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By David A. Welch
What might make Kim Jong-un want to give up nuclear weapons?
North Korea’s recent alleged “H-bomb” test in flagrant violation of United Nations resolutions set off the predictable flurry of shock, outrage, condemnation, and expressions of determination around the globe. We are now well into the equally predictable hand-wringing and token wrist-slapping phase. Everyone but North Koreans agrees that a nuclear North Korea is intolerable; everyone also – no doubt including North Koreans – believes that nothing can be done about it.
Or can it?
Certainly the international community’s standard bag of tricks is not up to the task. North Korea is already almost entirely sanctioned, and therefore immune to further economic pain. Kim Jong-un appears to believe (probably correctly) that having even just a small, low-quality nuclear arsenal will deter foreign military action. Condemnation and largely symbolic sanctions merely feed the “they are out to get us” narrative that justifies both Kim’s iron grip on power and the very nuclear program that the world would like to reverse. If anything is going to work, it would have to be something very much outside the box.
It is probably a safe assumption that if Kim Jong-un values anything more than having a nuclear arsenal, it is staying in power. If he could be brought to believe that his nuclear weapons threatened rather than served that higher goal, he might be willing to give them up. The trick would be to do this without the threat of external force, which merely plays to the regime’s strengths.
The alternative to external force is internal force.
Read the full story at The Diplomat