely used — can induce cooperation or overcome stumbling blocks among China, Japan and the Koreas.
But there are limitations to US diplomacy that have grown since the 1990s. The Republican Party increasingly lacks interest in governing and problem solving, as the rise of Donald Trump demonstrates. The practical collapse of a Democrat foreign policy in Northeast Asia under President Barack Obama has also reduced, if not eliminated, the potential for Washington to attempt anything like another Iran nuclear agreement.
The delays hampering the nuclear agreement with Iran one year after it was signed are revealing. James Durso argues that the US should either ‘put up or shut up’ and do more to help the promised economic aspects of the deal to go forward. The US administration’s timidity in making the deal work means that, at a minimum, the next US president will have to establish a full-time, multi-agency group that would have to work for at least the next three presidential terms for it to succeed.
The political and institutional dynamics of the Iran deal are directly relevant to any US–North Korea diplomacy. What Durso calls the ‘Sanctions Industrial Complex’ built by the Bush and Obama administrations for Iran was also used for North Korea, and it will confound all but the most adept and prepared president. Hillary Clinton is very capable. But there has been no indication that either she or her presumptive foreign policy advisors are as good as Bill Clinton was at grasping the potential opportunities with North Korea.
Former presidents Kim Dae-jung and Bill Clinton put extensive planning, commitment and personnel into the achievements of the 1994 Agreed Framework and the 1998–2008 North–South Engagement. The lack of any similar overarching policy approach by either government has crippled discussions since. Discussions have remained exclusively transactional since 2001. This, combined with the electoral calendar, means that recent meetings are unlikely to deliver a change in positions.
Still, there have been openings that the United States and South Korea could explore in the future. If the next South Korean and/or US leader does the necessary planning, then negotiating structures should not be a problem. The Six-Party Talks are overdue for retirement. Their best aspects actually pre-date their creation in 2003: the US Agreed Framework and North–South Engagement projects already included robust regional consultation. They were replaced, in the Six-Party Talks, by a flashy substitute born of ideology, confusion and hubris.
Most policy assumptions about what motivates the current North Korean leadership are highly speculative and badly analysed. As the North continues to advance its weapons development in a state of increasing isolation, new thinking is needed about how to open dialogue channels. Unfortunately, United States and South Korean administrations are going in the opposite direction, as is North Korea.
This assessment is not encouraging. There are two elections and at least 18 months to get through. But, for now, a change in leadership in South Korea offers the most likely opportunity among the key regional players for any serious return to diplomacy with North Korea. Just possibly, the next US leader can help. But don’t count on it.
Stephen Costello is an independent analyst and consultant and the producer of AsiaEast. He was formerly director of the Korea Program at the Atlantic Council, director of the Kim Dae Jung Peace Foundation, USA, and Vice President of Gowran International.
Dr Costello’s persuasive arguments are appropriately leavened with reasoned pessimism. The record shows Pyongyang has not been forced to change tack under pressure; indeed, it has doubled down on fashioning an increasingly, perhaps dangerously, threatening nuclear-deterrent capability. Any regime, however sui generis and intolerable when seen through external lenses, functions because it represents the strongest elite-faction domestically. Large numbers of North Koreans have suffered excruciating privation, and many continue to do so. Still, as we have seen in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and Yemen over the past decade-and-a-half, externally sponsored pluralist transformations do not necessarily promise rapid or inexpensive success in societies where multi-party liberal democracy is an alien concept. Also, utter chaos born of innocent and naïve optimism is no improvement on stable order as a basis for evolution. Sanctions and threatened decapitation have not worked over the past six decades; it would perhaps be a little foolhardy for the world’s greatest power ever to continue along that path and hope these will somehow work over the next six. If the USA feels it must democratise the world, shouldn’t charity begin closer to home among its allies in the Gulf-Arab GCC monarchies first?
Dr. Ali notes repeated failures by US administrations when it attempts to use blunt or inappropriate tools to address nasty regimes. Stephen Kinzer’s book, The Brothers, about the Dulles Brothers and the impact of their views on US policy, reminds us of this long history. Lim Dong Won’s book, Peacemaker, about Korea-US relations before and after George Bush, reminds us the US can still get it wrong. The three examples of the Agreed Framework of 1994, the Iran Nuclear Agreement of 2015 and the Cuba re-engagement of 2015 show better uses of US power and diplomacy.
Thanks for an interesting, albeit very sobering, analysis. Thirteen months until after the next S Korean election is a long time to wait. A lot could happen between now and then…..including the election here in the USA.
This is the first time I have read of someone praising Bill Clinton’s efforts with the DPRK. Did he run out of time before some concrete progress could have been made? Bush placing the DPRK in his so called ‘axis of evil’ was the kiss of death, eh?
I agree with Mr. Solomon that much can happen in the 13 months before the ROK presidential election. Not only the inter-Korean tensions but Chinese reactions to the Permanent Court of Arbitration’s ruling in favor of the Philippines could also raise temperatures. This is why the lack of high-level and realistic attention to Korea issues is worrisome.
Bill Clinton’s efforts with the DPRK have not received the attention or praise they deserve. He certainly made some mistakes, and may have unnecessarily slowed the diplomacy during his second term. But he engaged the nuclear crisis of the early 1990s, put excellent people in positions of authority, stood up to US congressional opponents who were wildly exaggerating the DPRK threat, and stood up to a tempermental and insecure South Korean partner, Kim Young Sam. All were difficult, but achieving a cap on North Korean plutonium activity, missile production and sales, and the beginning of formal diplomacy – when the North had zero nuclear divices – would seem to be the definition of concrete progress. Much still had to be done, but the achievements were real.
Mr Costello is very critical of US and South Korean polices towards North Korea, but nowhere does tell us what these policies should be. The US signed a deal with North Korea in 2012, which they backed out of two weeks later. Is the US to blame for this failure. The North Korean plan is to get nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them, and to use negotiations as their cover. They are in the process of succeeding. Mr Costello tells us that policy analysts don’t understand North Korea yet does not tell us what he thinks motivates the North’s actions. North Korea is not a normal country it is a failing fascist family mafia state only interested in the elite. They maintain their power by keeping the people of the North terrified, ignorant, malnourished and over worked. If the people of the North are ever to have a decent life, that will only come about with regime change. China maintains North Korea because they believe it is in their interest and because the North is their only ally. China is never made to pay a price for this support and won’t be in the future, something tells me this is not going to end well.
I worry very much that, as Mr. McCarthy says, “this is not going to end well.” The comment by Dr. Ali above might be a good reminder to anyone proposing regime change in the DPRK. By whom, how, and with what end state?
Perhaps the best answer to the past 15 years of behavior by the North Koreans is to ask if there is a way to return to something like the working deal of 1994, taking into account modern realities. After all, despite it nascent nuclear arsenal, there are strong indications that its strategic interests remain largely unchanged. A more important question, then, may be whether US and South Korean interests have changed. If so, how?
The point of the Agreed Framework deal of 1994 was to stop North Korea from becoming a nuclear power, it failed. North Korea got 10 billion in aid and the time to build its bombs. The six party talks with North Korea failed in 2007 because North Korea would not provide a list of their nuclear programs as they were required to. They lied for ten years about their uranium enriching program which they denied having until the US found traces of enriched uranium on NK aluminum tubes. Then in Nov of 2010 the North showed Siegfried Hecker their uranium enriching plant with over 1,000 centrifuges. In 2007 the Israelis destroyed a plutonium plant in Syria being built by the North Koreans and paid for by the Iranians another violation of their agreements. Mr Costello if you think you have a plan please, share it with us. After all its lying how could anyone trust the North Koreans, also they said they will not give up their nuclear weapons. These weapons are not for defense because no one is going to attack the North. The nuclear weapons are to threaten the US mainland and get us to abandon South Korea. It may sound crazy but the North Korean plan is to take over the South, that’s what the weapons are for.
The failure of the Agreed Framework is an important part of the mythical viewpoint of the broad “no diplomacy” and “regime change” groups who talk about these issues. A careful look at the books by officials of the George Bush administration, along with other available reports, is clear: the US walked away from that agreement, not the North Koreans. It should therefore not be surprising that the North Koreans are distrustful.
The best analysts of North Korea will tell you that motivations and strategic interests are among the hardest to discern. Selectively picking only those that seem threatening is not, therefore, very useful.
The only way to know if it is possible to climb down from current dangerous positions is to talk. Professional diplomats in Washington, Seoul and elsewhere have well-developed plans for resuming diplomacy. But it will take presidents who can see the possible benefits to get the work started.