Ever since North Korea's nuclear test on May 24, I've been sporadically humming "How Do You Solve a Problem Like Korea?" to myself while trying to devise an answer to the question in time for my column deadline. But I've got nothing. As Andrew Grotto, a colleague of mine at the Center for American Progress, points out, there are some additional sanctions that could be applied to North Korea, but not by the United States. China could impose a total energy embargo that could potentially cause the North Korean state to collapse. But China doesn't want North Korea to collapse. And to tell the truth, neither does South Korea, and nor do we.
Realistically, North Korea's belligerence looks like a problem that can't be solved. Instead, we're going to have to try to manage it -- minimizing the harm North Korea can do while acknowledging that a lasting solution is unlikely to emerge until there's a change of leadership in Pyongyang.
More aggressive strategies, like urging sharply punitive economic measures from China, seem likely to do more harm than good. The reason is that the complete failure of the North Korean state would pose too many difficult questions in terms of how to cope with the ensuing flows of refugees. Then there's the reality that South Korea's economy would likely sink if it had to take responsibility for the North. The military options against North Korea also don't look remotely appealing. For one thing, you can't bomb the engineering knowledge North Korea has obtained. More fundamentally, the problem with military action against North Korea remains the fact that Seoul is within artillery range of North Korean forces. A war, in other words, could lead to one of the world's largest cities being effectively destroyed.
That's not to say there's nothing we can do about the North Korea problem. Diplomacy must be continued. We need to persuade the Chinese to understand our perspective. We need to try to maintain a consensus among other powers in the region. We need to continue to provide the North Koreans with both carrots and sticks for their behavior. But we also need to recognize that North Korea's leadership seems to be truly 'round the bend.
There's a fair chance that, had the United States not made the grievous policy errors of George W. Bush's first term, the Korea situation would be much better today. The Bush administration may have improved its policy under the efforts of Ambassador Christopher Hill, but North Korea has kept on making new troubles despite some initial headway.
One thing we can do with our North Korean approach is to consider it in the context of our experience with Iran. We have two countries: Iran has a nuclear research program that could be turned to military purposes, and North Korea has one that's built and tested actual nuclear weapons. Iran is led by people who mouth off but have generally followed a cautious foreign policy; North Korea is led by people who stage repeated deliberate provocations and routinely break deals. For no particularly good reason, our political debate spends much more time focusing on the less severe problem.
Similarly, back in 2002, both Iran and North Korea had active nuclear programs -- and the United States instead invaded Iraq, which doesn't, citing proliferation concerns.
The common thread in both moments is that rather than address the most serious issues, we focused on the easier ones. Iraq was the weakest of the three countries. Invading Iraq was a much more realistic option than invading Iran or North Korea. So Iraq was portrayed as an overwhelming threat, and an invasion was launched. It sounds dumb, it was dumb, and it's ended tragically. In today's version of the dynamic, bombing Iran is more feasible than bombing North Korea, so hawks prefer to obsess over Iran, hyping up both the threat level and the feasibility of the military option as a solution.
Ignoring North Korea for Iran is a serious mistake. An attack on Iran is not nearly as appealing as hawks make it out to be. Beyond that, this approach is a serious mistake because even if we can't "solve" the problem, our response to the North Koreans' malfeasance sets an important example for the rest of the world. One would have hoped that the disincentives available for deployment against Pyongyang would have persuaded Kim Jong-Il to behave. It now seems likely that our efforts in that regard will ultimately fail. But if they do fail, it should be clear to other potential proliferators that our policy isn't working because Kim is nuts, not because our sticks don't hurt. Similarly, maintaining an openness to negotiations is important even if they don't work, simply to make it obvious to others that it's Kim who is being unreasonable, not us.
As for the North Korean endgame, it's not clear what we can do. Ultimately, the United States -- along with South Korea, China, and Japan -- needs to start thinking more seriously about the possibility of a North Korean collapse. Pyongyang's political and economic systems are unsustainable, and the country's aggressive behavior is alienating all potential friends and making things worse. Meanwhile, one reason it's so difficult to respond effectively to North Korean provocations is that its enemies are almost as afraid of its collapse as its leaders are. As of now, nobody's prepared for what would happen when the waiting ends, making the situation even harder to manage, let alone solve. The fact that there are no good answers to either the North's nukes or its potential collapse tends to encourage people to just focus attention on other things. But ignoring the problem doesn't make it go away, and delaying efforts to think about it makes things worse.
