North Korea playing dangerous game with nuclear talks

Eric Hydrick / Assistant Online Editor

With its recent declaration that it did have nuclear weapons and that it was withdrawing from multinational talks to bolster said arsenal, North Korea once again added tension to the growing drama in the region. North Korea's on-again, off-again participation in these talks can't last much longer without the international community eventually condemning North Korea for its nuclear ambitions and either severely sanctioning the country, or taking action to halt its programs.

North Korea continually cites hostile U.S. policies as its reason to pull out of the talks, hoping to get an edge in negotiations. This is because North Korea knows that its actions won't be tolerated, and that its best bet is to try to create and press any advantage it can now, while U.S. troops are tied up in the Middle East. Once American troops are able to withdraw from Afghanistan and Iraq, North Korea knows its nuclear programs are on the top of America's list of things to deal with. They also know that when our troops come home, our patience with doing things diplomatically will have faded to almost nothing, and we'll be in a position to demand that North Korea shut the program down or have it shut down for them. Currently, with our troop levels stretched as thin as they are, North Korea knows that it's not a possibility at the moment and are trying to capitalize on the fact.

Another potential reason for the North's strategy is to help remove some of the pressure it faces from multinational talks by isolating the United States from the North's neighbors. North Korea has often demanded one-on-one talks with America, trying to ignore all of the other countries who don't want to see North Korea with nuclear weapons. North Korea could be hoping that by separating America from the other countries trying to remove its arsenal that it can isolate a major source of international pressure to disarm. The North could be thinking that if the United States isn't involved in its dealing with its neighbors, then it won't be facing nearly as much pressure from the rest of the international community, making it easier to blow them off while acting like the United States is some sort of lone ranger out to try to enforce its will on the world.

However, there are some serious risks to the negotiating strategy that North Korea is employing. The first is that the United States has never shown any interest in being put off to individual talks with North Korea. The second is that the rest of the world has no interest in being put off in their demands that North Korea disarm. Thus, North Korea's hopes of ignoring the world won't pay off.  It will do just the opposite.  It will further anger them and make them less likely to conceded to North Korea's demands and make them more likely to put economic and political pressure on the government, while making a military solution more and more of a appealing possibility. North Korea won't have the luxury Iraq does of being an incident without broad international support. If action is taken in North Korea, it will be a much more broad international operation than Iraq and will be harder for the North to denounce.

This brings up possibly the biggest risk to North Korea's policies. North and South Korea never signed a formal treaty to end their 1950s era war. Technically, it hasn't ended. Any military action could re-ignite the conflict. With North Korea holding nuclear weapons, it could decide to use them to take out South Korea before international forces compel it to surrender. This will force the South's allies to respond, triggering the nuclear war that the world feared during the Cold War. If North Korea is willing to accept this risk and play Russian Roulette with its very survival, then its more than welcome to.  But the more they drag things out in this manner, the more dangerous the game becomes.

Contact Eric Hydrick at pendulum@elon.edu or 278-7247.