Kerry says engage North Korea directly

Writing in an oped piece that appeared in the Los Angeles Times, former Democratic presidential nominee and current US Senator from Massachusetts John Kerry says that the Obama administration's stance has been measured, firm, but ultimately inadequate. He calls for direct talks:

Returning immediately to the six-party talks (which included North Korea, South Korea, the United States, Russia, China and Japan) is not viable. South Korea won't participate unless North Korea atones for its recent bad behavior. And the North, approaching a leadership succession in 2012, is disinclined to cooperate lest it look weak.

Similarly, there are limits to the pressure that China is willing and able to apply. China exerts the most leverage as North Korea's ally and largest trading partner, but it's not willing to risk the country's collapse. Further, Pyongyang has a habit of stubbornly resisting good advice, even from its patrons in Beijing.

The best alternative is for the United States to engage North Korea directly.

We all have grown weary of North Korea's truculence — its habit of ratcheting up tensions, followed by calls to negotiate back from the brink, followed by concessions, and a repetition of the process. But while North Korea may be the "land of lousy options," as one expert calls it, inaction only invites a dangerous situation to get worse.

While he accepts the label of North Korea as "the land of lousy options," I say, pragmatically, nothing can be done about North Korea, not without China's consent. And frankly, I think Senator Kerry misreads and misunderstands the degree and extent of China's influence.

China may already be taking last year's attacks and using them as a pretext for changing Pyongyang's behavior at a holistic level. China does not want to lose their buffer, of course, and they also want access to the East Sea (aka Sea of Japan), and they have belatedly realized how bad it is for Beijing to ignore Pyongyang's bad behavior.

Note that all of this has little to do with what Seoul, Washington, or Tokyo have done. When Seoul takes a hardline stance on Pyongyang, as current President Lee Myungbak has done, North Korea sinks South Korean ships and shells South Korean islands, but even when South Korea was on the complete opposite course, in the heady days of Sunshine Policy openness, there were major military clashes out in the Yellow Sea.

And thus Kerry misjudges the situation, saying a dangerous situation will get worse if we do nothing, when in fact it is our predictable "gotta do something" response that precipitates the next round of brinkmanship by North Korea. Pyongyang thinks it has a winning formula, which is why (as I colorfully illustrated here, where I noted that Kim Jong-il acts like a six-year-old Kushibo) we need to break that cycle.

President Obama has been firm and his response measured because he is not reacting as his predecessors did. Certainly he has the benefit of foresight that Clinton and even Bush43 did not, and he so far seems to be sticking to what Joshua Stanton of One Free Korea calls "Plan B," a hard-nosed, non-military threat that hurts the Pyongyang regime financially to effect changes in their behavior.

Now where Joshua and I may disagree is that I think it was necessary to at least try Sunshine Policy, given that a hardline policy had been ineffective for the nearly half century prior to that, and I think even though Sunshine Policy failed (in part for being too much carrot and not enough stick) engagement should be tried in ways that will not benefit the DPRK military or line the coffers of the regime (see previous link). But we both agree that Obama should stick to this plan. To engage now would just reward Kim Jong-il's government for patiently waiting for anger to subside just enough that Washington and Seoul will come to the table, making such bad acts more likely in the future when Pyongyang isn't getting its way again.

It also comes at a time when Beijing may actually be effecting real changes, for a change. Although I am deeply concerned that China's ultimate goal may be to fully integrate North Korea into its Northeastern Provinces (making North Korea the Inner Cháoxiān Autonomous Region), China has started to leverage its role as North Korea's only friend of substance, forcing Pyongyang to make economic reforms, helped along by China in exchange for small territorial concessions.

But that largely gets ignored. While I've been beating the drum that China has begun this reform-and-absorb policy in earnest, the rest of the world was distracted by the Kim Jong-un ascension side show.

My conclusion is that people like Senator Kerry should visit Monster Island and One Free Korea a bit more often, because then you might see that Pyongyang is still trying to play you, but Obama seems to have picked up on that.

If any negotiations should be done with North Korea at this time, it should be to decide which plot of land in Mongolia the Royal Kimenbaums would like for their exile.

Requisite picture of threatening-looking images from 
North Korea that must accompany any article on North Korea. 
In this photo: North Korean MILDs (military I'd like to disarm).

The sun goes down on the Sunshine Policy

South Korea's Unification Ministry has officially pulled the plug on the so-called Sunshine Policy of active engagement begun in the late 1990s under then-President Kim Daejung and carried on, with nearly all carrot and no stick, by his successor Roh Moohyun.

From Voice of America:

The South Korean Unification Ministry's annual report calls the Sunshine Policy of peaceful engagement with North Korea a failure.

The ministry's white paper, issued Thursday, contends a decade of cooperation, cross-border exchanges and billions of dollars in aid did not change Pyongyang's behavior or improve the lives of North Korean citizens.

Lee Jong-joo, a ministry spokeswoman, says South Korea's goal is to see North Korea prosper, but Seoul must respond appropriately to any provocations from Pyongyang.

While I can understand the pendulum swinging completely the other way under the Lee Myungbak administration, I'm loath to call Sunshine a "failure." In fact, when Kim Daejung was president, it was probably wise to at least try it, because what we were doing before wasn't getting us anywhere.

Here's what I wrote about Sunshine upon KDJ's death:

When he became president, he decided that it was time to shift gears vis-à-vis North Korea. Some four decades of mutual hostility had not made North Korea less threatening, more democratic, or any friendlier, and he thought it was time to try killing with kindness. Reach out to the North, try to integrate them, get political and social change to come from economic integration. And so was born the "Sunshine Policy."

Critics of the Sunshine Policy complain that after ten years, Kim Jong-il's regime is still standing. They complain that Roh Moohyun kowtowed so much to Pyongyang that Seoul's back was broken. And while I've been a harsh critic of Roh Moohyun, it is not Kim Daejung's fault that RMH was all carrot and no stick; I don't think, had he been allowed a second term, that KDJ would have been the same toward North Korea as his successor was.

Although I think right now we should pursue what Joshua at One Free Korea calls "Plan B," I find it a bit ironic that anti-Sunshiners (one professor at Yonsei called them "Moonshiners") say that because Sunshine didn't work to change North Korea over the past ten years, we should return to a hardline policy, which failed to work for forty years. Well, they don't say that last part.

Another reason I am not inclined to say Sunshine didn't work is that the greatest benefit of that intensive engagement may not yet have occurred:

I do believe, though, that engagement is important for showing a human face of the enemy. No matter how much the North tries to demonize the South or the Americans, the food aid and now the daily presence of South Koreans in North Korea — even a hermetically sealed part — engagement erodes that demonization. It may seem laughable today, but prior to democratization in South Korea, kids in the ROK learned that the North Koreans had horns and would kill them just as soon as look at them. The North had learned as bad or worse, but that type of propaganda no longer is capable of packing the same punch. It’s a joke now, even in the North.

I don’t know if engagement will have a desired effect. I think it’s possible that if there were a sufficient shake-up in the ruling apparatus (e.g., the sudden death of the Dear Leader) that certain factions might now be more confident than before that they can work with the South and the US. And when/if the South ever does take administrative control over a collapsed North, the reduced level of demonization will make it easier.

I fully expect the DPRK to go into a tizzy about this, and possibly threaten to close down factories, stop family reunions, or do some other things that sorta underscore perfectly that Sunshine needs to fade because it has failed to stop Pyongyang from grabbing Seoul by the gingkos whenever it wants and then throwing a temper tantrum.

Plan B

Over at One Free Korea, Joshua seems quite pleased with the Obama administration's announcement of targeted sanctions against North Korea. Indeed, they seem to be following his must-read "Plan B" almost to the letter (no pun intended):

The order, pursuant to the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, authorizes the blocking of assets of “any person” providing what Treasury calls “material support” for North Korea’s WMD proliferation, money laundering, counterfeiting, trade in luxury goods, bulk cash smuggling, and pretty much everything North Korea does that violates UNSCR 1718 or 1874, or the U.S. Criminal Code.

In addition to the new order, Treasury also imposed new sanctions against several North Korean entities under the existing Executive Order 13382. Below the fold, I’ve pasted the text of the Executive Order, President Obama’s letter forwarding the EO to the Speaker of the House, two Treasury press releases, and some remarks by OFK favorite Stuart Levey, all of which I’ve archived here to aid your research and mine.

My initial reaction is that the new EO gets it just right. It’s narrowly targeted at North Korea’s illicit activities, but it’s also broad enough to cover the main ones — arms and drug trafficking, money laundering, currency and pharmaceutical counterfeiting, and the squandering of its resources on luxury goods while North Korean children starve in the streets. This is a tough-yet-refined version of the Plan B I’ve been advocating since its earliest draft in 2006.

And since I have become convinced that this is the right thing to do at this time, I'm pleased as well. I hope these are implemented effective and given a chance to work. (And note that the "Plan B" link toward the bottom of the last paragraph means that Obama is trying the very things Joshua Stanton wrote in April 2009 that Obama would never try.)

It fits in nicely with my own theory on what to do about North Korea (when I'm not bemoaning that nothing can be done about North Korea), which can be summed up thus:

For me the model is kill with kindness, don’t be a doormat, and be ready to smack ‘em down if they get out of line. How’s that for a North Korean policy?

I call that the hybrid Sunshine-plus-Kick-'em-Where-the-Sun-Don't-Shine Approach.