By Joseph A. Bosco
A call for a policy of North Korean regime change sparks debate.
Richard Haass, the respected president of the Council on Foreign Relations, raised eyebrows among foreign policy elites recently when he proposed that regime change in North Korea should be the explicit aim of American foreign policy. The notion also stirred much-needed debate on broader national security considerations.
Haass’s Wall Street Journal article cogently made the strategic and humanitarian case for a collaborative campaign by Washington, Beijing, Seoul and Tokyo to arrange the end of the Kim Jong-un regime and bring peaceful unification to the Korean Peninsula.
Pyongyang’s infamous cyber aggression against Sony is only the latest straw. Its hard military power, both nuclear and conventional – coupled with its reckless rhetoric and behavior – directly threaten South Korea, Japan, and the United States. The regime’s massive human rights violations constitute a litany of crimes against humanity, causing the Security Council to deem North Korea’s oppression of its own population a threat to international peace and security.
Nothing less than regime change, Haass argues, will suffice to remove those internal outrages and external dangers. But his call for what he acknowledges is an ambitious and risky undertaking, coming as it does from an eminent leader in the foreign policy establishment, has stoked alarm among fellow scholars. One set of objections relates to the practical modalities of the Haass proposal: It offers no post-reunification plan going forward, and it potentially accords China an inappropriate role in U.S.-South Korea military cooperation.
Read the full story at The Diplomat