Dealing with space aliens (and other North Korea problems)

By Christian Brose

It seems the Obama team is doing a big rethink of North Korea policy, in light of the Hermit Kingdom’s recent missile launches, nuke test, journalist incarceration, and all-around clenched-fist-shaking:

In France on Saturday, Mr. Obama referred to the same string of broken deals, telling reporters, "I don’t think there should be an assumption that we will simply continue down a path in which North Korea is constantly destabilizing the region and we just react in the same ways." He added, "We are not intending to continue a policy of rewarding provocation."

While Mr. Obama was in the Middle East and Europe last week, several senior officials said the president’s national security team had all but set aside the central assumption that guided American policy toward North Korea over the past 16 years and two presidencies: that the North would be willing to ultimately abandon its small arsenal of nuclear weapons in return for some combination of oil, nuclear power plants, money, food and guarantees that the United States would not topple its government, the world’s last Stalinesque regime.

Now, after examining the still-inconclusive evidence about the results of North Korea’s second nuclear test, the administration has come to different conclusions: that Pyongyang’s top priority is to be recognized as a nuclear state, that it is unwilling to bargain away its weapons and that it sees tests as a way to help sell its nuclear technology.

This reminds me of the Bush administration’s talk circa 2001 and 2002. So will Obama break with the assumptions of the past 16 years and adopt what sounds like a more hard-line policy toward North Korea? Color me skeptical. At this point, I think the administration’s talk tells us more about what they want their policy not to be, rather than what it will be.

Just work through the math. The administration is going to get tough with North Korea. OK, but to what end? Squeezing Pyongyang harder is not a policy in and of itself. It’s a tactic to advance a broader goal. And if the Obama team now believes that the old assumptions of Clinton and Bush no longer hold, and that the North Koreans won’t negotiate away their nukes, then what’s the new goal of a new policy?

Presumably, the administration is not assuming that it can just turn the screws ever tighter on the North Koreans, eventually making them cry uncle and hand over their weapons. It would be great if they did, but by the administration’s own logic, there is no reason to believe that Pyongyang is now willing to surrender the one card it has, and there is every reason to believe that the regime will just continue passing all of the extra pain we impose onto its starved, broken, and beleaguered population.

So does that mean Obama is moving toward a policy of regime change in North Korea? After all, that would seem to be the logical conclusion to which the administration’s recent statements would lead them: The North Korean regime won’t change its behavior because it’s the regime itself that is the problem; therefore, if you want to solve the problem, you have to get rid of the regime. That has been the conservative argument all along. But Obama isn’t saying that is the goal either. It would be pretty hard to square a policy of regime change in North Korea with Obama’s pledge of unconditional engagement with anyone and a renaissance of U.S. diplomacy.

Another option is simple containment (or quarantine): assuming the North Koreans won’t change their behavior, try as best we can to keep a lid on the problems they cause. The assumption here is that we’ve been living with a nuclear North Korea for a few years already, and we can go on living with it; we just need to limit the worst repercussions, like proliferation. But there’s the risk: We won’t catch everything (like, say, a nuclear reactor in Syria), and it’s a matter of time before a purely containment policy gets attacked as ineffective. At that point, if the administration is talking to North Korea, it will be urged, both at home and in the region, to be more accommodating (sounds familiar, right?); if it is not talking to North Korea, it will be pilloried for dismissing diplomacy as … well, let’s just say Obama will have all his words read back to him.

But of course, Obama has not foresworn either bilateral or multilateral engagement with North Korea. Nor will he. To do so would undermine the entire narrative of his presidency. Indeed, by every indication the administration has given thus far, the purpose of getting tougher with North Korea now would be to enhance U.S. leverage at the negotiating table later. But then, aren’t we right back to the same old process with the same old goal that the administration now says it is dispensing with — trying to push North Korea to give up its weapons and change its behavior, with both the lure of carrots and the prod of sticks? And it would be naive to assume that this time it would all be different, that the North Koreans would not be up to all their same old tricks again: salami-slicing agreements, missing deadlines, blustering and blackmailing, walking away from talks and then demanding payment to return, etc.

If this is where the administration ends up, which it seems quite likely is where they will end up, it’s hard to imagine how this policy will look any different than the diplomatic dog and pony show of the past 16 years — and with much the same result.