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Can North Korea Trust Us?

Written by

timlangeman

in

on a few questions there is real consistency across his years as a public eminence.

  1. One is his belief, which may give us new steel tariffs, that America is a big loser from the international trade system.
  2. Another, which may give us a Trumpian tête-à-tête with Kim Jong-un, is his belief that he alone can solve the problem of nuclear proliferation.

In 1984, near the peak of Reagan-era nuclear fears, he told The Washington Post that he should lead nuclear deal-making with the Soviets.

Six years later, he warned Playboy that “the greatest of all stupidities is people’s believing [nuclear war] will never happen.”

In 1999, flirting with a presidential bid, he promised to “negotiate like crazy” to prevent North Korea from going nuclear.

.. But we also have no clear example to offer Pyongyang of a denuclearization that worked out for the authoritarian regime that accepted it.

.. Where denuclearization has happened successfully, it has generally followed a

  • transition from dictatorship to democracy (as in Brazil and Argentina), been
  • part of such a transition (Ukraine) or been
  • a prelude to regime change (as in South Africa).
.. Ukraine, which gave up its nuclear weapons in return for guarantees from Russia and the United States, only to find that guarantee a dead letter in an age of Putinist aggression
.. Then there is the case of Iraq.
.. Any authoritarian regime observing that history might reasonably conclude that nuclear weapons should be sought and never be given up …
.. Especially since our next president decided to tacitly confirm that lesson, by pursing regime change in Libya after the Libyan dictator had agreed to close down his own W.M.D. program. The spectacle of Qaddafi getting murdered by a Libyan mob, however roughly just, was also an object lesson in the downsides of believing that the Americans will care about a W.M.D. deal if the opportunity arises to remove you afterward.

.. Despite our official commitment to nonproliferation, then, the revealed preference of our foreign policy elite is often for other priorities — NATO expansion, humanitarian intervention, regime change.

.. the deal that Kim dearly wants to extract from us — a limited denuclearization in return for our withdrawal from the Korean Peninsula — would probably have disastrous effects for regional security and the larger Pax Americana.

  1. .. persuade Pyongyang that we might attack if they keep raising the nuclear ante and
  2. that we really don’t care about toppling them otherwise.

 

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