December 15, 2017
Give Bad Faith a Chance in North Korea
Fruitless, drawn-out high-level negotiations could buy time for less diplomatic efforts to work.
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said this week that the U.S. was “ready to talk” to North Korea. The White House and State Department walked back that statement, but Mr. Tillerson may be on to something. With time running out for a peaceful solution, the U.S. should pursue a high-level, bad-faith diplomatic initiative with Pyongyang.
The purpose would not be to reach an agreement but to buy time—to induce the North Koreans to temporarily slow their nuclear and missile programs, giving the U.S. more time to step up the sanctions, military defenses, and covert operations that can actually resolve the crisis.
For the past year, the Trump administration has largely rejected high-level diplomacy on the ground that Kim Jong Un will not make meaningful concessions. Instead, the U.S. has strengthened offensive and defensive military capabilities and launched a sophisticated campaign of economic warfare.
President Trump is right that North Korea is unlikely to make meaningful nuclear concessions, and that economic strangulation and stepped-up covert activities are needed to force change in Pyongyang. But even maximally tough sanctions take time to bite. It took nearly three years of sanctions pressure before Iran got serious about negotiating over its nuclear program in 2013. Sanctions will take at least that long to change North Korea’s strategic calculus, given the Kim family’s well-documented history of starving North Korea’s people as it perseveres through economic hardship.
Read the full commentary in The Wall Street Journal.
More from CNAS
-
Trump Tariffs: How Will U.S. Plans Reshape the Global Economy?
Donald Trump says he's already decided the tariffs he will impose on countries that export goods to America, including the United Kingdom. Channel 4 hears from Emily Kilcrease...
By Emily Kilcrease
-
Edward Fishman on the Age of Economic Warfare
In the latest episode of the Sanctions Space Podcast, Justine is joined by Edward Fishman, author of Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare and an adjunct ...
By Edward Fishman
-
The World Has Changed Since Trump’s First Trade War. Other Countries Are Ready to Fight Back.
With so many countries armed and ready, the challenge for Trump will be to use economic weapons to advance U.S. interests without leaving America isolated or ruining the world...
By Edward Fishman
-
Ziemba: China Could Impose Retaliatory Tariffs on U.S.
If tariffs and costs continue to rise, it will not be great for oil demand within the US, that's according to Rachel Ziemba, Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Center for a New Amer...
By Rachel Ziemba