A nuclear North Korea and the limitations of US security perspectives

ABSTRACT

If the United States’ main strategic policy priority on the Korean peninsula has been preventing the North Korea from developing a nuclear capability, US policy has failed manifestly. How did we get here? What is it about the ideas that lie behind the creation of US policy towards North Korea that seem to rule out, time and time again, the possibility that casting aside preconditions and engaging in serious attempts at dialogue with North Korea might once more be worth a try, with the stakes so high? In this article, I argue that a social logic of risk led to a very specific construction of the North Korean threat in US foreign policymaking under Obama, which constrained the options policymakers believed to be open to them.

KEYWORDS:

• North Korea
• construction of security
• critical security
• US foreign policy
• risk
• nuclear diplomacy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Writing from a policy rather than a scholarly perspective, Glyn Ford also offers a critical reading of US policy, arguing that the main impediment to workable solutions has been a ‘tendency to stereotype’ North Korea as irrational and/or a deadly security threat to the world (Ford and Kwon 2008).

2. The roles these men played in the early days of the administration were Vice-President, Secretary of Defense, Deputy Secretary of Defense, chairman of the Defense Policy Advisory Board and Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security, respectively.

3. In 1998, debate within the United States over Korea policy came to a head with the revelation that US spy satellites had discovered an underground reprocessing facility and a solid fuel missile test. With many calling for the abrogation of the Agreed Framework, Clinton called on William Perry to review American policy towards North Korea and come up with options. The report advised a comprehensive, ‘two path’ negotiating strategy. Importantly, the Perry Report was clear that the Agreed Framework should remain central to US policy towards North Korea (Berry 2006, 7–9; Chinoy 2008, 11–15).

4. For an inside perspective on these rivalries, and how they shaped policy, see (Pritchard 2007).

5. Full title: Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs.

6. There are reports that the North Koreans attempted to use the HEU programme as a bargaining chip, but that the hands of Kelly and his team were tied and that they had been sent to Pyongyang with specific instructions to not open new dialogue (Chinoy 2008, 120–126).

7. Most notably, the US’ decision to lead a coalition to invade Iraq in 2003, despite failing to gain support for the action from the United Nations Security Council.

8. For a rigorous overview of Douglas’ sociocultural approach to risk, see: (Lupton 1999, 36–57).

9. This interpretive approach, which takes risk to be an ideational category, is distinct from much of the recent work in critical security which focuses on risk as produced in the materialities of security politics (e.g. Aradau and Van Munster 2007; De Goede 2008; Mythen and Walklate 2008).

10. These questions are borrowed from Lupton (1999, 33–5).

11. See fundforpeace.org/fsi/country-data/.

12. For more on the hierarchical nature of risk, and the implications of this for international society, see Clapton (2014) and Clapton and Hameiri (2012).

13. Author interview with Frank Jannuzi (Asia Policy advisor for the Obama presidential transition team: National Security Working Group), 31 October 2016, Washington, DC.

14. In June 2009, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee held a hearing to review the present situation in North Korea. Senator Kerry (Committee Chair) stressed that the purpose of the review was to ‘test our assumptions and examine our options’ (Senate Foreign Relations Committee 2009a). Leon Sigal argued for an incremental approach to engagement with North Korea, whereby denuclearisation was brought about gradually rather than posited as a precondition for the commencement of dialogue: ‘North Korea’, he argued, ‘may be willing to trade away its plutonium and enrichment programs brick by brick. We should be willing to give it some of what it wants in return. That would reward good behavior’ (Senate Foreign Relations Committee 2009b). In October 2009, former State Department official Joel Wit (2009) produced a comprehensive strategy report which drew on background papers provided by 11 prominent experts. The report laid out a detailed set of options for North Korea that combined tough measures with serious efforts towards dialogue.

15. In what turned out to be an important detail, it was unclear whether satellite launches were included in this moratorium.

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Danielle Chubb

Danielle Chubb is senior lecturer in International Relations, and a member of the POLIS group in the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation, at Deakin University in Melbourne. She has previously held positions at The Australian National University, Pacific Forum CSIS and Hawaii Pacific University. Danielle’s main research interests are transnational activism, the policy dynamics of the Korean peninsula and Australian foreign policy. Danielle’s first book, Contentious activism and inter-Korean relations, was published by Columbia University Press in 2014. Danielle has a forthcoming edited volume (with Andrew Yeo) on North Korean human rights activism, with Cambridge University Press.