In Defense of a Bold U.S. Approach Toward North Korea
A bold new strategy toward North Korea means engaging North Korea politically in order to fundamentally change the nature of the bilateral relationship.
by Yoon Young-kwan
Adjustments to the U.S. global strategy in accordance with the tectonic shift in global geopolitics are well underway. However, it is unclear whether similar adjustments are occurring to U.S. strategies at the regional level. It does not seem to be the case regarding the U.S. policy toward North Korea. The details of the Biden administration’s North Korea policy review have not been fully disclosed. However, comments by policy-makers and in media reports on the review do not indicate that the Biden team’s approach to North Korea reflects the fundamentally new reality of intense competition between the United States and China.
Though each U.S. administration in the last three decades tried various forms of North Korea policy, they could not achieve the goal of denuclearization. Actually, as time went by, the situation got worse and worse. Thirty years ago, North Korea was at an embryonic stage in terms of nuclear development. Regional countries now view it as a de facto nuclear state with thirty to sixty nuclear warheads and Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) capabilities that could threaten the security of the United States. What then are the reasons for this failure? Will there be any alternative approach left to address the current, much worse situation?
Though diverse in form, most approaches of the different U.S. administrations in the last three decades were not much different in substance. These conventional approaches shared three common characteristics.
Failure to Question China’s Full Cooperation
First, they were mostly based on the assumption that China shared a common interest with the United States in denuclearizing North Korea and would fully cooperate. U.S. policy-makers tried to utilize China’s full cooperation in pressuring North Korea to denuclearize.
Contrary to the expectations of U.S. policy-makers, however, China did not cooperate much. In the initial stage of North Korea’s nuclear development in the 1990s, China mostly took a lukewarm attitude on the North Korea nuclear issue. Chinese policy-makers regarded it as a bilateral issue solely between the United States and North Korea. In the 2000s, Beijing became a little more active mainly due to the George W. Bush administration’s pressure and hosted the Six-Party Talks. Even then, Beijing limited its role to that of a third-party mediator between the United States and North Korea. Chinese policy-makers tended to underestimate North Korea’s capability to develop nuclear weapons.
As North Korea increased its nuclear stockpiles in the 2010s, China seemed to accept North Korea’s possession of nuclear weapons as a fait accompli rather quickly. There was one unusual exception when Beijing responded positively to former President Donald Trump’s request to apply harsh economic sanctions against North Korea from 2017 to mid-2018. Witnessing President Trump’s strong rhetoric and threat to use force in 2017, Chinese leaders seemed to have really worried about the possibility of a war on the Korean Peninsula and felt the necessity to push North Korea harder. War on the Korean Peninsula would be the last thing that Chinese president Xi Jinping might want. However, following the Singapore summit between the United States and North Korea, Beijing began to quietly loosen its economic sanctions on North Korea.
In this way, even during the period of U.S. engagement with China, China’s cooperation with the United States on North Korean issues was very limited. It was mainly because of the consistent Chinese geopolitical strategy toward the Korean Peninsula. As Mao did at the time of his decision to intervene in the Korean War in late 1950, his successors, including President Xi, have sought to maintain a buffer state in the northern part of the Korean Peninsula against the United States and its ally South Korea. So, they placed a higher priority on the stability of North Korea’s regime than its denuclearization. To avoid jeopardizing the Kim regime’s stability, they refrained from sanctioning it too hard.
The North Korean leaders, on the other hand, have recognized China’s strategic calculation and turned it to their own advantage. They pursued their nuclear program as freely as they wished with impunity. Though China participated in producing various UN Security Council resolutions sanctioning North Korea economically for its nuclear and missile programs, its implementation of those sanctions was nominal except in the period of 2017 to mid-2018.
The Korean Peninsula has uniquely experienced the geopolitical struggles among big powers in the last century and a half. The Sino-Japanese War (1894), Russo-Japanese War (1904), colonization of Korea by Japan (1910), division into two Koreas (1945), and Korean War (1950) are examples of struggle among neighboring powers that took place on the Korean Peninsula. Considering that South Korea and four important neighboring countries—the United States, China, Japan, and Russia—all have interrelated vital interests, achieving a peaceful settlement of the North Korean nuclear problem through multilateral cooperation is particularly desirable. However, China’s consistent geopolitical strategy of trying to maintain a buffer state in the northern part of the Korean Peninsula has been making multilateral cooperation with a closely coordinated action plan difficult.
China may want the United States to pay a very high price for its full cooperation on North Korea. It may wish the United States to make important concessions on some international issues such as the U.S.-ROK alliance, Taiwan, the South China Sea, or the East China Sea. If the United States does not wish to make that kind of Machiavellian deal with China, it may be natural for Washington to depart from the old policy assumption that China would fully cooperate. However, the U.S. government still seems to cling to that assumption instead of trying to explore a new bold approach.
Second, the conventional U.S. approaches in the last three decades have tended to focus mostly on the moral aspects of North Korea’s violations of international norms and rules. As a result, they tended to minimize or disregard the ‘security dilemma’ aspect of the conundrum. By developing nuclear weapons, North Korea violated international law, the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, and various UN Security Council Resolutions. As a result, the United States had no other way to achieve desired behavioral changes than to apply as much pressure as possible in areas North Korea cares about more strongly, like the economy. Some even argued that regime change would be the only solution.
This view has been very powerful because it matched the moralistic and legalistic standards of the policy community and public opinion in the United States. However, the approach based on this interpretation neglected the dualistic nature of the problem. Simply put, North Korea’s nuclear problem not only has a moral dimension but also an amoral dimension of real politics. Most U.S. administrations, probably with the one exception being the Clinton administration around 2000, have focused mainly on the former aspect and adopted a coercive approach. It tended to neglect the important policy implications of the ‘security dilemma’ problem embedded in the North Korean nuclear issue.
There is a long list of historical examples showing the security dilemma aspect of North Korean provocations. Being deeply concerned about its own security, North Korea often tried to mitigate insecurity by improving its relationship with the United States before it fully developed its nuclear weapons. Each time, however, U.S. policy-makers largely discounted and disregarded North Korean leaders’ appeal to improve bilateral relations.
For instance, immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the situation in North Korea was desperate. It suffered the triple shocks of an economic crisis, the weakening of its conventional military forces, and diplomatic isolation. In September 1990, Foreign Minister of the Soviet Union Eduard Shevardnadze visited Pyongyang to inform North Korean leaders of his government’s decision to open diplomatic relations with South Korea. Shevardnadze witnessed his North Korean counterpart, Kim Yong Nam, retort angrily that if that happened, North Korea would develop nuclear weapons.
In New York, in the first meeting of high-level U.S. and North Korean officials that took place in January 1992, the North Korean representative Kim Yong-sun delivered the message that Kim Il-sung wanted to improve North Korea’s relations with the United States and to establish diplomatic relations. However, the United States declined North Korea’s offer. The leaders of the United States and South Korea were not ready or imaginative enough to embrace North Korea diplomatically and totally redraw the security map of the Korean Peninsula while rooting out the seeds of its nuclear program early on.
In October 1994, the United States and North Korea concluded the Geneva Agreed Framework, with North Korea agreeing to freeze the Yongbyon nuclear facilities. In the negotiation process, the North Korean side pushed the U.S. representative hard to include clauses on improving political relations between the two countries. However, this agreement could not be fully implemented due to the opposition of the conventional approach’s strong supporters in Washington, especially in Congress.
President Clinton’s policy was an exception to the conventional moralistic-coercive approach. He tried to engage North Korea diplomatically in 2000 through exchange visits of high-level officials. When Vice Marshal Jo Myong-rok visited Washington in October 2000, the United States and North Korea endorsed a communiqué and promised to end their hostile relationship. However, President George W. Bush abrogated this communiqué unilaterally and declared North Korea as one of three ‘axis of evil’ states in his 2002 State of the Union Address.
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The United States launched the Six-Party Talks mechanism in 2003 to deal with the nuclear issue multilaterally. However, the United States used this mechanism mainly as an instrument for multilaterally pressuring North Korea rather than as a venue for a pragmatic, give-and-take kind of negotiation. Even the hard-won September 19th Agreement of 2005 did not have a chance to be implemented mainly due to the opposition of U.S. hard-liners who produced a financial sanctions law against North Korea almost simultaneously. The cost of having no real negotiation during 2003-2006 turned out to be quite detrimental. North Korea kept producing significant stockpiles of fissile materials and finally conducted its first nuclear test in October 2006.
President Trump’s meeting with Chairman Kim Jong-un was unprecedented, opening a direct communications channel between the two highly hostile leaders. This might have helped to mitigate unbridled distrust and suspicion, the biggest obstacles to a successful negotiated solution to the nuclear dilemma. However, Trump’s diplomacy was not much different in substance from the conventional U.S. approach in the sense that it neglected the security dilemma problem. Throughout the whole diplomatic process from 2018-19, Washington consistently demanded that Pyongyang denuclearize first before the United States moved. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo visited Pyongyang May 8-9, 2018, and told Kim Jong-un that the United States needed North Korea to provide a list of sites for developing and testing nuclear weapons.
When Secretary Pompeo again demanded that North Korea produce a full declaration of its nuclear program at his meeting with Kim Yong Chol in July 2018, Kim responded angrily. He was reported to have said that the U.S. demand was nothing less than asking for the target list for an American attack on North Korea.
In this way, North Korea’s security concern has been regarded mostly as a disguise or pretext for their aggressive nuclear ambition. U.S. policy-makers, therefore, focused on applying military, economic, and diplomatic pressure on North Korea. Policy-makers and experts tended to assume that a small country like North Korea would not capitulate and denuclearize unless the United States strengthened its pressure tactics. In addition, Washington’s expectation of Beijing’s full cooperation on the North Korean nuclear issue contributed significantly to this kind of sanguine moralistic perspective. So there is a hidden linkage between the first characteristic and the second characteristic of the conventional U.S. approach. Of course, China, the most important patron of North Korea, did not help the United States. And North Korea, facing those pressures, became even more desperate and accelerated its nuclear development. This vicious circle repeated itself over the past three decades.
Supporters of the moralistic coercion approach tended to overestimate the power of U.S. policy tools. The two pillars of the U.S. pressure campaign against North Korea were military and economic. However, the utility of U.S. military pressure on North Korea was quite limited. The effectiveness of military pressure was high only when the threat to use military force was credible. But it was usually not very credible because North Korea knew the United States would not be able to strike North Korea for fear of a retaliatory attack on South Korea, which might escalate into a total war.
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The second pillar of U.S. pressure is the policy tool of economic sanctions. This can work only when there is a strong international coalition. However, the United States had only the illusion of China’s full cooperation in applying harsh enough sanctions against North Korea. It took a long time for U.S. policy-makers to recognize that China would not help much. China never wanted to take any serious measures that could destabilize the North Korean regime. Thus, China’s unwillingness to fully cooperate seriously weakened the effectiveness of U.S. pressure tactics.
By neglecting the security dilemma aspect of the North Korean predicament, U.S. policy-makers encountered the challenge of discerning between perception and misperception in dealing with North Korea. How will the North Korean leaders perceive U.S. intentions and respond to them? In the history of international relations, misperception has often led to disasters. Professor Robert Jervis highlighted the importance of this issue in his essay in the May/June 2018 issue of Foreign Affairs.
‘Whether the U.S. can actually persuade Pyongyang depends not just on which tools it chooses to use, but also, more fundamentally, on how it is viewed by North Korea. How do North Korean leaders interpret the signals Washington sends?
The promoters of the moralistic approach tended to view past U.S.-North Korea relations not as an “action-reaction” process but from a morally charged “bad guy, good guy” perspective. In their eyes, North Korea always reneged on agreements while the United States always kept its promises. However, the reality has been more complicated than that. For example, it was the United States that did not implement its promise to improve political relations with North Korea as laid out in the 1994 Geneva Agreed Framework. Instead, many U.S. government insiders were just expecting North Korea to collapse soon. The George W. Bush administration also unilaterally scrapped the U.S.-North Korea communiqué of 2000, which had promised to end the hostile relationship between the two countries. Frequent talks on the regime change option among policy-makers and opinion leaders in the United States aggravated North Korea’s paranoia about its own security.
Paying serious attention to the other side’s perception of U.S. intentions, rather than focusing solely on punitive counter-measures, has led to successful crisis resolution in the past. One example is the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. President John F. Kennedy, despite pressure to strike Cuban missile sites from U.S. military leaders, tried hard to discern what the Soviet leaders’ perception of the U.S. intention would be. The recommendation of the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Adlai Stevenson II, to make a deal with the Soviet Union was criticized by hardliners as cowardly. But President Kennedy took it, and his prudent decision contributed to a peaceful resolution of the crisis that might have escalated into World War III.
A similar attentiveness was never applied to North Korea. This discrepancy was certainly because of the much larger asymmetry of power between the United States and North Korea. North Korea was simply not the Soviet Union. In retrospect and ironically, this asymmetry of power worked against not the small country, North Korea, but the big country, the United States. After all, the small country of North Korea’s resolute stance to assure its own security against big powers through nuclear weapons development has always been much stronger than the U.S. will and commitment to denuclearize North Korea.
My intention here is never to defend North Korea’s position. From the beginning, North Korea’s original sin was trying to woo the United States with its nuclear weapons program, a deadly wrong policy tool, out of desperation. I am just emphasizing that, once confronted by this kind of undesirable situation, U.S. policy-makers needed to observe the situation from a somewhat disinterested, amoralistic, third-person angle in order to find clues to a solution. The moralistic coercion approach of punishing a ‘bad guy’ may sound just and politically correct but may not be based on a thoroughly cool-headed calculation of the U.S. national interest. That approach has actually deprived U.S. policy-makers of the incentive to search for a more fundamental and realistic solution and to break the vicious cycle in which U.S. pressure leads to the acceleration of North Korea’s nuclear weapons development. In other words, instead of trying to cure the disease, the moralistic coercion approach just tried to palliate the symptoms each time. This was how we arrived at the current dangerous situation.
Failure to be Comprehensive
The third characteristic of the conventional U.S. policy toward North Korea is the lack of a comprehensive approach. As a result of focusing solely on security issues, policy-makers tended to disregard the interconnectedness among North Korea’s nuclear, economic, and diplomatic policies. As Shevardnadze’s encounter with the North Koreans in 1990 has shown earlier, the diplomatic isolation of North Korea aggravated their sense of insecurity, which motivated them in the early stage to develop nuclear weapons. Economic difficulties led them to pursue nuclear armament since it would cost much less than trying to strengthen their conventional military forces, which was the essence of North Korea’s Byungjin policy (parallel development of economy and nuclear weapons).
So from a policy-making perspective, it is almost impossible to separate the nuclear issue from the diplomatic and economic issues and then expect successful denuclearization. However, most U.S. policy-makers narrowly focused on the nuclear issue only. Addressing issues like diplomatic opening or economic assistance to North Korea has been regarded not as a necessary condition but as a quid pro quo for making progress in denuclearization.
For example, among other reasons, I suspect, the root cause of the collapse of the 1994 Geneva Agreed Framework was the failure to improve political relations between the United States and North Korea. Even President Trump’s unconventional approach of meeting the North Korean leader person-to-person could not make any meaningful progress because he did not prepare a concrete big picture, which covered the economic and diplomatic dimensions. Even his promise to provide North Korea with a “very bright future” in return for denuclearization was nothing but mere talk. Thus, any agreement on denuclearization that may be produced in the future will not last long without diplomatic normalization between the United States and North Korea and some international assistance for developing the North Korean economy. This is why we need a comprehensive approach from the United States.
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The result of the conventional U.S. policy of expecting China’s full cooperation, relying mainly on pressure tactics without political engagement, and having no comprehensive plan (in other words, the absence of a strategy) has been the ever-worsening strategic position of the United States in the region surrounding the Korean Peninsula. The United States has been pushed gradually and unnoticeably to the “world of the worsts.” The United States not only failed in denuclearizing North Korea but also pushed Pyongyang further into the orbit of China, leading to ever-increasing Chinese influence over North Korea.
This occurred even though most North Koreans, including their top leader, Kim Jong-un, deeply resent China. ‘Juche’ (self-reliance) has long been the leading national ideology for North Korea, and Kim Jong-un may have been very worried deep in his mind about his country’s heavy economic dependence on China with over ninety percent of North Korea’s trade with China—until North Korea’s self-quarantine measures to prevent the spread of COVID-19. The United States could have utilized Kim Jong-un’s concern in one way or another, but instead squandered the opportunity.
World of the Bests
In contrast, China was appreciating the “world of the bests,” enjoying the benefit of the status quo with no complete denuclearization, no war, no collapse of the North Korean regime, and ever-increasing influence over both Koreas.
The fact that North Korea has been pushed into the arms of China also has an important implication for South Korea’s foreign policy. In addition to China’s strong economic influence over South Korea, North Korea’s heavy dependence on China has made South Korea and its policy-makers very conscious of China’s influence over North Korea in the process of South Korea’s foreign policy-making. This is simply because of South Koreans’ cherished desire for a permanent peace on the Korean Peninsula. In my view, the Korean people’s desire to build a permanent peace should not be dismissed simply as a matter of partisan politics in South Korea. Progressive political leaders and even conservatives such as former president Park Geun-hye tried hard to nurture close ties with Xi because of her wish for China’s help in settling the North Korea problem and building a permanent peace on the Korean Peninsula. In this sense, U.S. policy toward North Korea, which pushed it toward China, has significantly constrained South Korea’s foreign policy-making.
This means that as long as the conventional U.S. policy continues, U.S. influence on the Korean Peninsula will be likely to recede compared to the Chinese influence in this age of intensifying competition. The United States is already far behind China in terms of building an economic base in North Korea. In the case of a contingency in North Korea, which some hardline supporters of regime change might want, not U.S. but Chinese influence will dominate the Korean Peninsula. This is why the United States needs to be more realistic and adjust its strategy toward North Korea. What the United States needs is neither a wait-and-see nor a piecemeal tactical adjustment based on the ineffective conventional approach. It needs a bold strategic shift of its North Korea policy in accordance with the new reality.
Most of all, a bold new strategy toward North Korea means engaging North Korea politically in order to fundamentally change the nature of the bilateral relationship. In other words, the United States needs to consider a détente with North Korea as it did with China in the early 1970s and Vietnam in the mid-1990s. The purpose of this new policy would be communicating more closely with its top leader, getting North Korea out of its diplomatic isolation, accomplishing the goal of complete denuclearization, and inducing North Korea to become not just a normal state but a partner of the United States.
In order to achieve these goals, the Biden team needs to adopt a two-track approach at the current stage. On the one hand, it needs to begin by taking some bold initiatives in order to engage North Korea politically. Measures that could be considered include offering to establish liaison offices in Washington and Pyongyang; beginning confidence-building measures like military-to-military exchange programs; declaring the end of the Korean War; inviting North Korean bureaucrats, students, sports and performance teams to the United States; and establishing a U.S.-DPRK (Democratic People's Republic of Korea) or a U.S.-DPRK-ROK (Republic of Korea) Track-1.5 commission for planning to help North Korea’s economic reconstruction.
In particular, establishing liaison offices in Pyongyang and Washington should be the first measure considered for political engagement. We need to recognize that North Korea’s nuclear program has already advanced too far. It will take a long time and be all but technically impossible to denuclearize that country without mobilizing their voluntary cooperation. A New York Times article on May 6, 2018 pointed out that even if the International Atomic Energy Agency brought all of its inspectors into North Korea, it would be impossible to inspect all of North Korea’s nuclear facilities. There are simply too many facilities, and nobody knows where North Korea is hiding its weapons and fissile materials. In order to mobilize North Korea’s voluntary cooperation, there should be a fundamental change in political relations between the two countries, which would begin with establishing liaison offices.
The United States and North Korea were almost at the stage of completing the deal on establishing liaison offices through five meetings of negotiating teams from September 1994 to mid-1995. However, the North Korean side canceled the exchange of liaison offices at the final stage. It was likely due to the strong tension between the military and the foreign ministry over which side would take initiative on the U.S.-North Korea communication. However, the situation now is quite different from then. Chairman Kim Jong-un’s attitude at the summit meetings with President Trump showed his seriousness about improving relations with the United States. When asked by an American reporter during the Hanoi summit about establishing a liaison office, Kim said “I think that is something which is welcomable.”
According to the conventional approach, all these measures might be considered as a quid pro quo for North Korea’s cooperation in denuclearization. The new approach should regard all these measures as an early unilateral gesture to increase communications, build mutual trust, and improve political relations. All measures for political engagement should be de-linked from the negotiation process for denuclearization on the other track. For instance, the Biden team may pursue a gradual phased approach to denuclearization, which would be a realistic approach. However, they need to take additional measures for political engagement in parallel to negotiations for denuclearization. Though these two-track negotiations would be delinked, talks on political engagement will significantly provide incentives and facilitate talks on denuclearization.
Considering North Korea’s past behavior, some may worry that North Korea will simply “pocket” unilateral gestures without making any corresponding concessions. However, here we are talking about changing the nature of the bilateral relationship fundamentally after which both countries will play a very different game. If North Korea takes the U.S. offer of détente seriously, that means North Korea will be entering the international community where reciprocity is the rule of the game. North Korean behavior will then have to change qualitatively. For example, Vietnam, once a deadly enemy of the United States, has become a close partner of the United States through the strategic decision of U.S. political leaders for détente in the early 1990s. Thereafter, the United States was able to induce significant changes in Vietnamese behavior with its much superior resources and leverage. It could effectively mobilize Vietnam’s full cooperation on the POW/MIA issue, withdrawal from Cambodia, and even human rights issues.
The Catch
There is one caveat. Though measures for political engagement should be taken on one track, pressuring North Korea with economic sanctions would still be necessary on the other track of negotiating denuclearization. This is because North Korea’s intention regarding its nuclear program may have shifted from defensive to offensive. Rapid growth of its nuclear capability might have caused that kind of shift despite North Korea’s public announcement that its nuclear weapons are only for defensive purposes. For example, North Korea may not only be able to attack any city in the U.S. mainland through its growing ICBM capabilities but also to weaken the U.S. commitment to provide extended nuclear deterrence to its allies, South Korea and Japan. In this way, North Korea may try to weaken the U.S.-ROK alliance through its nuclear and missile capabilities and strive for a more favorable political-military environment for unifying the Korean Peninsula on their own terms.
North Korea may argue that economic sanctions are evidence of U.S. hostility. However, they need to recognize the hostility and the threat at the current stage are not one-sided but mutual. Their nuclear development is a grave threat to the United States. North Korea has already threatened a few times that they could strike U.S. territory with their nuclear ICBM. Thus, the principle of exchanging sanctions with denuclearization should be maintained.
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Even in that kind of undesirable scenario of North Korea having an offensive goal, the United States will lose nothing much by offering North Korea a détente. At least, through political engagement, the United States will be able to discern North Korea’s true intention, which will help identify the next steps to take in close coordination with South Korea. Most of all, the United States will be able to confirm whether North Korea truly wants the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the South in return for its denuclearization. North Korea has been publicly demanding it, but it is quite likely that North Korea may not want it out of concern that Chinese influence would fill the vacuum on the Korean Peninsula. In the past two inter-Korean summits in 2000 and 2018, the North Korean leaders indicated flexibility on this matter. Through political engagement and candid dialogues, the possibility of an optimal solution satisfying the demands of three major stakeholders, the United States, South Korea, and North Korea could be explored.
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After all, a thorough review of the conventional approach and a cool-headed calculation of the U.S. interest from a broader geostrategic perspective requires a bold new approach toward North Korea. In this way, the United States will be able to move a step closer to curing the root cause of the North Korea problem and strengthening its strategic position in the region surrounding the Korean Peninsula.
Dr. Yoon Young-kwan was recently the inaugural Senior Visiting Scholar with the Korea Project at Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center. He served as Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade of the Republic of Korea from 2003 to 2004. He is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Political Science and International Relations, Seoul National University. The author acknowledges the generous support of the Korea Foundation.
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