First, there is the matter of the military situation, specifically the balance between the DPRK and the United States. It is actually extremely asymmetric, grossly favoring the United States in terms of conventional and nuclear forces on land, in the air and at sea. It is not the United States that has no good military option, it is North Korea. Yes, the North is credible with a threat to use whatever nuclear capability it has were the United States to threaten the survival of its regime. But short of that, the North should not be able to intimidate the United States or its allies with its nuclear weapons, ICBMs or no ICBMs. The idea of the North holding Seoul or Tokyo hostage is credible only if the leadership in the North is assessed as suicidal. There is no evidence for that judgment. The North Koreans have watched the U.S. military in action in the Middle East, as they never tire of pointing out, and they are acutely aware of the unique American capability to project force with precision and lethality almost anywhere on the globe. The nature of the military balance between the two countries is not lost on them.

That, of course, does not mean that we should ignore the growing nuclear and ballistic missile capabilities in North Korea.

But it does mean that the United States does not have to launch a preventive war to block North Korean acquisition of nuclear armed ICBMs. That capability will not give the DPRK the ability to blackmail the United States anymore than it did the Soviet Union during the Cold War, likewise with Russia or China today.

It does mean that there is no reason to embrace self-deterrence or a posture of military disadvantage, and that we can approach negotiations from a position of confidence. And we should, in fact, seek negotiations.

Now, the arguments against negotiations seem to turn on the assumption of “bad faith” on the North Korean side. The assumption of critics, for example, is that the North will seek to use intimidation and fear to extract concessions, that it will stall in talks while advancing its weapons programs, that it will renege on whatever agreements it does make, or otherwise cheat on them even as it extracts benefits of all kinds.

But to argue the virtue of North Koreans in all negotiations is simply “too heavy a lift” and completely unnecessary. It would make more sense to first agree on the standard for assessing the value of a negotiation and its outcome, and then ask if any negotiations with North Korea have been successful by that standard. I would then propose that if a negotiation enhances the security of the United States and its allies in the region, that if we are all better off with whatever deal is struck than without it, then the negotiating track was a prudent one.

By that standard, the deal struck in 1994, the Agreed Framework, was a good one. Absent the deal, the American intelligence community assessed in the early nineties that, if the North completed the graphite moderated reactors then under construction, it could produce roughly 200 kg of plutonium each year, and plausibly have one hundred nuclear weapons by the year 2000. As it turned out, after the deal, those reactors were not completed, no more plutonium was produced or separated in North Korea for a decade, and when George W. Bush entered the White House in 2001 he found North Korea, as best we know, without any nuclear weapons.

Now, if an American is asked if the North cheated on the deal, he would say that they surely did by secretly acquiring gas centrifuge equipment and technology from Pakistan. But from the North Korean perspective, Washington had failed to normalize relations with Pyongyang and eventually labeled it a point on the axis of evil, making the pursuit of fissile material by uranium enrichment, as well as separation of plutonium, a reasonable response. Whichever narrative one finds more attractive, it is the outcome that deserves attention when assessing the value of negotiation in this case, and I would argue that the Agreed Framework was a good deal for the United States and its allies. (I say this without any pretension to objectivity on the matter, in light of my own role in those negotiations.)

The truth here is that the quality of a negotiation, and any deal that emerges, should be judged by its terms, what both sides get and give and particularly on the issue of cheating. The question here is whether the terms of an agreement provide for sufficient transparency to monitor it—providing reasonable confidence that significant noncompliance will be discovered in a timely manner. It has been unfortunate, and potentially tragic, that negotiations as a tool have been so disparaged by bumper sticker-like assertions without any reasoned analysis to support them.

Continuing to address options, a word ought to be said about containment, or “strategic patience” as some would prefer. Basically, there really is no reason to abandon containment as a default option if the situation cannot be otherwise addressed. While it is true that containment will not, by itself, “contain” the North Korean weapons programs, it can contain their threat. If containment is understood, as it should be, to require attention to defense, meaning conventional forces and development and deployment of BMD as may be technically feasible, the maintenance of credible nuclear deterrent forces, and the cultivation of the political as well as the military elements of alliances, then it is an appealing option—at least until a better alternative becomes available. Disparaging this option is no more helpful than disparaging the others.

Finally, a comment is due on the currently favored option of imposing more severe sanctions on North Korea, the impact of which is enhanced by gaining China’s active participation. There may be nothing wrong with imposing sanctions on the DPRK for its withdrawal from the Non Proliferation Treaty, development and testing of nuclear and thermonuclear weapons, development and testing of extended range ballistic missiles and for its human rights abuses. But we should not delude ourselves about what may be accomplished through sanctions. They will not directly stop North Korean weapons programs by interdicting needed equipment: too much of what these programs require has already been acquired, and the North is too skilled at selective circumvention. They will not cause the regime to collapse: the North Korean people are accustomed to hardship and besides, Beijing will not allow that to happen. China does not wish to be confronted with a unified peninsula under a government in Seoul allied with the United States. But sanctions, particularly those more recently imposed, will cause substantial hardship in the North, and plausibly make the government more interested in negotiations as a way to relieve pressure. This is what most observers believe paved the way for the ultimately successful negotiations with Iran. But the endgame would not be sanctions: it would be negotiations.

Negotiations

We have a pretty good idea what the DPRK would want from negotiations, and they probably know what we want the most. Fundamentally, the North wants America to stop acts of hostility against it and to be free of the threat of regime change. This means that they want an end to sanctions and provocative U.S.-ROK military exercises, particularly those involving practiced decapitation and American flights of strategic bombers over the peninsula. They want to be respected and accepted as a nuclear weapons state— consider India’s status for the last decade—and generally have normalized relations with the United States.

Some analysts also assert that the North is not a status quo power, that it still harbors hopes of unifying the peninsula by the use of force and, in fact, seeks ICBMs to deter the U.S. from meeting its alliance responsibilities with regard to the defense of the ROK. These assertions should not be dismissed, nor should they be assumed to be accurate. They should be tested through a process of engagement and negotiations, during the course of which we should leave no doubt in North Korean minds about the strength of the U.S.-ROK alliance and the intent of both parties to honor their obligations under it.

From the American perspective, it is exactly the ballistic missile and nuclear weapons programs, which the North so values, that need to be dismantled. Indeed, some of us believe that a nuclear weapons free peninsula is an essential goal of any negotiation with the North, and to fall off this goal would legitimize the DPRK as a nuclear weapons state. Those who see this disagreement as an impossible barrier to a successful outcome should understand that the most difficult goals in a negotiation may be approached incrementally, over time, as both sides gain from the agreement and gain confidence in the process of negotiation. It is not hard to imagine limits on testing of ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons, in exchange for some limits on ROK-U.S. military exercises, as an initial step.