At the recent seventh congress of the Workers' Party of Korea, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un declared that North Korea won't use nuclear weapons unless it feels threatened by nuclear-armed countries. What "feels threatened" means is anyone's guess, but a pledge like that isn't the action of a politician insecure in his position.
In April, the North Korean foreign minister, referring to the US and South Korea, told The Associated Press, "Stop the nuclear war exercises in the Korean Peninsula, then we should also cease our nuclear tests." President Barack Obama's response? "They're going to have to do better than that."
This is the better, Mr. President. You have a 33-year-old leader, at the head of a freshly purged regime, confident enough to publicly ask for talks, who is hedging his position by dual-track development of nuclear weapons and an (undefined) five-year plan for the civil economy, and who can repeat the offer on Jan. 20, 2017. He saw what happened to overthrown Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, and as to security guarantees for giving up nuclear weapons, well, Ukraine springs rudely to mind. If worse comes to worst, he might take the same deal as Iran.
North Korea has repeatedly offered to start talks to end the Korean War. The US response is always to require that nuclear weapons be part of the discussion, so no discussion ever takes place. Is the US being canny or obstinate? Does the US want to end the Korean War? Maybe not. The US derives a significant advantage from stationing troops and intelligence collection assets on the Korean Peninsula under the UN flag. Come a treaty, North Korea (and China) will probably insist they have to go.
By not talking to North Korea we lose the ability to assess the personalities of their diplomats and political leaders. In recent years, Iran and its proxies killed hundreds of Americans in Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Lebanon (and one in the United States in 1980). Today we have a deal with Iran. Saddam Hussein? A bad, bad man, but Donald Rumsfeld, then a special envoy, flew to Baghdad in 1983 to shake his hand and deliver a message from the president of the United States. The Soviet Union's leaders were responsible for 15 million deaths by one accounting, but we never stopped negotiating with them. If he studies history, Kim Jong Un knows all this and is either perplexed or confident he knows America's true intent toward his country (and him).
So let's start talking. Kim Jong Un will take all sorts of credit on North Korean TV, but so what? He probably doesn't care what the viewers in Pyongyang think and neither should we. The only American Kim Jong Un has likely spoken to is former NBA player Dennis Rodman. Now, I admire The Worm for his rebounding, but a foreign service officer he isn't. We need professional diplomats to start talking and stay talking through North Korea's tantrums and provocations. Donald Trump said about Kim Jong Un, "I would speak to him, I would have no problem speaking to him." That's a good idea, but he should let the diplomatic staff soften up the target first and not rush to talks for a year or so.
And let's lower our expectations to: the official end to the Korean War, then IAEA monitoring, and a gradual end to sanctions linked to the North's nuclear transparency. The US will have to manage its alliances with Japan and South Korea while North Korea will be trying to split them, and everyone will be expecting China to "deliver" the North. It's going to be tough and it's going to be tedious, but we have able diplomats and the sooner we start the sooner we'll be done.
And about the U-word: unification. Is it really necessary? To start, China won't want a US-allied country on its border and there won't be an end to the Korean War without China. Absorbing East Germany cost West Germany 2 trillion euros and that was in a benign political environment. If Korean unification goes awry, China will be working overtime to ensure its border with North Korea doesn't resemble the US border with Mexico. And what's in it for the North? From their point of view, why would a nation that built its own submarine-launched ballistic missile and nuclear weapons while under severe sanctions agree to be absorbed by an American protectorate that is the leading exporter of flat-screen TVs and K-pop.
If the Koreas are at peace and remain divided, the US may be able to retain the South Korea platform for troop basing, port calls and intelligence gathering. China won't have a US ally on its border (and the US ally won't have China on its border). South Korea (and the rest of the world) can avoid footing the bill for reunification, currently estimated at $500 billion by the South Korean government. That might be the best we can so, but we won't know until we start talking.
James Durso is a Washington, D.C.-based former naval officer who was a military and post-conflict reconstruction adviser in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Iraq.
