By 38 North / Joseph DeThomas
The costs of regime-threatening sanctions on North Korea might outweigh the benefits.
A recent op-ed by Sung-Yoon Lee and Joshua Stanton highlights what should happen in dealing with North Korea. Unfortunately, for this long-time practitioner in the field of nonproliferation sanctions, it also highlights what cannot happen — or at least what cannot happen at an acceptable level of risk with the limited knowledge and the complex agendas that policymakers face.
At the highest level of analysis, Lee and Stanton get some key points right. The effort of multiple U.S. administrations to negotiate away the threat of North Korean nuclear weapons has been a truly bipartisan failure. Four U.S. presidents — two of each party — have tried and yet it seems the story of failure repeats itself in very familiar ways. However, the authors certainly over-simplify the story of those efforts. It is worthy of note that the four administrations came at the problem from very different perspectives and initially tried tactics that ranged from highly confrontational to being predisposed to engagement. Yet all ended up more or less in the same policy dead-end. This might lead one to suspect that the problem with North Korean policy might not rest primarily with naiveté in Washington but rather with a single-minded Pyongyang that has a very limited diplomatic repertoire.
Lee and Stanton are correct that it is extremely unlikely that any set of negotiated incentives will ever induce the DPRK to give up its nuclear weapons. They are probably also correct that — if North Korea were to be coerced into giving up its weapons — it would require regime-threatening measures to be put into play. But, that does not mean that such measures can be created at this time. Moreover, it does not mean they should be implemented unless a careful calculation of the costs and benefits can be made.
Read the full story at The Diplomat