PHOTO-ILLUSTRATION FOR TIME. KIM JONG IL BY CHIEN-MIN CHUNG/AP
Must we learn to love the North Korean bomb? Or is there some way of taming Kim Jong Il instead of meekly welcoming him to the nuclear club? So far, the world's potentates have spent months dithering and disagreeing over a remedy. Russia and China want to talk the program away, blithely insisting that the crisis can be resolved through negotiations. Japan and South Korea are equally anxious not to get tough. South Korea's incoming President, Roh Moo Hyun, simultaneously says that he will not tolerate North Korean nukes and that he is opposed to using sanctions or military force to make Kim behave. Meanwhile, security experts say North Korea will have atomic weapons within months—if it doesn't have a couple already.
What's a superpower to do? Despair not, America. Fortunately, there happens to be an approach to countering Pyongyang's proliferation threat that is ideal for timid and querulous posses: a campaign of coordinated and sustained economic pressure, tailored to punish Kim's regime for its nuclear violations.
Here's the idea: Washington lobbies the northeast Asian neighborhood to curtail or terminate foreign aid to Kim's regime. It also organizes a consortium to interrupt North Korea's illicit revenues from counterfeiting, drug trafficking and missile sales. And it keeps up the pressure until Kim shows, and shreds, his nuclear homework—or until we get a new and improved Dear Leadership in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (dprk).
Note the lack of heavy lifting required of one and all. For this approach to succeed, governments need only cut their foreign-aid budgets and do a little of the police work they should already be undertaking. The approach doesn't need U.N. sanctions in order to work. It doesn't even need unanimous decisions by the consortium. It practically runs on entropy.
Skeptics will object that economic pressure—including worldwide sanctions—has a miserable record of coercing targeted governments into changing their behavior. Quite true. Then again, North Korea has no ordinary government. Partly as a result of its success as an international military extortionist, Pyongyang is uniquely dependent on foreign aid and illegal earnings. The dprk generates perhaps $1 billion or more a year by dealing drugs and scaring its neighbors into giving it assistance. Even with all this danegeld, North Korea's distorted economy is broken, and the view from Pyongyang's bed in the intensive-care unit is pretty grim. Imagine how things would look with the oxygen cord severed.
Critics may cavil, the plan might perhaps make Kim feel our pain. But could it really be implemented? Absolutely. For all its sotto voce talk of negotiations with Pyongyang, Japan is on board with the idea already; the plan's passive-aggressive specification suits Japanese policy toward North Korea perfectly. Moscow will be no hurdle; Russia is an aid-seeking, not an aid-giving, state these days. Even distant Euroland will help out; remember, it was the European Union that first voted against energy aid for Pyongyang after the current North Korean nuclear drama commenced.
The weakest links in my pressure program are, admittedly, the Chinese and South Korean governments, two of the North's biggest benefactors. But incoming President Roh's new administration might not be able to continue funding the North's protection racket even if he wants to. Outgoing President Kim Dae Jung is leaving office in disgrace over recently revealed secret payments to Kim Jong Il to secure the "historic" Pyongyang summit of 2000. Furthermore, South Korea's legislature, which has to sign off on the national budget, is in the hands of an opposition party bitterly opposed to such subsidies.
And what about China? Forget the country's tired "lips to teeth" blather about its affinity for old dprk allies—North Korean nukes are a foreign-policy nightmare for Beijing, a trip wire that could ultimately leave China encircled by nuclear neighbors (including Taiwan) and U.S.-assisted missile defense shields. During the North Korean nuclear crisis of the early 1990s, Beijing slashed its food shipments to North Korea by two-thirds (and probably triggered the subsequent dprk famine). Beijing has been more publicly critical of Pyongyang during this current nuclear drama—and Sino-American relations are distinctly warmer since 9/11 than they were during the Clinton era. All in all, coaxing Uncle Zemin or Uncle Jintao to reduce China's allowance for Kim hardly looks like a diplomatic mission impossible.
I've given up guessing about the Bush Administration's North Korean policy—Kremlinology was child's play by comparison. But if the foreign policy "grownups" we were promised during George W. Bush's presidential run are alive somewhere—tanned, rested and ready—I hope they will take this modest proposal to heart. With any luck, they could hit the ground with the concept before Pyongyang detonates its first underground nuclear test.
Nicholas Eberstadt holds the Henry Wendt Chair in Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C.
