Leon V. Sigal 

RESOLVING THE NORTH KOREAN NUCLEAR PROBLEM 

Director of the Northeast Asia Cooperative Security Project 

at the Social Science Research Council

Conference on the 14th Anniversary of the North-South Summit Kim Dae Jung Library Seoul June 12, 2014

North Korean preparation for a fourth nuclear test shows that the Obama administration’s stance of “strategic patience” toward North Korea has failed, just as pressure without negotiation has in the past. And President Park’s policy of “trust-building” has fared no better.

Without a firm commitment to reconcile with the North and a willingness to seek a peace treaty and full political and economic normalization, the chances of persuading Pyongyang to curb and roll back its nuclear and missile programs are slim.

At the same time, North Korea’s strategy of forcing others to be its friend has now reached a dead end. Without prospects for a negotiated way out, the security of all of Northeast Asia is in peril.

What Do We Want?

Modesty is in order about how best to deal with North Korea. We do not know enough to have much confidence about our approach. How best to act in uncertainty?

The starting point is to be clear about what we want North Korea to do and about what worked or did not work to make progress in the past.

What the current South Korean government says it wants – “reform and opening” in the North as well as a resolution of the nuclear issue, a durable peace, and unification – may be too much to ask. Reform and opening, however desirable, are somewhat at odds with its other goals.

It is also important to recognize the impediments to reform in the North Korean system, both internal and external, as well as the conditions conducive to internal change – the spread of markets, the increasing flow of information, and the decision by Kim Jong Un, unlike his father, to stake his legitimacy on improving the people’s economic well-being. A more fundamental question is whether reform in North Korea, as Seoul defines it, should be South Korea’s goal.

What Washington and Seoul need, above all, is stability on the Korean peninsula, specifically abandonment of Pyongyang’s nuclear and missile programs and an end to deadly clashes, as well as improvement in the living conditions of the North Korean people, regardless of how the North runs its economy or state. That requires reconciliation and normalization with the North.

The regime’s collapse is antithetical to these goals. How many nuclear weapons, for instance, would Pyongyang have by the time of collapse and what would happen to them? Yet some South Korean officials believe that collapse is not only desirable, but also imminent. Such wishful thinking relieves them of the need to formulate a policy that addresses the here and now. Another form of wishful thinking is the hope that China can resolve our North Korea problem. But hope is not a policy.

As for what worked in the past, the history of nuclear diplomacy has been obscured by all the parties. None of them acknowledge their own responsibility for failing to keep agreements. If negotiations failed because the other side reneged, the reasoning on each side goes, then the other side must take unilateral steps to rebuild trust. If it does not, then the only recourse is more pressure. For Pyongyang that means moving ahead with its nuclear and missile programs and conducting forceful probes in the contested waters of the peninsula. For Washington, Seoul and Tokyo that means imposing more stringent sanctions and trying to isolate the North by convincing China and others to go along. Yet North Korean arming has seldom brought its neighbors to the negotiating table, and allied pressure, even when China has gone along, has had no success at all in curbing North Korean arming.

The lack of progress has led many to conclude that, in Victor Cha’s clever phrase, North Korea is “the land of lousy options.” His conclusion sidesteps whether Washington, Seoul and Tokyo have engaged in sustained diplomatic give-and-take to reconcile with Pyongyang, have been willing to satisfy the North’s key demands, and have faithfully lived up to the agreements once made. A review of the negotiating history shows they have not.

That leads to a second problem, that in contrast to North Korea’s remarkable consistency in dealings with its neighbors, the United States, South Korea, and Japan have swung from engaging North Korea to isolating and pressuring it, depending on who held power in those countries. The three allies have seldom been in synch on North Korea.

What Has Worked?

What has worked to secure moments of progress in Korea needs more careful examination. First, a few facts:

Until a few years ago, the only way for the North to make the fissile material it needed for weapons was the plutonium program centered at Yongbyon. Yet North Korea stopped reprocessing to extract plutonium from spent nuclear fuel in the fall of 1991, about the time it agreed to the Joint Declaration on the Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula and three years before signing the 1994 Agreed Framework. It did not resume reprocessing until 2003 after the Bush administration shredded what was left of that 1994 accord, having denied itself tens of bombs in the interim. The North also stopped operating its fuel fabrication plant before signing the Agreed Framework, then disabled it, and did not refurbish it until last year. The North shut down the 5MW reactor at Yongbyon in 2007 and restarted it only this spring, even though that reactor could have produced a bomb’s worth of fissile material sooner than the enrichment plant nearby. Why such restraint?

Similarly, the only way for North Korea to perfect ballistic missiles for delivering nuclear warheads is to test them until they work reliably and with a modicum of accuracy. Yet the North has conducted only seven sets of medium- and longer-range test launches in twenty years. And testing a rocket to launch satellites is not quite the same thing as testing a ballistic missile. Why so few missile test launches?

Deadly clashes have occurred only intermittently in the past twenty years. Again, the question is why.

Careful review of the long pauses in North Korean nuclear and missile development as well as the periods of tension and calm suggests three tentative conclusions:

The most promising periods in U.S.-DPRK and North-South relations have occurred when Seoul and Washington acted in concert to sustain dialogue and engagement with Pyongyang – in 1991, 1999-2000 and 2007-08.

The most intense crises, by contrast, occurred when Pyongyang concluded that Seoul was impeding Washington’s efforts to engage – in 1993-94 and 2008-10. And Seoul could make little progress with Pyongyang when Washington was not engaging, as in 2001-06.

Also, when China and the United States applied concerted pressure on North Korea, the North responded with nuclear tests – in 2006, 2009 and 2012. By contrast, when China concluded the United States was negotiating in good faith, in 1994 and 2005, it helped coax the North to reach agreements.

In short, it looks like engagement worked and coercion failed.

Pyongyang’s Motives

The question remains, why did North Korea act this way? To some observers, the North was always determined to arm. If so, how explain its long periods of restraint?

The most tenable hypothesis is that the Kim dynasty, despite its dependence on others, has long justified its rule by juche or self-reliance - the legitimizing myth that it, unlike its sibling rival in the South, has stood up to all its neighbors and forced them to respect its sovereignty, safeguard its security, and strengthen its economy. Just as it played off China against the Soviet Union during the Cold War, since 1988 it has sought to compel the United States, South Korea and Japan to end enmity and improve relations in an effort to hedge against a rising China and to reduce its political and economic dependence on Beijing. It was willing to curtail its nuclear and missile programs to that end.

A high point was the Agreed Framework of 1994 in which Washington committed to “move toward full normalization of political and economic relations.” When it did not follow through, Pyongyang in 1997 began acquiring the means to enrich uranium. After Washington pledged in October 2000 to “fundamentally improve” relations and agreed that “neither government would have hostile intent toward the other,” Kim Jong Il offered to end production, deployment, and exports of medium- and long-range missiles, an offer President Bush never explored.

When the Bush administration confronted Pyongyang over its enrichment efforts in October 2002, the North suggested it would forgo uranium enrichment, as well as plutonium production, in return for diplomatic recognition, legal assurances of nonaggression, including not threatening it with the use of nuclear weapons and not impeding its economic development. As U.S. negotiator James Kelly himself acknowledged three weeks later, “They did suggest after this harsh and — personally, to me — surprising admission that there were measures that might be taken that were generally along those lines.” Condoleezza Rice elaborates in her memoirs how Kelly was tightly bound in a diplomatic straitjacket:

Usually there is enough trust in an experienced negotiator that the guidance is used more as points of reference than as a script. But in this case, given the fissures, the points were to be read verbatim. There were literally stage directions for Kelly. He was not to engage the North Koreans in any side conversation in any way. That left him actually moving to the corner of the table to avoid Pyongyang’s representatives.

Rice’s conclusion is worth underscoring: “Because his instructions were so constraining, Jim couldn’t fully explore what might have been an opening to put the program on the table.” Instead, President Bush walked away from all prior U.S. commitments in 2003 and Pyongyang, in turn, resumed reprocessing to extract five or six bombs’ worth of plutonium and ramped up its enrichment efforts.

Negotiations finally resumed in earnest in 2005 and yielded a September 2005 six-party joint statement, in which North Korea pledged to abandon "all nuclear weapons and existing nuclear programs." Yet the ink was hardly dry on the accord when irreconcilables in the administration capitalized on a Treasury Department investigation of money-laundering at the Banco Delta Asia in Macao to try to pressure North Korea by denying it accounts in banks around the world. For over a year it refused to return to six-party talks while demanding bilateral talks to resolve the BDA issue. Far from giving Washington leverage, the financial measures prompted Pyongyang to retaliate. Its tests of seven missiles, including a Taepo-dong 2, on July 4 did just that, leading China to vote for a U.S.-backed resolution in the U.N. Security Council condemning the tests and threatening sanctions. North Korea, undaunted, immediately began preparations for its first nuclear test, a test it conducted on October 9, 2006.

Within three weeks of that test, Washington resumed bilateral talks with Pyongyang to repatriate its funds in the BDA. That reopened the way to six-party talks. Under an October 2007 second-phase agreement to implement the 2005 joint statement, the North disabled its nuclear facilities at Yongbyon. That October agreement said nothing about verification, which had been deferred to the next phase of negotiations. Yet, as Secretary of State Rice acknowledged on June 18, 2008, Washington moved the goalposts: “What we’ve done, in a sense, is move up issues that were to be taken up in phase three, like verification, like access to the reactor, into phase two.” In last-ditch talks that October, the North agreed to allow “sampling and other forensic measures” at the reactor, reprocessing plant, and fuel fabrication facility at Yongbyon, which could have sufficed to ascertain how much plutonium Pyongyang had extracted in the past. If not, it also agreed to “access, based on mutual consent, to undeclared sites.” That oral commitment did not assuage the Lee Myung-bak administration in Seoul, the Aso Taro government in Tokyo, or critics in Washington who insisted it be put in writing. When Pyongyang balked, Seoul suspended energy aid promised under the October 2007 six-party agreement in late 2008.

In response to the South’s renege on energy, the North moved in late January 2009 to launch a satellite. Pyongyang delayed the launch until April, time for Washington to resume negotiations – the only way to head off the launch and subsequent nuclear test. The Obama administration refused and instead embraced strategic patience. That pose, adopted in the interregnum, was confirmed in a March 2009 National Security Council meeting chaired by Obama. As NSC senior director for East Asia Jeffrey Bader recalls:

The president told his senior staff he wanted to break the cycle of provocation, extortion, and reward that various U.S. administrations had confronted and ultimately accommodated in the past fifteen years. … Defense Secretary Gates stressed the importance of not providing inducements to bring North Korea back to the table, or “not paying for the same horse three times.” The president agreed. There was no mention then, or at any subsequent time, of candidate Obama’s suggestion of a willingness to meet Kim Jong Il.

Strategic patience manifested the belief prevalent in Washington that the North alone had failed to live up to past agreements and was determined to arm so negotiations would be fruitless. Washington’s belief soon became a self-fulfilling prophecy as Pyongyang went ahead with the rocket launch, and soon followed with its second nuclear test. By March 2010 the administration was inching back to the negotiating table only to have the North torpedo a South Korean navy vessel, the Cheonon – and with it any chance of talks that year.

With a presidential election on the horizon, however, the administration moved to head off trouble by resuming negotiations in 2011. Having begun preparations to resume nuclear testing, North Korea agreed to suspend uranium enrichment, keep its reactor at Yongbyon shut down, and allow international monitoring. Most significantly, it also accepted a moratorium on nuclear and missile tests while “productive dialogue continues.” Left unresolved was whether that moratorium precluded satellite launches. North Korea insisted on its right to launch despite a U.N. Security Council ban. The United States warned a launch would be a deal-breaker.

These arrangements were to be finalized at talks in December 2011, the very week that Kim Jong Il died. They were delayed until February 29, 2012. Whether Kim Jong Il would have gone ahead with the launch and subsequent nuclear test is not known, but his son and successor did.

Some in Washington experienced in negotiating with the North thought it was a mistake not to get a written deal precluding satellite launches. That sidestepped a more fundamental question: why did Pyongyang proceed with the launch and a third nuclear test when it had reason to believe that the Obama administration was finally negotiating in earnest? Had Pyongyang abandoned its two decades-long effort to improve relations with Washington? No one outside Pyongyang knows for sure.

Administration officials understandably felt double-crossed, which only reinforced their reluctance to resume negotiations. Last fall, North Korean officials indicated their willingness to return to the Leap Day arrangements and possibly refrain from exercising their supposed “right” to launch satellites as well. That was not good enough for Washington, however, which insisted that Pyongyang had to do more — without reciprocity. That was unacceptable to Pyongyang, which saw “commitment for commitment, action for action,” the principle enshrined in the September 2005 six-party joint statement, as the only way to build trust. In late April, Washington, Seoul and Tokyo moved to soften this stance somewhat, but without the commitment to take reciprocal steps, it was too little, too late.

Trust-Busting Politics

Seoul’s policy was no more successful than Washington’s. Park Guen-hye’s election had generated hope that she would move to re-engage Pyongyang and encourage Washington to do the same. After all, Kim Jong Il had hosted Park in 2002 and his successor seemed willing to probe her intentions. And her campaign talk of “trust-building” seemed to break ranks with her hard-line predecessor in the Blue House. Upon Park’s coming to power, the North toned down its rhetoric, entered into serious talks with the South and had gone so far as to drop its preconditions for a family reunion, Seoul’s most sought-after objective.

Far from accelerating engagement and quietly urging Washington to join her, however, Park moved to placate her right-wing base by talking about unification – a synonym for collapse in Pyongyang. She did move to reaffirm the 2000 and 2007 summit agreements that her predecessor had back away from. Seeking to counter declining interest in unification and concern about its costs, she spoke of a unification “bonanza” in her New Year’s press conference. Then came what the Blue House portrayed as her “Dresden Declaration.” Dresden was, of course, the site of Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s 1989 speech, a watershed moment in East Germany’s absorption. While many of Park’s proposals were reasonable, her references to “famine-stricken North Korean children,” a “nonstop string of defections,” and a “social-cultural wall” that “must be swept away” were patronizing at best and inflammatory at worst. Pyongyang’s reaction was predictably vitriolic. Even more explicitly, at an April 25 press conference with President Obama at her side, President Park invoked the magic word: “Reflecting development process of human history, barriers built due to conflict, distrust, social cultural differences eventually collapse.” At a speech in New York, Foreign Minister Yun Byung-se dispensed with the word “eventually” when he said that “the day is approaching, perhaps much faster than we may all realize.” What is the basis for that conclusion other than the usual wishful thinking?

Sanctions and Pressure Have Failed

This examination of the past leads to the conclusion that sanctions and pressure have done little to curb the North nuclear and missile progress. Some shipments of weapons-related material have been seized – with little effect. U.S. financial sanctions dating back to September 2005 are more comprehensive than those authorized by the U.N. Security Council in February 2013, targeting not just weapons-related and other trade that was sanctioned by the U.N. Security Council, but all transactions by North Korea with any bank in the world. Denying access to international financial institutions was intended to make it difficult for North Korea to conduct trade, which usually requires a letter of credit issued by a bank to guarantee payment to a seller of goods by the issuer whether or not the buyer eventually pays, and often also to assure the quality of goods to the purchaser.

One claim widely accepted in policy circles is that the U.S. financial sanctions imposed on the North have created severe problems for Pyongyang and that further sanctions will have even greater effect. Yet North Korean trade has grown substantially since 2005 — not just with its main partner China, but also with countries throughout South and Southeast Asia, Africa and Europe. Even its trade with South Korea set a record high in 2012 despite Seoul’s reduced engagement with the North. The transactions are often opaque, making calculations imprecise, but E.U. data puts the North’s trade with the world at 5553 million euros in 2011, up 26.7 percent from 2007. Its trade with Europe in 2011 was 159 million euros, one-third higher than in 2007. Imports from India, much of it petroleum, reportedly topped $1 billion in 2010, a tenfold increase from mid-decade. Some evidence compiled by Marcus Noland and Stephan Haggard even suggests that for the first time in its history, the North may have enjoyed a current account surplus in 2011 — “bad news” for those who want to believe that economic sanctions will bring North Korea to heel.

Worse than being ineffective, the financial sanctions proved counterproductive. Interpreting the freezing of its accounts at BDA as a breach of the September 2005 joint statement and a sign of U.S. hostility, Pyongyang boycotted six-party talks until its funds were repatriated and ended a seven-year moratorium on missile test-launches first concluded with the Clinton administration by testing seven missiles including the longer-range Taepodong-2 in 2006,. Pyongyang then conducted its first nuclear test.

Now, as the North anticipates new international sanctions in response to its latest nuclear test and a cooling of relations with China, it has concluded new trade deals with Russia and Uganda and is continuing to boost trade with the rest of the world.

A Possible Way Out – Not Pressure But a Peace Process

Pressure without negotiation is unlikely to yield the results Washington or Seoul seeks. Why won’t deployment of carriers, nuclear submarines, B-52s and B-2s and beefed up exercises lead to further North Korean arming and further clashes, as they always have in the past? And why would such actions prompt China to ban port calls by suspect vessels or suspect overflights from North Korea. President Park’s “Vision Korea Project,” withholding aid until the North begins disarming, is unlikely to fare any better. As Pyongyang underscored by shutting down Kaesong, Pyongyang’s weapons programs are not for sale.

More fundamentally, the very steps that each side in Korea takes to bolster deterrence increase the risk of deadly clashes. This was evident in incidents such as the North’s sinking of the Cheonan in March 2010 in retaliation for the November 2009 shooting up of a North Korean navy vessel and a November 2010 artillery exchange in the contested waters off Korea’s west coast. In short, deterrence alone will not assure morning calm on the peninsula. The way to reduce the risk of further clashes is a peace process in Korea.

Pyongyang has long said it wants a peace treaty ending the Korean War. Probing whether it means what it says is in South Korean and U.S. security interests, especially now that North Korea is nuclear-armed.

The September 19, 2005 joint statement suggests just that critical step: negotiating "a permanent peace regime on the Korean Peninsula at an appropriate separate forum." Yet that possibility has never been seriously entertained by either the Obama or the Park Administrations. Indeed, since taking office, the Park administration has seldom, if ever uttered the words “reconciliation” or “peace treaty.”

North Korea has long sought a peace agreement with the United States and South Korea. A notable example came on June 16, 1998, when Pyongyang made public an offer to negotiate an end to its export, testing, and production of ballistic missiles. With that offer came a threat to resume tests, a threat the North carried out on August 31, 1998, when it launched a three-stage Taepodong-1 in a failed attempt to put a satellite into orbit. The June 16 statement said, "The discontinuation of our missile development is a matter which can be discussed after a peace agreement is signed between the DPRK and the United States and the U.S. military threat [is] completely removed. If the U.S. concern about our missiles is truly related to the peace and security of Northeast Asia, the United States should immediately accept the DPRK-proposed peace agreement for establishment of a durable peace mechanism on the Korean Peninsula."

By "peace agreement" the North did not necessarily mean a peace treaty, but a declared end to enmity and a pledge to respect each other's sovereignty, as in the October 2000 U.S.-DPRK joint communique. Nor was "the U.S. military threat" synonymous with the U.S. troop presence. Only a basic change in the political relationship with Washington - reconciliation - would remove the threat as Pyongyang perceives it; the withdrawal of U.S. armed forces would not since the North would remain at risk from U.S. armed forces based offshore. The "peace mechanism" that Pyongyang has sought to replace the Military Armistice Commission set up to monitor the cease-fire at the end of the Korean War would include a military-to-military channel among the United States, South Korea, and North Korea. Involving all three parties with forces on the ground in Korea, the new channel would do more than resolve disputes like the shooting down of a U.S. reconnaissance helicopter in 1996 after it strayed across the DMZ, the repeated incursions of North Korean spy submarines, or the firefight sparked after North Korean fishing boats ventured south in 1999 and were rammed by the South Korean navy. Pyongyang also saw the peace mechanism as a venue for negotiating confidence-building measures. These could be the subject of additional peace agreements.

A Korean peace process should be pursued in parallel with renewed negotiations to rein in the North’s nuclear and missile programs, as well as the three other processes envisioned in the September 2005 six-party joint statement: normalization, deeper economic engagement and security cooperation in the region. We have yet to try such a comprehensive and concerted approach to reconcile in any sustained way up to now. Until we do, we won’t get anything from Pyongyang but more trouble.

The New Geopolitical Situation in Northeast Asia

Two trends are reshaping the geopolitical context in which a peace process would take place: China’s growing economic and military might and Japan’s more assertive nationalism. These trends, taken together, mark a fundamental break with the post-Cold War context of the past two decades.

With the growth in Chinese power, mutual accommodation between the United States and China is the key to security in Northeast Asia. The problem is that the steps the United States has taken to reassure its allies also antagonize China — joint exercises that include flights of B-52 and B-2 bombers or the dispatch of aircraft carriers to Korea, expanding missile defenses, and help for South Korean development of longer-range ballistic missiles to add to the long-range cruise missiles it recently deployed. It is unrealistic to expect China to abandon North Korea as the United States moves to shore up its alliances.

Confrontation between the United States and China would jeopardize the security of South Korea, as well as prospects for North-South reconciliation. That is recognized in Beijing, which tends to treat North Korea policy as subsidiary to U.S.-China relations. North Korean actions that threaten to destabilize the region have prompted Beijing to respond by pressuring Pyongyang enough to head off trouble with Washington, but to stop well short of undermining the Kim regime, notwithstanding recurrent hopes in Seoul and Washington that it would do so.

No state in the region is more profoundly affected by the rise of China than the DPRK, which throughout its existence has tried to avoid economic and security dependence on any one neighbor. During the Cold War, Kim Il Sung played off the Soviet Union against China and extracted economic aid from and trade with both, as well as from the rest of the East bloc, while refusing formal membership in that bloc. In the late 1980s, as the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact were collapsing and China embarked on a capitalist road, Kim reached out to South Korea, Japan and the United States as counterweights to China and alternative sources of aid and investment. In the post-Cold War geopolitical context, the North has sought to develop nuclear weapons in order to avoid security dependence on China and has increased its trade with the rest of the world – with the exception of the United States and Japan.

The rise of China may explain why Kim Jong Un adopted a “new strategic line” on March 31 “on carrying out economic construction and building nuclear armed forces simultaneously under the prevailing situation.” Did the phrase “prevailing situation” refer to the “state of war” it declared after its nuclear test led to a tough South Korean response or does it refer to what it calls the U.S. “hostile policy”? Or was it a response to its new geostrategic environment, in which a rising China treats it more like a friendly neighbor rather than an ally and backs U.N. Security Council sanctions? One way to answer this question is for the South to move toward reconciliation with the North and encourage the United States to do likewise.

Japan’s more assertive nationalism also affects the geopolitical context for inter-Korean reconciliation. An ultranationalist right wing, within both the ruling Liberal Democratic Party and the opposition Japan Restoration Party has grown in strength in the Diet over the past decade. It poses a challenge to the realists who still dominate foreign policy-making in Tokyo. The right wing not only resists acknowledging Japan’s historical legacy. It also takes its cue from former Governor of Tokyo Ishihara Shintaro, who has long sought to confront China in order to expose the United States as insufficiently loyal to Japan in order to justify nuclear arming. While the ultranationalists are still a minority in Tokyo, they have pushed the last two governments to press Japan’s territorial claims. That spells trouble in the region.

A more assertive Japan could complicate concerted action to promote North-South reconciliation by antagonizing China and Korea, triggering a regional arms race, and even setting off clashes in the region.

The Consequences of No Negotiations

Whether negotiations can stop and reverse North Korean arming is not known for certain. But it is the only policy with any chance of succeeding.

Without a resumption of negotiations, North Korea’s nuclear and missile development will proceed apace. As of now, the North is enriching uranium and is expanding its capacity to do so. It has restarted its reactor at Yongbyon to generate more plutonium. Construction of its new light-water reactor is nearing completion. It will need more nuclear and missile tests if it is to perfect a compact weapons design capable of delivery by missiles. If unbounded, those weapons programs will undermine regional security and sow doubts in Tokyo and Seoul about relying on Washington for security.

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