With North Korea planning the launch of a long-range rocket later this month in celebration of domestic events including the 100th anniversary of the birth of Kim Il Sung and the 4th Chosun Workers’ Party Delegates’ Conference, and with the U.S. treating the launch as a violation of both UN resolutions and the February 29th ‘Leap Day Agreement’ made between the two countries, many experts fear that the Korean Peninsula is heading down a similar path to the one it travelled in 2009, a path which ended with North Korea’s second nuclear test.
[imText1]Thus, while the U.S., South Korean and Japanese governments consider countermeasures to the promised launch and as the U.S. moves to cut off exchanges that emerged from three rounds of bilateral talks with North Korea held both before and after the death of Kim Jong Il, a small group of experts are promoting alternate courses of action that would even see the U.S. engage with Pyongyang at this difficult time.
One member of this pro-engagement group is Professor John Delury of Yonsei University in Seoul. Working with colleague Professor Moon Chung In, Delury published a piece in Foreign Policy last Friday in which he urged Washington to dispatch a high-level envoy to Pyongyang immediately.
In the piece, ‘The Land of Lesser Evils’, Delury and Moon argue, “The safe response is to keep leaning on China and other countries to condemn Pyongyang’s planned launch, and then tighten sanctions and push for a U.N. Security Council resolution after it happens. But the safe, obvious move is also the wrong one. Washington needs to pay more attention to the domestic political context of North Korean foreign policy-making after the death of Kim Jong Il, and to advance down, not retreat from, the tortuous path of engaging Pyongyang.”
Explaining the Moon-Delury position in conversation with Daily NK on the day the Foreign Policy piece is published; Delury again backs the envoy idea, saying, “You don’t have to tell them that much about why you are sending them the envoy. Just send in this high-powered person. I like Colin Powell for the job; it’d be like the Perry Process. I want to see a Powell Process.”
He does acknowledge that expectations need to be managed, however. “We must not set it up as sending an envoy to get the launch cancelled,” he agrees. “But if you send someone in when the North is nervous and excited about the visit and wants it to be a good one, then they will be under some pressure to deliver. At the end of the day, if you can say, ‘I have instructions that allow us to do nothing about this launch but here is what we expect in return’ then that is a good position to be in.”
Naturally, such a position is a hard sell in the current climate, particularly with an Obama administration that got its fingers burnt by the rapid change of mood following the conclusion of the ‘Leap Day Agreement’ on February 29th. Nevertheless, Delury still believes it is the best available option.
“Behind our proposal lays an assessment of why the reversal from the Leap Day Deal to the satellite announcement happened,” he explains. “We focus on the context of what is likely to be the domestic debate in North Korea right now; I mean, Kim Jong Il has just died, it is only the second time that the state has lost its paramount leader in six decades, more than 60 years, so this is a pretty extraordinary moment in terms of their domestic politics.”
As such, Delury says he believes the planned satellite launch represents “one of the less provocative, bellicose, aggressive things that North Korea could have done under the circumstances.”
“The North Koreans want to show off their prowess, they want to show off how modern they are, and they need something big that they can get foreign journalists to cover and can show to their people to say, ‘Wow, look at us, this is incredible’,” he explains, but adds that as such “they could just do a long-range ballistic missile launch or something else military; massive new exercises on air, sea and land, for example.”
Based on this analysis, he concludes, “I want to see the Obama administration get hungry and get in there to deal with the North to build relationships; especially now when things are in a bit of flux on their side. This is when you want to be in there, figuring out the players, working out what can and can’t be done and what they want.”
