How to End the Missile Threat From North Korea

Although the fighting stopped in 1953, the Korean War has never formally come to an end. The Military Armistice Commission, set up as a temporary expedient to oversee the cease-fire, lingers on. So does the United Nations Command, which provided a genuinely multilateral umbrella for U.S. intervention in the conflict but is now only a fig leaf for what is a unilateral U.S. security commitment to South Korea. Even the wartime U.S. economic sanctions imposed against North Korea are still in force, though they will be partially relaxed in exchange for a temporary moratorium on North Korean missile testing just negotiated with Pyongyang.

It is increasingly clear that the United States would have to phase out all three of these Cold War anachronisms as the price for a comprehensive, long-term missile deal with North Korea. Pyongyang has offered such a deal, but only if Washington agrees to link it with a formal end to the war and a basic change in the U.S. security role in Korea. Economic incentives alone, recommended by presidential envoy William Perry in his report on North Korea policy last month, will not get Pyongyang to give up its missile program.

The mission of U.S. forces in Korea now is limited to the defense of the South against possible North Korean aggression. Pyongyang is urging the United States to play a more balanced role as an honest broker seeking to prevent any threat to the peace, whether from the South against the North or the North against the South. North Korean diplomats are privately pushing a plan for a trilateral mutual security commission (North Korea, South Korea and the U.S.) that would replace the Military Armistice Commission and lead to the termination of the U.N. Command. Under this plan, U.S. forces would remain, without the U.N. fig leaf, for an indefinite transition period, and a peace agreement between the United States and North Korea would declare that the Korean War is over.

The United States has never responded to a North Korean proposal made on June 16, 1998, explicitly offering a missile deal linked to a peace agreement. The report of a House Republican advisory group Wednesday warns of a dire North Korean missile threat but ignores this offer, focusing solely on missile defenses and calling for a tougher U.S. stance against Pyongyang.

The North Korean proposal states that “the discontinuation of our missile development is a matter which can be discussed after a peace agreement is signed between the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and the United States, and the U.S. military threat completely removed.”

The key phrases in this little-noticed offer were “peace agreement,” not “peace treaty,” and the U.S. military “threat,” not the U.S. military “presence”--both critical distinctions. Pyongyang wants to defer a formal treaty to circumvent a long-standing stalemate over who should sign it. The signatories to the 1953 armistice were North Korea, China and a U.S. general acting on behalf of the U.N. Command. The United States wants a treaty limited to North Korea and South Korea, but Pyongyang points out that the South never signed the armistice, since then-President Syngman Rhee wanted to continue fighting.

Significantly, while ready to accept China as a signatory to an eventual treaty, North Korea does not want its powerful neighbor to be involved in the proposed trilateral peacekeeping commission. Beijing does not belong in the commission, Pyongyang argues, because it has not had forces in Korea since 1958, in contrast to the United States, which still has 37,000 troops in the South and would have operational control over South Korean forces in time of war.

Until recently, North Korea has called for the withdrawal of U.S. forces from the South, but now Pyongyang says that Washington need only announce a “political decision” that it accepts the principle of an eventual withdrawal as part of a negotiated tension reduction process.

The concept of a “change of status” of U.S. forces was put forward by Pyongyang behind closed doors in the ongoing Geneva four-power talks (China, North Korea, South Korea and the U.S.) on how to replace the armistice.

The United States has refused to consider this proposal, insisting that North Korea must initiate tension-reduction measures at the 38th parallel first. But the missile moratorium agreement with Pyongyang has given the Clinton administration an unprecedented diplomatic opportunity. Washington should offer to discuss North Korean security concerns as part of negotiations toward ending the production, deployment and testing of long-range missiles in accordance with Pyongyang’s 1998 offer.

These negotiations should focus solely on the threat to the United States if North Korea succeeds in developing missiles capable of reaching American territory. Pyongyang is not likely to make any deals with Washington relating to short-range missiles capable of reaching Japan. North Korea assumes that Japan will eventually have nuclear weapons and distrusts its hated former colonial ruler even more than it does the U.S. Washington should encourage Tokyo to pursue its own negotiations with Pyongyang, not only on security issues but on a broader normalization of relations in order to preserve a coordinated U.S.-Japan posture in dealing with North Korea.