By John Swenson-Wright, Visiting Professor at Graduate School of International StudiesPyongyang's rocket launch should come as no surprise to the international community.
Unlike the previous missile launch in 2006, this one has been well telegraphed days in advance by the North Korean authorities who appear to have been keen to secure maximum international exposure for their actions. Here, perhaps, is the clearest indication of their motives - a desire to demonstrate that the North is a force to be reckoned with, technically, strategically and diplomatically.
In many respects, this bid - simple in execution - appears to have succeeded. News coverage internationally and in the region has given the North Korean leadership the oxygen of publicity which it craves and refocused world attention on the North's nuclear threat. In South Korea, and especially in Japan - the country, most anxious about the implications of the missile launch given its long history of tension with the North and its unique historical nuclear anxieties - daily reporting has been dominated by the missile story.
In the past, such sabre rattling initiatives by Pyongyang have also been an effort to sow dissension amongst the North's neighbours, particularly the core alliance members of the Six Party talks process - Japan, South Korea and the United States. However, for now, there are no discernible signs of diplomatic division.
The condemnation from Tokyo, Seoul and Washington has been swift and unambiguous and has been echoed by stern words from UN Secretary General BAN Ki-moon. President Obama in his remarks Sunday afternoon in Prague has talked of the international community standing"shoulder to shoulder to pressure the North Koreans to change course." Yet, the key question is how to do this?
UN sanctions have been tried in the past, most notably via resolutions 1695 and 1718 in response to the North's last significant missile launch in July 2006 and its October 2006 nuclear test. Yet, these actions, while a helpful measure of the international community's unity and resolve appear to have had little impact on the North Korean leadership, largely because both China and Russia have been and remain reluctant to back punitive and binding measures against the North. Sanctions have limited bite when the target is essentially disengaged from global trade and finance, when the North Korean people are largely inured to hardship and privation, and when the leadership in Pyongyang remains impervious to international punishment.
A more effective strategy is to focus on keeping the channels for dialogue open and persuading the North to realise it has more to gain from engagement than it does from continuing its policy of ballistic brinkmanship. South Korea's President LEE, despite his hawkish, conservative credentials, has talked of sending a special envoy to the North; Stephen Bosworth, the Obama administration's special representative for North Korea has struck a pragmatic note by signalling that bilateral contacts between the US and the North should offer a constructive route for re-starting the Six Party Talks process; and even Japan, while on the point of embracing tougher sanctions, is unlikely to want to see the door for dialogue closed shut.
The likely response from America and its allies will be to signal their displeasure forcefully via the United Nations, but to also patiently allow the post missile-test"dust to settle" and then redouble their diplomatic initiatives. In doing this, they can take comfort from two key aspects of the current crisis: first, the test itself has had mixed results since the North's attempt to put a satellite in space appears to have failed. This will limit Pyongyang's ability to propagandize at home and abroad by trumpeting the launch as an unqualified technical success. It will also help minimise the anxieties of America's regional allies, most notably the Japanese who have long worried about their vulnerability given their proximity to the Korean peninsula. Wisely, neither the US nor Japanese defence establishments sought to shoot down the missile - a gambit which would have been technically challenging and if it had failed would have risked undermining the deterrence capacities of the two allies fledgling joint missile-defence system.
Second, Obama's new bold diplomatic push for a nuclear-free world, signalled through the President's Prague speech, gives the United States a potentially new moral authority that the Bush administration lacked, and which may help in crafting a more coordinated global diplomatic approach to the North Korean nuclear challenge.
None of this, however, should obscure the scale and complexity of the challenge of persuading the North Koreans to give up nuclear weapons - arguably their most valuable diplomatic and strategic asset. Restarting the stalled process of verifying the dismantlement of the North's plutonium stockpiles, providing opportunities for the provision of international financial and trading opportunities to the North, finding a mechanism for an effective peace treaty between North Korea and its former Cold War adversaries, and putting in place a new regional security architecture robust enough to reassure all the affected countries in the region, will require considerable diplomatic ingenuity and patience.
Sunday's missile launch undoubtedly makes this task more difficult in the short-run, since critics of engagement will be quick to denounce such initiatives as"rewarding" the North's"bad behaviour". However, it is important to see the missile launch as an unhelpful provocation rather than a fundamental shift in the strategic regional balance. The nuclear issue remains the key diplomatic and strategic priority and wise-minded statesmen should not allow the current crisis to distract them from this more pressing, existential goal.
April 8, 2009
SNU PR Office