Dealing With ‘Rogue’ States: Cooperation versus Coercion?

ASIANPERSPECTIVE, Vol. 23, No. 1,1999, pp. 205-214 Book Review Dealing With 'Rogue' States: Cooperation versus Coercion? Leon Sigal, Disarming Strangers: Nuclear Diplomacy With North Korea (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998) When India and Pakistan's indulged in their bouts of nucle­ ar machismo last year the US response was wholly predictable. Mandatory sanctions were immediately imposed on both states. While this may have made some American members of Congress feel better and conceivably may have deterred other states contemplating going nuclear, the sanctions were an exer­ cise in futility as far as India and Pakistan were concerned. Both states had successfully tested their nuclear weapons and neither planned more explosions. Sanctions - and the hostile American rhetoric that accompanied their imposition - only served to increase popular support for the nuclear programs in both Pak­ istan and India. To many outsiders America's indignation seemed both inconsistent and self-serving. Washington was simultaneously claiming that the handful bombs in South Asian hands were a deadly threat to regional and global stability, while the many thousands of nuclear weapons in American hands were a force for world peace. Critics argued that at best this was gross hypocrisy; at worst racism. Leon Sigal's engaging study, Disarming Strangers: Nuclear Diplomacy With North Korea, says nothing about India or Pak­ istan, yet there are uncanny parallels between the Korean and South Asian nuclear dramas. In each case American inattention and misperception made effective diplomacy difficult if not impossible in the early stages. In each case Washington signally 206 AndrewMack failed to see how its self-righteous rhetoric and blustering served only to infuriate the hyper-nationalist regimes it sought to coerce. In both cases US responses to the crisis were driven by domestic politics in ways which seriously impeded attempts at crisis resolution. The Korean case was also very different, of course. India was a democracy of sorts, Pakistan was an erstwhile American ally; North Korea was a totalitarian enemy. The mainstream conventional wisdom in the US security community in the early 1990s depicted the North as a ruthless, aggressive and irrational 'rogue' state implacably hostile to the US, bent on acquiring nuclear weapons, and willing to cheat on its international obli­ gations to do so. Sigal, by contrast, sees a weak, somewhat para­ noid North Korea, prickly and difficult to deal with to be sure, but prepared to reach an accommodation with Washington and to abandon its nuclear weapons program in return for a package of diplomatic and economic concessions. American security mindsets meant that Pyongyang's signals of willingness to cooperate were either ignored or seen as tricks, while North Korean bluster and threats confirmed Pyongyang's 'rogue' image in American eyes. This in turn dictated what Sigal calls the 'crime and punishment' strategy that Washington used to coerce Pyongyang into giving up its bomb program. 'Rogues' who ruled by terror at home and promoted it abroad were, by definition almost, were simply not amenable to rational persua­ sion; only coercion. In dealing with Pyongyang, denial of high level political contacts and economic assistance, threats of sanctions and even military strikes against the North's nuclear facilities, were the favoured weapons in Washington's diplomatic armoury. Posi­ tive inducements were relegated to the sidelines. The problem was that the coercion approach simply didn't work. By the summer of 1994 a combination of US impatience and North Korean intransigence had brought the Korean penin­ sula to the very brink of war. The antecedents of the crisis went back at least to 1985 when the North started to build a small research reactor at its nuclear facility in Yongbyon. There was nothing particularly suspicious about this. Many countries start their civilian nuclear programs by building research reactors to get practical experience in non­ Dealing With 'Rogue'States 207 military nuclear technologies. The fact that Pyongyang had joined the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1985 was also reassuring. In joining the NPT, the North had undertaken not to make nuclear weapons and had also agreed to admit International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors to monitor its nuclear facilities. The main task of the safeguards' inspectors was to ensure that no plutonium - the...