Does the Obama administration have a North Korea policy?

By Peter Feaver

Does anyone know what the Obama-Clinton strategy on North Korea is?  I don’t, and based on the sketchy reports and ad hoc comments in the media, it may be that they don’t know themselves.  Or simply haven’t decided.

As Chris Brose demonstrated, Clinton has built her Asia trip on the shaky foundation of a false premise: the notion that Bush botched Asia policy and that Obama has a bold new vision.  In fact, most experts (including Democratic experts) recognize that Asia policy was a success and the Obama approach for the region as a whole seems to be a carbon copy of the Bush approach. 

Perhaps there will be tweaks in the details.  Perhaps Obama will attend an early ASEAN Forum and not skip it like Bush did in 2007. Of course, if Congress is threatening to block Obama’s most urgent foreign policy priority during the next ASEAN Forum meeting, as Bush faced in September 2007, then maybe Obama will find it hard to attend, too. (The real mistake, in my opinion, was Secretary Rice not attending in his stead, since she did not do much heavy lifting on the Hill on Iraq policy anyway.)

In the spirit of bipartisanship, then, let’s give the Obama team some premature credit for a better approach in Southeast Asia. What about Northeast Asia? Can anyone connect all the following dots into a meaningful strategy?

1. The Obama administration has ditched Ambassador Hill, who was Bush’s de facto North Korean nuclear file desk officer and redeployed him, oddly, to Iraq.

2. Secretary Clinton started her trip with some feel-good language on North Korea. Then she went even further (much further) by appearing to criticize the Bush Administration for adopting a worst-case interpretation of North Korea’s clandestine and illegal efforts to develop weapons-grade uranium. 

3. But Clinton also promised to meet with the families of victims of North Korea’s bizarre policy of abducting Japanese citizens. This emotional issue has always been a sore point with the North Koreans but a high priority for the Japanese, and Chris Hill angered our allies when he relaxed our demands on the abductees issue in a desperate attempt to keep the nuclear negotiations afloat.

4. And now Clinton has had to veer back to semi-tough language, telling Pyongyang that if North Korea goes ahead with the missile launch during her Asian trip it "would be very unhelpful."

If the strategy is to confuse North Korea and the world community on Obama’s intentions, this approach seems destined to succeed. If there is a deeper, more constructive set of objectives in mind, it is hard to discern what they might be.

The Obama team appears to want to follow the broad outlines of the Bush approach — promise to distribute a big bag of carrots if North Korea behaves and promise to wield a big bag of sticks if North Korea does not behave. But there is no evidence that they have a strategy for securing the sticks. This was always the hardest part of the Bush approach and was, in effect, the principal reason Bush opted for the multilateral framework of the 6-party talks. Only the neighbors, especially China and South Korea, have much leverage over North Korea that can take the form of non-military sticks. 

I see little evidence that the Obama team has figured out any way to build a bigger stick to make the North Korean strategy work. However, I see a lot of evidence that North Korea will press the issue and force the Obama team to show their cards. Perhaps we will learn soon enough if they have a strategy or not.