Tag Archive for: Six Party Talks

The Korea question: six-party security assurances could be the answer

US President Donald Trump’s hope that the Korea question—particularly the part about North Korea’s nuclear capabilities—could be resolved by the sheer force of personality has been confirmed as a fantasy. The best that can be said of his meetings with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in Singapore in June 2018, Hanoi in February 2019 and Panmunjom in June 2019 is that they broke a lot of ice—the last one, in particular, had an element of casual frivolity—making it harder for either leader to make frightening threats and be taken seriously.

But if the road back to browbeating and brinkmanship is a little longer than before, Pyongyang has signalled that Washington has left it with no choice but to make the journey: it has said that it is ending its informal, unilateral moratorium on testing nuclear devices and long-range ballistic missiles unless the US offers major concessions (especially on sanctions) to unblock the dialogue between them.

Where do we look for constructive things to do with this conundrum? Are there aspects of the situation that remain underexplored, stones that remain unturned? Improbable as it may seem, one candidate could be the offering of security assurances. In all previous endeavours to find a solution, Pyongyang spearheaded its negotiating position with the contention that it is the most threatened and insecure state on the planet and that—as a first step—the US (in particular) had to demonstrate convincingly that it had abandoned its ‘hostile policies’.

The essence of the Korean story—how it originated and evolved since World War II—has been utterly distorted. Ironically enough, among the six key parties—the two Koreas, the US, China, Russia and Japan—it’s the US, the perennial ‘fall guy’ on this issue, that has by far the most positive story to tell. Finding ways to get the real story out—about the origins of the 1950–1953 war, about the lost opportunities to shape North Korean assessments and aspirations, and about how this desperately poor and isolated nation ended up circa 2017 with a stockpile of nuclear warheads and an array of sophisticated ballistic missiles—should probably not, even at this late stage, be the first option. But it can’t hurt to make clear that it’s an option.

The offering of security assurances would provide an opportunity to refresh and develop an important piece of the puzzle. Such assurances would offer every state directly associated with security on the Korean peninsula to make a substantive contribution to the sort of positive atmosphere needed to find a way into the core issue: opening up the path that leads to a peninsula that is both reliably stable and not a focus of major-power competition. In such circumstances, you would expect Korean armed forces to be unmistakably defensive in size, character and deployment. As I have argued in earlier posts, the weak and unequal sharing of exposure and accountability among the six major players in addressing and resolving the many facets of the Korean issue has been a fatal flaw in past efforts to find a peaceful solution.

In a September 2005 joint statement from the since-abandoned Six-Party Talks, the US ‘affirmed that it has no nuclear weapons on the Korean peninsula and has no intention to attack or invade the DPRK with nuclear or conventional weapons’. Consideration could be given to getting the six states together again to see what each is prepared to offer in the way of security assurances to the other five, to provide an opportunity to negotiate reciprocal development of unilateral statements, and to explore the scope to combine these undertakings. Clearly enough, all six players would want to make their assurances conditional on the other five remaining fully compliant with the core principles of the UN Charter. Equally, however, any assurances need not be limited to hostile intentions or particular forms of military capability like nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction, but could also address the size and disposition of military forces and possibly other tools of statecraft.

It’s also worth bearing in mind that the six states bring with them a formidable set of historical animosities that have very clearly complicated management of the Korean issue and continue to do so. The gradual drift of the US–China relationship toward contestation and rivalry has accelerated sharply since 2018. Japanese militarism in the 1930s and 1940s still casts a dark shadow over Tokyo’s relations with a number of countries but especially the two Koreas and China. Since 1961, China has had a formal alliance relationship with North Korea (comparable to that between the US and South Korea), but the net effect of living alongside imperial China for millennia is that neither Korea relishes the prospect of being left alone with their giant neighbour.

China and Russia were allies when they jointly endorsed North Korea’s invasion of the south in 1950 but fell out dramatically for some three decades (1959–60 to 1989), an enmity that contributed to irresponsible negligence on the part of both with respect to North Korea. Today, with China as the dominant partner, Beijing and Moscow are being meticulously careful to protect the positive relationship between them but, as in the past, rather secretive about their dealings with Pyongyang, leaving others to wonder whether they share similar aspirations for a durable settlement of the Korea question.

So, who among these six players might have the courage to pit their diplomatic skills against the challenge of brokering an agreement to conduct an official Northeast Asian dialogue on security assurances?

North Korea: once more down the diplomatic path?

North Korea — Pyongyang, Arirang (Mass Games)

With the world awash with strategic challenges—including Chinese building efforts in the South China Sea, Islamic State’s on-the-ground victories in Iraq and Syria, and the difficulties still confronting the Iranian nuclear deal—North Korea probably hasn’t received its due level of attention over recent months. But a lot’s been happening, so it’s worth bringing readers up to date.

First, there’s been a new level of consensus on the increasing nature of the threat. Both American and Chinese assessments point to a substantial expansion of the North Korean nuclear arsenal in coming years. In late February the US Institute for Science and International Security published a report providing three scenarios for the future of the North Korean nuclear program. Estimates of the number of nuclear warheads in 2020 range from about 20 to 100. The latest Chinese assessment, published in late April, also points towards a larger arsenal than most analysts have previously thought. The Chinese believe North Korea might already have 20 nuclear warheads, and that number might double by 2016 and double again by 2020.

Second, there’s been a new wave of interest in North Korean efforts to miniaturise its nuclear warheads—an important development, if true, since miniaturisation is key to deployment of warheads atop ballistic missiles. Miniaturisation has been a topic of contention before, of course, and the evidence still seems too slim to draw firm conclusions. Still, Pyongyang has done what it can to fan that interest by claiming progress in just that area.

Third, there’s been the North’s advertisement of a new submarine-launched ballistic missile capability—a claim greeted with a degree of scepticism by most analysts. Building a reliable SLBM capacity typically takes years, even for rich great powers; and if the recent photographic evidence of a North Korean missile rising from the salty blue can be taken at face value at all, it seems most likely merely to demonstrate ejection from an underwater platform. But positioned alongside reports that the chief of the North American Aerospace Defense Command believes North Korea already has an ‘operational’ intercontinental ballistic missile capability, the claims have excited a degree of apprehension about the pace of delivery vehicle development that the North is achieving.

Alongside those developments, there have been a set of political signals about a possible revival of the Six Party Talks. Five of the parties—all but North Korea—got together recently in the margins of a separate event in Tokyo. And media reports suggest that an invitation has been extended to Pyongyang to return to the negotiating table. The timing—at least in one sense—is propitious: with the talks with Iran scheduled to conclude by the end of June, perhaps diplomatic momentum can be transferred to the North Korean problem at that point. But in another sense, a decision to venture once more down the diplomatic path involves a delicate judgment about North Korean politics: that Kim Jong-un’s regime is sufficiently established to be able to negotiate with confidence.

Moreover, there’s another factor: is Pyongyang willing to find a negotiated solution to its nuclear program? That’s not a new question either. We’ve been down this path before, with mixed results. The ‘freeze’ that resulted from the 1994 negotiations had some utility, but in the long run it gave Pyongyang time to build a uranium enrichment program. The promising Joint Statement agreed at the fourth round of the Six Party Talks in 2005 didn’t bear much fruit: it didn’t stop North Korea conducting a nuclear test in 2006. And the ‘Leap Day agreement’ in 2012, declaring a moratorium on further nuclear and missile tests testing certainly didn’t constrain North Korean testing of satellite launcher technology—essentially missile technology in civilian guise—nor a nuclear test in February 2013.

I suppose the bigger question is not whether a diplomatic solution has proved fruitless before, but whether it’s a viable pathway now. Are we better off with another round of talks or not? Deciding that probably turns on what sort of outcome we might realistically expect. We shouldn’t expect to roll back the North Korean nuclear program to the same point as Iran’s. Iran is a long way behind North Korea, which has mastered plutonium reprocessing and—probably—high enrichment of uranium. Pyongyang’s conducted three nuclear tests; Tehran none. So what is it we’re expecting the North to agree to? Comprehensive, verifiable and irreversible dismantlement seems a distant goal. Previous attempts to freeze the program or constrain testing haven’t been successful. Joint statements have proven ineffective. With Pyongyang advertising its recent ‘progress’ on its nuclear arsenal, perhaps it’s bidding up the price of any negotiated settlement. But there’s also another explanation: it has no serious intention of trading away its weapons.