N. Korea Needs Something to Lose

President Bush’s references to North Korea as part of an “axis of evil” represents another feint in the administration’s yet unformed policy toward that opaque regime.

Bush started his term skeptical of North Korea and the “sunshine policy” of engagement by ally South Korea. After a thorough policy review concluded last June, Bush then moved in the direction of welcoming talks with Pyongyang. But in his State of the Union address, Bush seems to have reversed course again, intimating little interest in better relations with the North.

If the administration believes that tough words and a policy of “benign neglect” that walks away from engagement will pacify Pyongyang, it is sorely mistaken. A confluence of events ensures that we are headed for the brink again with North Korea.

The 1994 “agreed framework”--in which the U.S. offered heavy fuel oil and nuclear energy in exchange for North Korea shutting down its potential nuclear weapons and missile programs--reaches critical implementation stages in the coming months that will test the intentions of Pyongyang. It will almost certainly spark debates about whether the U.S. should revise or abandon the accord.

Presidential elections in South Korea this year have made Kim Dae Jung’s sunshine policy an object of acerbic debate, with the front-runner opposition candidate already pushing a harder line. Japan-North Korea normalization talks have been frozen since 2000 with little chance of a thaw. Meanwhile, Pyongyang’s rhetoric against Tokyo grows more aggressive. Finally and most ominous, North Korea’s self-imposed moratorium on missile tests will end this year.

With this backdrop, Pyongyang is unlikely to be brought into line by a policy of “benign neglect.”

Bush should reaffirm the policy of engagement with North Korea in his trip to Asia later this month. Many highly placed individuals in this administration abhor the North and genuinely do not trust Pyongyang’s intentions. But what Bush officials might see as a dovish or naive policy can also be the policy of hawks.

First, engagement is the best practical way to build a coalition for punishment tomorrow. No U.S. plan to coerce North Korea into behaving will work without a regional consensus that efforts to resolve the problem in a nonconfrontational manner have been exhausted. There was no such consensus in the June 1994 nuclear crisis. Not only was there resistance to imposing economic sanctions against North Korea from China (which could veto such a resolution in the United Nations) but also from U.S. allies, such as Japan and South Korea.

Second, engagement makes threats to punish more credible. For example, continuing to impose a decades-old embargo is unlikely to elicit a positive change in behavior. However, lifting sanctions, letting the North gain what little they can from new opportunities and then using the possibility of reinstating sanctions is more likely to be successful. Today’s carrots are tomorrow’s most effective sticks.

Third, engagement with North Korea and missile defense are not incompatible. The common refrain in Asia regarding Bush’s North Korea policy is that the administration does not want to engage North Korea--its “poster child” for missile defense. This has been a popular albeit not well-thought-out stance.

Engagement is most effective when it is undergirded by robust defense capabilities and when it clearly communicates to the target that engagement is a choice of the strong and not the expediency of the weak. In this sense, missile defense enhances rather than contradicts the policy.

The North Korean regime is despicable. The regime’s starving of the people, selling of children like cattle and other untold acts run contrary to every value the United States upholds. But given current concerns, inviting crisis in East Asia is not in American interests.

Moreover, there are “hawk rationales” compatible with the thinking of many in the administration. For these folks, engagement cannot operate without an exit strategy, but engagement is the exit strategy.

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