Last week, a task force assembled by the Council on Foreign Affairs released a report on the current North Korea situation facing the U.S. and its regional allies. The report was conducted following the regime’s unprecedented number of ballistic and nuclear grade missile testing within a single year and its leader’s increasingly belligerent posturing. The report asserts that the previous two U.S. Administrations’ overarching approach towards the DPRK has failed to slow the regimes’ path towards weaponized nuclear material. It also argues that due to the danger the volatile regime poses towards its neighbors and eventually the U.S. mainland, halting any further progress of the regime’s nuclear program must become a “front-burner” issue. Also, while the task force presented no original ideas in terms of paths to success, its value lays in the hierarchy in which it places known ideas, as well as iterating the need for urgent action.
There are multiple dangers to U.S. interests from DPRK miniaturization of nuclear materials, including, but not be limited to, the following:
- An existential threat to the U.S. when the regime’s nuclear weapons are able to reach the U.S. mainland
- The regime’s ability to use nuclear arms as a means of increasing influence on regional and international politics
- The option for the desperate and reckless regime to sell the weapons to the U.S.’s many adversaries for profit, including Iran or international terrorist organizations
The task force also accurately judged that, regardless of action taken, The People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) involvement will define any policy’s ultimate success or failure. While official sanctions implemented by UN partners have done little to change the regime’s position on advancing with its nuclear weapons program and committing human rights abuses against its own populace, it has made China Pyongyang’s primary benefactor.
While the PRC has agreed to the UN resolution on sanctions towards the DPRK regime on paper, it has continued to provide “food & fuel” and economic channels for capital to flow in and out of the country. This state of affairs has put the PRC in a unique position; if it so chooses, it has the power to deal a devastating economic blow to the regime. The PRC has the most leverage in terms of cutting off essential resources, given its geographic position on North Korea’s sea-lanes and land border. This position enables the PRC to restrict and permit trade in and out of North Korea.
Beijing’s foreign policy priorities, however, are oriented toward its own critical priorities: internal stability and sustained economic growth. Beijing has opted to save face with the international community regarding complaints on how it treats its own citizens and its aggressive expansion in the South China Sea. It expects, quite rightly, that its economic power will save it from any repercussions besides international political virtue signaling, while helping the adjacent regime in Pyongyang remain relatively stable.
While the PRC would prefer a less troublesome regime on the Korean peninsula, it does not have the same geostrategic or defense concerns as the U.S. This friction is the essential source of friction between U.S. and PRC cooperation on this issue. A higher priority on Beijing’s list is ensuring the regime remains intact so that any negative effects do not spill over into China. This position contrasts heavily with the US ideal of replacing the totalitarian Communist state with a pro-Western, democratic government. The task force also suggested that a united Korean peninsula (under a U.S. friendly government) would be unfavorable to Beijing.
The task force correctly judges that the PRC’s cooperation will be required for success if Pyongyang’s nuclear program is to be dismantled without military intervention. This in itself should be a key point of indirect pressure in the hypothetical negotiation; a U.S.-Japan-RoK military intervention in a neighboring country falls squarely into China’s sphere of influence and places the situation and its outcome well outside its control, which runs contrary to its geopolitical priorities. The US should use this possibility to remind Beijing of the consequences of supporting an increasingly hostile and provocative DPRK.
Foreign policy commentators have concluded that Beijing responds best to straightforward pressure from actors negotiating from positions of strength. However, Beijing also recognizes it holds a strong position given its global economic power and its status as the region’s dominant military force. This may limit the effectiveness of a purely pressure-based negotiation approach to PRC compliance on North Korea. Therefore, a mix of pressure and positive incentives has the best potential for encouraging PRC cooperation on U.S. policy towards North Korea.
The pressure in negotiations should be applied with an understanding of and respect for the PRC’s foreign policy priorities and regional objectives. For example, Beijing places a high priority on stability in the region. This emphasis should be exploited when forming a negotiation strategy to move Chinese leaders to act accordance with U.S. objectives. For example, the U.S. could posit to PRC leadership that, short of Beijing’s cooperation incomplete sanctions enforcement and stifling cash and resource flows in and out of North Korea, the U.S. will have no choice but to take one or multiple courses of action. Such options could include deployment of the Theater High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system deployment in South Korea, as well as the possibility of joint-U.S. Republic of Korea, Japan military intervention. Both of these prospects, in minds of the PRC leadership, threaten China’s regional dominance and the perception of China-led regional stability. This, in turn, may cause Beijing to reconsider its calculus on compliance on the DPRK. While there is irony in getting China to act to aid the U.S. in disrupting the DPRK regime for stability’s sake even though China views its preservation as conducive to short term stability, the aforementioned approach may have success as it is grounded in an understanding of Beijing’s regional priorities.
Beijing strongly rejects any U.S.-controlled THAAD deployment in Northeast Asia, a deployment that would both expand U.S. radar visibility in the region and greatly reduce China’s defense and deterrence power from its long-range conventional and nuclear missiles arsenal.
Foreign military action against the DPRK regime, especially by the U.S., would certainly be considered by Beijing to be a destabilizing act. It has observed the catastrophic results of U.S.-led military intervention in Iraq and Libya, further reinforcing the difference in calculus between the perceived strategic foreign policy priorities between it and Washington, which is one of stability versus the establishment of pro-U.S. democratic republics. This intervention would also set a precedent for formal coordination between the US, Japan, and the RoK during an actual conflict, an exercise threatening to Beijing’s regional military primacy.
Use of positive incentives would also capitalize on the PRC’s desire for regional influence and security, and might include taking a new approach on other issues of importance to Beijing. This approach might involve appearing to make concessions on particular issues with which the U.S. has been steadfast in the past, and adopting more subtle strategies. This could include reducing the lead role the U.S. has played in countering the PRC’s claims in the South China Sea region, while taking a containment-like approach to check aggressive Chinese expansion in the region and to account for the interests of other important partners and nations like Taiwan, Vietnam, and Malaysia.
The U.S. could and should pursue means of checking Chinese expansion, not through international courts and rhetoric, to which Beijing has not responded. It should instead leverage covert means of influence and support to other actors in the region. A willingness to reduce its public position as the lead role in patrolling the SCS region for the potential to gain a more effective approach towards this issue and Chinese aid on the DPRK issue may be a helpful option to consider. This incentive might be particularly timely in light of Manila’s open shift towards Beijing on the SCS issue after economic enticement. A positive incentive of this nature might be the currently missing and potentially effective negotiation tool for a successful agreement with the PRC.
From the U.S. perspective, movement on this issue is also urgent because further inaction risks giving South Korea and Japan the impression that it is not willing to take meaningful actions to protect them. The long term repercussions of such a loss of confidence would be severe for US interests in the region for decades to come, as they are its two most important economic partners and military allies in the region. At the same time, there must be stipulations that allow the U.S. and/or its partners monitor those previously hidden channels which have been afforded to the North Korean regime to make sure that any agreed to freeze will be faithfully implemented and enforced. This will include not only stringent blockade of all sea vessels but also along The PRC’s land border with North Korea.
In negotiations, Beijing may reject US pressure on the SCS question in the same way it rejected The Hague ruling as arbitrary and non-binding. There is a good chance, however, that while Beijing may not view the U.S. as a legitimate party to the SCS dispute, it recognizes the strength of its military reach and the influence it continues to have on regional partners, which may be enough for it to reconsider the issue as a possible piece of the negotiations.
Even with a successful DPRK agreement with the PRC, however, there is no guarantee that Kim Jung Un will change his country’s policies and reckless positions. But, they can vastly improve the odds of such an outcome, which is more than any U.S. administration has done over the past two decades.
