Preview
One year into the unorthodox presidency of Donald Trump, the United States faces an array of complex and dangerous foreign policy challenges that require principled leadership, pragmatism, patience, and smart diplomacy.
Country or Region: North Korea
Wolfsthal, Jon
Preview
President Donald Trump has made a number of sometimes contradictory comments related to nuclear weapons during his political campaign and since his election.
Arms Control Today, editorial
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The nuclear danger posed by North Korea is not new. But since the arrival of Donald Trump in the White House, a bad situation has become far worse. Now, as Trump readies for a trip to East Asia, the crisis enters a critical phase.
Hanham, Melissa, and Seiyeon Ji
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North Korea in July test-launched two intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) capable of reaching the U.S. mainland. Such long-range capability, coupled with nuclear warhead advances, has been considered a U.S. redline that could draw a U.S. military response.
DiMaggio, Suzanne
Preview
The Trump administration’s recently completed North Korea policy review calls for “maximum pressure” on Pyongyang, but leaves open room for engagement. Although President Donald Trump warned in an interview in late April that “a major, major conflict” with the North was possible, he also said he would prefer a diplomatic outcome. Following “Track 2” talks in Oslo in May, a senior North Korean diplomat, Choe Son Hui, told reporters that his country is open to dialogue with the United States “under the right conditions.” The task at hand is to find out what the right conditions might be.
Davenport, Kelsey
Preview
North Korea’s test of a ballistic missile capable of longer ranges poses an immediate challenge to newly elected South Korean President Moon Jae-in, who campaigned on an engagement-oriented approach to dealing with Pyongyang. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is showing no sign of making that easy as he continues to defy international demands that he halt nuclear weapons activities and missile testing.
Cohen, Ariel
Preview
With the ink barely dry on the historic Trump-Kim summit agreement, Moscow is already maneuvering itself to take advantage of rapprochement on the Korean peninsula. The first order of business: reviving a decades – old energy megaproject that would connect Russian gas and the Trans-Siberian railroad to Seoul via North Korea. As concerning as it may seem for Washington, reinvigorated ties between Moscow and Seoul may prove a strong bargaining chip for Donald Trump in his forthcoming talks with Vladimir Putin — rumored to take place in Vienna this July.
Lukin, Alexander
Abstract
Russia has historically been conditioned to exist within the European cultural tradition. However, its recent pivot to Asia poses a serious question to its cultural identity. How serious is this policy change for Russia and the world? Is the turn to Asia a long-term course or a mere repercussion of the current confrontation with the West? In this volume Alexander Lukin, a prominent scholar in international relations and Asian studies, seeks answers to these and many other questions related to Russia’s foreign policy and its relations with Asia. This collection of Lukin’s articles addresses a number of issues: Russia’s diplomacy and the place of the Asian direction in it, Russian Far East and its potential, the role of Russia on the international scene. This broad-ranging and detailed study will be welcomed by both students and policy makers as the first academic work in English to have such a wide coverage of this topic.
Kukreja, Dhiraj
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Diplomacy has failed because North Korea remains determined to build its nuclear arsenal. Resuming talks would achieve nothing, when it is so close to attaining an effective arsenal. North Korea now says that it will denuclearise only after USA and South Korea negotiate a peace treaty with it to end the Korean War formally. The only remaining hope for denuclearising North Korea peacefully lies in convincing it that it must disarm and reform, for continuing on the chosen path could lead to unimaginable consequences for it. Political subversion and financial isolation, through the latest sanctions, have to be backed with secondary sanctions against Chinese financial institutions and other institutions, which have been, on the sly, continuing trade and financial deals with North Korea.
Full text available at http://www.indiandefencereview.com
Zhu, Qin
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The relation between the United States and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) is of substantial strategic prominence in the security landscape of Northeast Asia. The longstanding incompatibility between the two countries can be illuminated by drawing on three factors: the conflict of interest in the DPRK–ROK unification; the strategic interests of the nuclearization and the denuclearization-normalization dilemma; the Sino–U.S. dual power structure in Northeast Asia. In addressing these issues, this paper discusses the possibility of achieving diplomatic normalization between the U.S. and DPRK by examining in a comparative framework the feasibility of existing mechanisms. The paper concludes that unconventional mechanism is required to establish the initial momentum for a necessary political breakthrough, especially in light of the Trump phenomenon. Specifically, the author proposes a stepwise model to assist the diplomatic reconciliation and to further promote the restoration of peace, security and stability in Northeast Asia.
Chan, Che-po
Abstract
A widely-held perception is that the image of North Korea among most Chinese people has changed from that of a socialist comrade and ‘little brother’ to an idiosyncratic, trouble-making neighbor. This research questions the homogeneity of Chinese people’s viewpoints towards North Korea. Concepts of state and popular nationalism are used to examine differences and similarities between the Chinese state and its people in their perceptions and sentiments towards North Korea, mainly focusing on the period of succession from Kim Jong-il to Kim Jong-un. Examining online discussions representing Chinese popular nationalism demonstrated that Chinese netizens’ political viewpoints are diversified along the ideological spectrum of left and right and that only the ‘moderate left’ netizens hold an image of North Korea which is close to that of their political authorities.
Suh, Jae-Jung
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Kim Jong Un’s meeting with Moon Jae-In and the coming summit with Donald Trump do not constitute a volte-face by the North Korean leader. He has consistently sought meetings to find a solution to the nuclear problem, but equally consistently responded with nuclear or missile tests when his diplomatic initiatives are rejected. The recent virtuous cycle began when Moon seized the opportunity of the Winter Olympics in South Korea to create an opening for inter-Korean meetings and Kim reciprocated. Kim has also been consistent in his quest for engagement with the world economy as a strategy of economic development, and steadily taken steps away from his father’s Military First policy toward his Economy First policy. His consistency creates an opening, which Moon effectively used to engage the North to propose a Korean Peninsula free of nuclear weapons and end the state of war. The United States will have a historic choice to make in June when Trump meets Kim in Singapore.
Full text available at https://apjjf.org/2018/10/Suh.html
Ichimasa, Sukeyuki
Abstract
While the spotlight has focused on multilateral economic sanctions in the post-Cold War era as a non- military means of exercising force by the United Nations, there has been a long history of unilateral economic sanctions by individual states exercising their powers on international politics in order to satisfy their national interests and security needs. Regarding the nuclear issues of North Korea and Iran, various discussions have been raised for many years over the roles and effects of international economic sanctions. Unilateral economic sanctions have been undertaken since the 1970s against concerns about the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Among them are cases in which economic sanctions succeeded, such as South Korea and Taiwan, and eventually nuclear nonproliferation as a foreign policy objective was realized. However, in many cases, there is a historical reality that nuclear nonproliferation cannot be achieved only by such economic sanctions. From the examples of sanctions against North Korea and Iran, there have emerged not only issues of political coordination among the countries concerned, but also a various political considerations. These include engagement by “gatekeepers,” who have influence on the targeted countries, the shifting “breakout” status of nuclear development of targeted country, the establishment of policy objectives to be achieved by economic sanctions, and the cost to be accepted for imposing sanctions, including a possible transition to military sanctions. Under these circumstances, the value and importance of the multilayered non- proliferation framework consisting of the historic nuclear non-proliferation regime and export control on weapons of mass destruction must be re-evaluated.
Full text available here.
Watanabe, Takeshi
Abstract
Negative security assurance (NSA), a key for sustaining the NPT, is supposed to provide a strong incentive for non-nuclear states to keep their status. The NPT also gives economic motivation, assistance for peaceful nuclear activities of the non-nuclear states. The reality that North Korea is going toward the opposite direction should indicate that these traditional ways for promoting nonproliferation are increasingly becoming ineffective.
Neither NSA nor economic assistance could end the nuclear weapon program because these supposed incentives are not consistent with the nation’s main reason for acquiring nuclear weapons. This article explains that North Korea develops nuclear weapons for fulfilling the norm to be an independent nation, rather than confronting external threat which could be eased by NSA. The normative achievement helps North Korea’s regime competition with South Korea, more critical threat than U.S. nuclear power. This competition gives priority to nuclear power over economic improvement which could not allow North Korea to claim supremacy over South Korea in the near future.
Full text available at http://www.nids.mod.go.jp/english/publication/kiyo/index.html
Son, Hyo Jong
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Why does North Korea continue to insist on maintaining a nuclear program despite its potential to be detrimental to the regime in the long term? This article argues that North Korea’s nuclear development strategy is derived from policymakers’ cognitive systems and norms that have accumulated over the decades. This study especially attempts to examine the mechanism behind how the normative system shaped by North Korea’s historical environment generates and re-generates nuclear strategy through nuclear discourse by applying the lens of Strategic Culture. It begins with a critical assessment of previous research on the motives of a nation or regime’s nuclear development policy and proposes the suitability of Strategic Culture for North Korea’s case. This article then characterizes North Korea’s Strategic Culture as a “Wartime Preferring Strategic Culture” which emphasizes the norm of the “prioritization of military values,” “closed groupism,” and “deontic mass mobilization.” These norms are based on the policymakers’ cognitive systems related to the fear of regime cleavage. Consequently, North Korea’s Strategic Culture, which is based on fear perception, influenced policy makers and drove them to strengthen nuclear development.
