North Korea, from a Foreign Policy Perspective

Here's another something I wrote for Shannon's ADP site. It was originally posted on February 20.

The US has been reluctant to really deal with North Korea since the fall of the Soviet Union on the assumption that it would, at each crucial stage, soon collapse. It has not collapsed. As Richard Bernstein notes here, if Clinton had followed up on the 1994 Agreed Framework, we could have an embassy in Pyongyang today. Instead, he calculated that the Kim regime would soon collapse anyway, and so as long as there was no immediate nuclear threat, there was no reason to deal with it.

Bush almost certainly added N. Korea to the axis in 2002 because he needed a third for rhetorical value, and hating N. Korea is a politically neutral position in the US. The North's response was to resume building nuclear weapons and missiles to carry them. It took a full nuclear test for Bush to start taking directly to Kim. (The US prefers to deal with N. Korea from within the Six Party Talks--in order to, I think, force China and S. Korea to express their disapproval of the North.) As usual, we ignore N. Korea until they do something nuclear.

Richard Armitage (deputy Secretary of State from 2001-2005) and Joseph Nye just authored a report at CSIS titled "The U.S.-Japan Alliance: Getting Asia Right Through 2020". Their assessment of N. Korea is the same old story: Reunification will happen, with "high probability" by 2020, and it will happen because of "instability in North Korea". They write off the possibility of development with this: "Our bottom-line assessment is that Pyongyang's behavior since 1990 strongly suggests that it is trapped in its own political and economic system...Our conclusion is that the Kim regime would prefer to muddle through, despite the dim future for 21 million North Koreans, than to take the risk of opening up à la Deng Xiaoping."

Yet again the US concludes that there is no reason to deal with N. Korea because it will just collapse anyway, and Kim is too greedy and short-sighted to attempt to develop his country. We think that he thinks opening up is a "risk" despite the fact that the Communist party in China has had no problems holding on to power after reforming the economy.

I think we should consider changing our approach in North Korea. What if we could allow Kim to stay in power while developing the economy. This is the approach that China and the South have been taking, with rather limited success. We could get it off the ground. One problem with this is that we really don't know what Kim will do--does he still fancy taking control of the South, or is he just hoping to insulate his power at home? Would he take all profits from international trade for himself and his crew, or would he allow his people to develop their own economy? Still, we often accuse Kim of being stuck in the cold war, still seeing his situation as a fight against the capitalist, colonialist West. But if we refuse to deal with Kim simply because we have bad history with him and his father, we are the ones stuck in the cold war. I think our best move in almost any international situation is to use our economy as a bargaining tool. Lets open up our markets and our consumers. We can get more of the world in sync with our foreign policy if we get it in sync with our economy. Economic power is our biggest weapon, and we consistently fail to use it. This could be a strategy in Iran as well. China, and countries like Venezuela, have already figured this out, and are signing FTAs and using economic leverage wherever they can.