L. Gordon Flake » Three Yardsticks for a Strategic Evaluation: Responding to a Nuclear North Korea

by L. Gordon Flake

Since year’s end, much of the attention on North Korea’s
nuclear program has focused on the missed deadlines for disabling the
Yongbyon facility and more importantly for Pyongyang’s provision of a
“complete and correct” declaration of all its nuclear
programs. However, whether a declaration is forthcoming or not, it
is important to note that it has now been nearly 15 months since
North Korea’s Oct. 9, 2006 nuclear test and it is against this
timeline that the progress in negotiations might best be evaluated.

U.S. strategy toward North Korea in the second term of the
Bush administration is, at its most basic level, a rejection of the
approach of the first term, during which contact with North Korea was
tightly proscribed and the strategy was largely an effort to bring
international pressure to bear on Pyongyang to convince it to make a
“strategic” decision to abandon its nuclear ambitions before the
United States would engage in any meaningful way. By contrast, the
second term’s approach has been to engage North Korea directly in the
context of the Six-Party Talks and, through tough negotiations, lead
North Korea to make a series of “tactical” decisions that, while in
themselves not satisfactory, would lead North Korea closer to the
“strategic” decision sought by the U.S. Over the past year, this
approach has arguably convinced North Korea to return to the
Six-Party Talks, shut down its reactor at Yongbyon, allow in
international inspectors, and even if slightly delayed, hopefully
still “disable” the Yongbyon facility and submit a declaration in the
not-too-distant future.

These are all very real accomplishments and merit
recognition. However, they should be evaluated in light of the
strategic objective of persuading North Korea to abandon its nuclear
ambitions. Accordingly, I suggest three yardsticks against which
negotiations with North Korea should be measured: 1) the context of
the Oct. 9, 2006 North Korean nuclear test; 2) the relative strength
of regional coordination and cooperation; and 3) the proximity of
results to the goal of eliminating North Korea’s nuclear program.

Had the recent progress in U.S.-North Korean relations taken
place prior to October 2006, there would be little but good to say
about achieving the freeze of the Yongbyon facility, its possible
disablement, and hoped for eventual dismantlement. The same can be
said for the anticipated declaration of North Korea’s nuclear
program, even if it turns out to be incomplete. However, these and
other steps forward in the negotiations of the past year can only be
fairly evaluated in the context of North Korea’s 2006 nuclear
test. Has our policy been an appropriate or an adequate response to
a nuclear test?

Despite North Korea being the only country in history to
withdraw from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and subsequently
test a nuclear weapon, in the year since that test, the UN Security
Council sanctions that passed with unprecedented Chinese support
remain largely unimplemented. The United States supported the return
of the illicit funds tied to Banco Delta Asia, and along with South
Korea and China, has resumed the shipment of heavy fuel oil to the
North. South Korea has resumed the shipment of fertilizer and food
and, despite long-time vows to never tolerate a nuclear North Korea,
held a presidential summit on Oct. 4, 2007. None of the summit’s
laundry list of pledges was specifically linked to or conditioned
upon North Korea’s abandonment of its nuclear weapons, nor did they
include any consequences or price for the nuclear test.

To be fair, thus far the North Koreans have shut down the
Yongbyon reactor and apparently begun the process of
“disablement.” However, for a state that has tested a nuclear
weapon, apparently reprocessed an as yet unknown amount of plutonium
into weapons-grade fissile materials, and demonstrated an
unwillingness to formally refer to, let alone begin negotiations on
these key elements, the international community’s response hardly
appears commensurate. It is hardly strange, therefore, that the Bush
administration, and particularly the negotiating team, seldom
mentions the North Korean nuclear test.

A second and perhaps more important measure of the past year’s
diplomacy is the degree of coordination and cooperation among
Washington, Tokyo, Beijing, Seoul, and Moscow. The fundamental
justification for the unwieldy six-party format of talks has been
that the U.S. alone does not have sufficiently flexible carrots or
sticks to convince North Korea to abandon its nuclear
ambitions. Only by leveraging the influence of China, Japan, South
Korea, and Russia is there a realistic possibility to jointly
convince North Korea to make a strategic choice.