How About Real Engagement with North Korea? Posted by jwolfsthal

Almost unnoticed in the American press, the latest round of denuclearization talks between the United States, North Korea and four other regional players (China, South Korea, Japan and Russia) were held last week in Beijing.  No real progress was made, with North Korea rehashing old arguments about compensation and sanction.  The breakthrough of September, when North Korea agreed to end its current nuclear activities and give up nuclear weapons remains only a long term goal and no one is sure if the parties will ever get from here to there.  This setback, in turn, has put the tactic of engagement with North Korea on trial, with some experts suggesting that any such efforts are doomed.  Yet it is not clear that what is being pursued is true engagement or that the US is being as forthcoming as Washington’s allies would like it to be.  While the prospects for conflict seem low, especially given the current administration’s domestic woes and its growing desire to demonstrate some control over foreign events, North Korea continues to churn out bomb making materials, producing enough plutonium for a bomb a year.  There are also recent signs that North Korea is racing to complete another reactor that can produce enough material for 10 weapons annually.

The idea that we can prevent North Korea from becoming a nuclear weapon state, or roll them back if they have already acquired nuclear arms is becoming less realistic every day.  The option of confrontation, backed by the use of military force has never been an attractive or particularly realistic option given the realities on the ground in Korea.  The more important question is whether a policy of engagement can succeed given the ground the international community has lost in the past five years?  No one knows for sure.

If the current engagement process fails, the administration will claim that diplomacy was impossible, but that at least they tried.  Yet, it is not clear to anyone watching that the United States has done all it can to convince North Korea that a new relationship is possible if Pyongyang abandons its nuclear ambitions.  The internal battles within the administration between those favoring and opposing true engagement with North Korea rage on, and those skirmishes have placed real limits on what the negotiators can offer North Korea as incentives to make real progress.  The inability of lead negotiator Ambassador Chris Hill to obtain unfettered permission from the White House to visit Pyongyang on October is just one sign of these constraints.

So if the current engagement process fails, the case will be made that engagement itself failed.  But in reality it will be a strategy of limited engagement that has failed and it remains to be seen what a truly focused, open-ended and honest set of proposals to North Korea – including negotiating a peace agreement, exchanging ambassadors, signing a non-aggression pact and providing economic and energy assistance – might produce.  In the end, even these might not be enough to talk North Korea off the nuclear ledge, but unless tried, we’ll never know.  For now, U.S. policy seems to be to do just enough to prevent Washington from bearing the burden of failure.

But no one should think that what has been tried to date meets the President’s test of “doing all we can” to prevent the most dangerous weapons from falling into the most dangerous hands.  There is much more than can and should be tried, if nothing else than to demonstrate to our allies in the region that the United States is willing to take real political risks in the name of peace and nonproliferation.

Jon Wolfsthal

Nonproliferation Fellow - CSIS

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