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Back in October, the National Committee on North Korea hosted a debate on North Korea policy for the next administration featuring Josh Stanton—an attorney and author of the One Free Korea blog—and Yonsei University professor John Delury. It would be hard to find two people more qualified to present contending views of the North Korea problem, and the transcript now posted provides a lively point-counterpoint on the policy dilemmas the US now faces.
Stanton argues that engagement hasn’t worked, and that it is time to increase diplomatic and financial pressure on the country. Given that our direct leverage for doing so is approximately nil, the answer is to be found in what Ian Bremmer at the Eurasia Group has called “the weaponization of finance”: the imposition of secondary sanctions, ultimately on the Chinese banks and firms that are keeping the country afloat. The instrument for doing this is the passage of the North Korea Sanctions Enforcement Act, of which Stanton is both advocate and contributing author. Marc Noland and I provide a skeptical blow-by-blow review of this bill, but the larger strategic point is simply put: China is not going to let North Korea go down—at least not yet—and the US is not going to pick a fight with China over a North Korea that we have learned to live with.
On information strategies, I am much more sympathetic. There is no reason why we shouldn’t do everything in our power to assure North Koreans have access to information: on their own country, on how that country is seen and most importantly about the rest of the world. Such strategies include everything from broadcasts, to USBs, to circumventing the North Korean firewall. Such strategies are unlikely to generate a revolution, but they could moderate what the regime can feasibly do. It is already farther along the path of marketization and de facto reform than Stanton believes, albeit of a distinctly state-socialist sort; more information makes it more costly to shut those processes down.
But there is an important tension in Stanton's approach. Stanton is interested in increasing the flow of information in and out of the country, but primarily through means that might be called hostile: information strategies that bypass the regime. But don't we also want to pursue information strategies that engage the regime, including by getting officials, professionals, traders, managers and others out of the country as well as outsiders in? If so, how does this square with the sanctions strategy?
Delury argues that engagement was never really tried—at least since the Clinton administration—because Washington and Seoul have been out of sync. Kim Dae Jung and Roh Moo Hyun had to make engagement work against the backdrop of a Bush policy that was—at least initially—highly unsympathetic. During his second administration, Bush and Rice had to work against the backdrop not only of their own hawks but of a skeptical Lee Myung Bak administration. Now, neither Washington nor Seoul really knows what to do, and “strategic patience” has drifted into “malign neglect.”
Delury believes in talk: track II’s, bilaterals, open agenda, China, “anyone, anywhere any time.” Unfortunately, however, it is not true that talking is always good. Talking about what? The idea that an American president would sign—or even negotiate—a peace regime with a nuclear North Korea is a fantasy. Delury thinks we can at least get back to the Leap Year Deal but I have seen absolutely no evidence of North Korean interest in such a proposition.
There is not much of an alternative to some variant of what we are doing, which ultimately traces to the Perry approach of the second Clinton administration. First, the US has to endlessly iterate its commitment to the September 2005 Joint Statement and a willingness to address all of the issues in that document in the context of the Six Party Talks. Such talks cannot only be about denuclearization, but need to address North Korean interests as well. And as noted above, we should be leading an aggressive policy of civil society engagement that provides North Koreans access to the real world.
The US also needs to embrace whatever it is the South believes it can accomplish bilaterally. We should not be second-guessing Seoul.
But in the meantime, we have no choice but to protect ourselves against the risks North Korea poses: through sanctions aimed at proliferation or illicit activities and through active and robust defenses, including with respect to Pyongyang’s missile program. If that means defensive capabilities that are uncomfortable to China, so be it. The North Korea problem is ultimately a China problem. Is Beijing willing to address the global public bad of North Korea—and on all fronts from nuclear weapons to gross human rights abuses—or not? If there is an easy test of China’s intentions as a global player, North Korea should be it.
