The North Korean Nuclear Agreement
It would seem odd for this blog not to mention the agreement in the Six Party Talks to close the North Korean nuclear reactor at Yongbyon (covered in all of the major newspapers, but for the basic story, see the New York Times). But I find it difficult to get excited about this announcement, so I have little to say other than it’s “big news” — a point event compared to the daily feed of bombing announcements in Iraq, for example.
We’ve announced agreements with North Korea before, only to discover that the Korean language text differed from the English or Chinese text, so there was never a real agreement at all. Or as we found with the 1994 Agreed Framework (which seems quite similar in basic outlines to this new deal), perhaps neither side intends to follow through on its commitment (in the 1990s / early 2000s, the North Koreans continued their nuclear program despite the Agreed Framework, while the U.S., Korea, and Japan failed to deliver the heavy fuel oil or to build the “proliferation-safe” nuclear reactors that we promised to build under the Agreed Framework). Ultimately, this agreement is just a document that neither side has much ability to enforce; we’re in nearly the same situation we were in yesterday, where we can harangue each other at diplomatic conferences, but neither side has much compellance capability.
Dan Drezner posted some interesting commentary on yet another roadblock: the U.S. Congress might not agree to implement the deal, although Dan sees reason to believe that the Democrats might favor implementing something that looks a lot like the deal that a Democratic president negotiated in 1994. In his academic work, Dan has suggested that aid payments to adversaries are likely to elicit real policy change more often than we might think — more often than they might elicit real policy change from our friends. Perhaps so. This North Korea case might be a real test of the bribery side of economic statecraft (more generously called “linkage” by advocates): have we offered a big enough bribe to convince North Korea to make a real change to its national security policy? Such a bribe ought to be really big — but maybe we’ve found one that’s big enough. Or maybe they’ll just take the money and reneg. I’m no optimist on this one.
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