A better way

North Korea’s third nuclear weapons test yesterday raises three questions:

1. Why are they doing this?
2. What difference does it make?
3. How should the rest of the world respond?

Why does North Korea develop nuclear weapons?

If you believe what Pyongyang says, the answer is clear:  to defy and threaten the United States, which the North Koreans see as their primary enemy. But this should not be understood as a classic state-to-state conflict.  North Korea poses, at least for now, little military threat to the United States.  But Pyongyang believes Washington wants to end its dictatorship (I certainly hope there is some truth in that–even paranoids have enemies).  The North Koreans see nuclear weapons as a guarantee of regime survival.  No one wants to run the risk of regime collapse if the regime holds nuclear weapons, for fear that they could end up in the wrong hands.  NATO attacked Libya only after Qaddafi had given up his nuclear program.  So the North Koreans view nuclear weapons as guaranteeing regime survival.

What difference does it make?

South Korea and Japan have reason to be nervous about North Korea’s nuclear weapons and improving missile capability to deliver them.  But it is going to be a long time before North Korea can seriously threaten the US with nuclear weapons.   And the US holds a capacity to respond massively.

The larger significance of the North Korean nuclear program is the breach it puts in the world’s nuclear nonproliferation regime, which has been remarkably successful in limiting the number of nuclear powers, especially in Asia.  But Taiwan, South Korea and Japan face real difficulty in maintaining their abstinence if North Korea is going to arm itself and threaten its neighbors.  There are not a lot of worse scenarios for the world’s nonproliferation regime than an expanded nuclear arms race in Asia, where China, India and Pakistan are already armed with nuclear weapons.

How should the rest of the world respond?

This is where the issues get difficult.  There are already international sanctions on North Korea, which has managed to survive them so far with a bit of help from Iran on missile technology and China on economic ties. More can be done, especially if the Chinese crack down on illicit trade across the border.  But the North Korean objective is juche (self-reliance), so tightening sanctions may help rather than weaken the regime.

The Economist last week suggested the efforts to block the nuclear program have failed and that the international community should instead now focus on regime change, by promoting North Korean travel, media access, Church-sponsored propaganda and trade.  This would mean a partial reversal of the efforts to isolate North Korea and a new strategy of building power centers that might compete with the regime, especially among the growing class of entrepreneurs and capitalists operating more or less illicitly in North Korea.

We are not good at reversals of policy.  But the failure of our decades-long attempts to isolate the Castro regime in Cuba is instructive.  Communism did not fall in Eastern Europe to sanctions.  It fell to people who took to the streets seeking a better life, one they learned about on TV and radio as well as in illegally circulated manuscripts.  Isolation alone seems unlikely to work.  Isolation of the regime with a more concerted effort to inform and educate the people might be a better approach.