By Van Jackson
A highly-ingrained taboo risks blinding rational alliance decision-making.
Arms control is one of the more benign tools of statecraft available to governments grappling with hard security problems. It entails diplomatic agreements or external mandates to constrain the development, stockpiling, proliferation, and use of weapons — and in recent decades the emphasis has been on nuclear weapons. Whatever its effectiveness, the arms control option is not generally considered a particularly dangerous or disastrous one.
Not so in the community of Korea watchers, nor within the politics of the alliance between the United States and South Korea. On the contrary, there’s a highly ingrained taboo against arms control when it comes to North Korea, and it’s so strong that it risks blinding rational alliance decision-making.
In a recent article, Adam Mount and I argued that the August mini-crisis on the Korean Peninsula revealed that a more sustainable policy toward North Korea might involve South Korea taking the lead on alliance policy toward the North. Central to our argument was the belief that absent intervention of some kind, North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs would mature and converge in a way that tempts greater North Korean adventurism and a future of more provocative crises than we’ve seen in recent years. Current U.S. and South Korean policy toward North Korea does nothing to disrupt this trajectory, which unduly burdens future U.S. and South Korean presidents with a much worse strategic situation than past presidents inherited. The Korean Peninsula’s status quo, in other words, is creeping toward crisis.
Read the full story at The Diplomat