Dimensions: 6'' x 9'' 340 pages AEI Press  (Washington) Publication Date: January 1999 Paperback ISBN: 0844740292 Price: $ 19.95 Add to Cart   Examination Copies

January 1999
Over the Line: North Korea’s Negotiating Strategy
By Chuck Downs

North Korea’s launch of a ballistic missile over Japan in August 1998 confirmed that its continuing famine and economic crisis will not prevent it from threatening peace in North Asia. How should the United States and its allies approach North Korea? This book provides guidance by examining the record of North Korea’s international negotiations over the five decades of its existence and by discerning the strong patterns that have characterized its negotiating posture.

Chuck Downs has substantial experience in international negotiations and in East Asian security issues and is a former associate director of Asian studies at AEI.

The words crazy, irrational, bizarre, and unpredictable are too often used to describe the negotiating behavior of North Korea. Despite those prevalent characterizations, North Korea's negotiating strategy has been extraordinarily consistent. Few nations have so regularly practiced negotiation as their principal foreign policy instrument, so repeatedly used a familiar set of negotiating tactics, and so doggedly pursued a set of fundamental negotiating objectives.

North Korea's persistent diplomatic stance has led to surprising success. Although bringing little to the negotiating table, North Korea has succeeded in focusing the world's attention on its demands and, in many cases, has won substantial concessions. Were it not for the regime's careful and clever management of the process of negotiation, few people outside the Korean peninsula would have reason to concern themselves with North Korea. But the negotiating process--and the regime’s manipulation of it--makes North Korea matter.

North Korea has wrested from the negotiating process advantages that have repeatedly brought it back from the edge of apparent defeat. Today, North Korea's people suffer famine and economic deprivation that have claimed more than 500,000 lives each year since 1995. Signs of economic and political collapse increase daily. Few doubt that the end of North Korea is near. Yet North Korea has survived similar difficulties at earlier points in its history. At the close of the Korean War, it was condemned by the international community, devastated as a consequence of its own aggression, and supported solely by its ideological sponsors. In some respects, the regime is better off today. It has obtained political recognition, security assurances, and significant economic assistance--even from its former enemies. Through its negotiating strategy, the North Korean leadership has avoided political and economic collapse time and again during the past five decades.

Leading Characteristics of the North Korean Strategy

North Korea's negotiating strategy is defined by the character of the regime it serves and is derived from the unique circumstances and worldview of that regime. The strategy is designed to address the regime’s systemic problems: its tenuous hold on its people's loyalty, its dissolute national economic policy, and its antagonistic relations with other nations. The regime pursues negotiations to advance aims that correspond to those failings: to reinforce domestic political oppression, to obtain advantages that compensate for its economic failure, and to disarm its enemies.

In this book, the patterns of North Korea's behavior emerge from the broad sweep of its negotiating record--from the initial armistice negotiations at the end of the Korean War, the discussions that were incidental to implementing the armistice, the talks that resolved crises instigated by North Korea, the dialogue between South Korea and North Korea, and the multilateral negotiations to force North Korea to comply with its international commitments. The strategy this book reveals is intriguingly consistent, well designed, and cleverly implemented.

North Korea does not enter into negotiations because it seeks agreements. Its objective is to gain concessions and benefits merely as a result of consenting to talk. Scholars have observed that negotiations with North Korea generally progress through three stages. The regime makes encouraging initial gestures, then hardens its posture, and ultimately condemns its opponents for not accepting its demands. It is no mere coincidence that North Korea initiates negotiations by appearing to be open to fundamental changes in its policies, uses its willingness to participate to demand benefits and concessions, and terminates discussions when it has gained maximum advantage. That cycle was first identified and explained during the 1970s, but it accounts for many of the seemingly random setbacks that plagued the truce negotiations twenty years earlier.

Similarly, North Korea demonstrated its proclivity to use acts of violence to instigate negotiations, to refocus the attention of negotiators, or to blackmail opponents as early as the summer of 1951. That tactic came into full use, however, in the 1960s. From 1966 through 1969, North Korea instigated 241 armed attacks--attempting to assassinate South Korea's presidents, bombing public gatherings and thereby killing high-level South Korean officials, seizing the USS Pueblo, infiltrating commandos over the line to South Korea, killing innocent civilians traveling on commercial airliners, sinking ships, and shooting down aircraft.

During the Vietnam War, North Korea correctly perceived that it had greater space in which to operate without provoking American military retaliation. In the seizure of the USS Pueblo, for instance, North Korea ostensibly sought an official "letter of apology" from the U.S. government, but its strategic objectives were more complex: to create friction between South Korea and the United States, to incite South Koreans against their own government, and to humiliate the United States. North Korea succeeded in garnering respect from socialist nations and weakening the resolve of democracies.

The Demand for U.S. Withdrawal

Important but sporadic talks have occurred between North and South Korea. The regime has used those negotiations to portray the Republic of Korea as a feckless colony, to undermine South Korean political stability, and to characterize the presence of allied troops as the single most important obstacle to patriotic objectives.

North Korea has occasionally presented enticing proposals for unification that stir hopes and raise expectations. Both the content and the timing of the regime’s proposals fall into a pattern. The North has made its most beguiling proposals during times of political instability and civil unrest in the South. When threatened by the increasing momentum of international pressure for unification, North Korea has made a show of agreeing to ineffectual arrangements with the South. The North has also initiated dialogue when it needed to deflect international attention after embarrassing terrorist failures--the Panmunjom axe murders, the Rangoon bombing, and the downing of Korean Air Lines flight 858.

The North pursues its diplomatic objectives skillfully. In practically every instance, talks end on terms dictated by North Korea that result in either a stalemate or an unenforceable agreement. In almost every standoff, the North has focused on one issue: the precondition that American troops withdraw and foreign military assistance to the South cease.

North Korea's consistent use of U.S. troop withdrawal as a deal-stopper suggests two things: first, that the North’s objective is not so much to conclude agreements as to focus attention on its singular demand; second, that the North wishes to make the South vulnerable more than it wishes to unite Korea. North Korea has repeatedly chosen to terminate the talks because the South has not agreed to undermine its own security.

Yet North Korea is under no illusion that it can persuade the United States to withdraw its troops. One reason it emphasizes troop withdrawal is to preserve the means to walk away from any negotiation. Another is to create war hysteria at home. Fanned by North Korea's own propaganda, war hysteria is used by the regime to justify purges against those presumed to be disloyal and to silence those who might counsel alternative policy approaches. When the "foreign forces" issue shifts from the background to the foreground of negotiations with North Korea, renewed preparations for war, heightened domestic repression, strident new demands, and threats to terminate the talks soon follow.

North Korea has made a science out of the Chinese notion that crisis has two attributes--danger and opportunity. By 1993, substantial evidence indicated that North Korea might have extracted enough plutonium from its nuclear power reactors to construct a few nuclear bombs, in violation of the nonproliferation treaty. In defiance of its international commitments, North Korea refused to permit nuclear inspections. Instead, President Kim Il Sung supervised the escalation of a crisis toward a resolution he found favorable.

As North Korea accurately understands, managing key aspects of the process of negotiation is difficult for the West. In democracies, foreign policy is a matter for public debate. Because North Korea is perceived as irrational and unpredictable, and because the consequences of war would be severe, some people in the West will always simplistically advise that negotiation is the only alternative to war.

North Korea has a different view: negotiation is war by another means. The regime is capable of pursuing a perilous negotiating course that appears to put the nation on the brink of survival but that the regime can actually reverse at its discretion. Such a strategy, which Kim Il Sung mastered, requires a combination of iron-fisted control and clever manipulation.

The Current Situation

Understanding North Korea's negotiating strategy is especially important now. The Clinton administration has premised its policy on the belief that North Korean behavior will improve because of the regime's fear of impending collapse and its eagerness to receive certain benefits--including more than $210 million in annual aid. In the 1994 agreed framework, the administration offered North Korea nuclear reactors worth over $5 billion in exchange for the regime’s commitments to promote North-South dialogue, to advance international nonproliferation objectives, and to freeze its graphite-moderated nuclear generating plants.

Contrary to the administration's hope, however, North Korea’s international behavior has not changed as a result of such appeasement. North Korea has used the years following the agreement to develop a more threatening military posture.

In August 1998, Clinton administration officials admitted to the news media that they "believed that the North intended to build a new reactor and reprocessing center" under a mountain. On August 31, North Korea launched a three-stage Taepo-dong 1 missile 1,380 kilometers across Japanese airspace and into the Pacific Ocean. The missile launch revealed with absolute clarity that North Korea had the long-range capability to threaten every part of the territory of two American allies--Japan and South Korea--as well as the 100,000 American troops stationed there.

What does it mean when a nation that appears to be on the verge of collapse invests in offensive military capabilities rather than its people's needs? It means that, contrary to the theory that collapse must lead to cooperation, North Korea perceives that an impending collapse compels increasingly threatening behavior.

The Clinton administration convinced itself that four-way talks among China, the United States, and the two Koreas would lead to a peace settlement--an elusive goal fifty years after the Korean War. North Korea, however, used the four-way talks as it had used every previous negotiation: to extract concessions that filled gaps in its economic performance, to provide a pretext for domestic political purges and increased political oppression, and to strengthen its military capabilities. In the decades since its founding, North Korea has pursued that strategy--by taking territory during the armistice talks, building up its military in defiance of armistice constraints, obtaining international recognition through terrorist attacks, intervening in South Korea's politics while promoting dialogue, winning concessions by denying inspections, and, in this most recent instance, improving its weaponry while pursuing peace talks.

North Korea cleverly manages the process of negotiation by postponing war while strengthening its military ability and pressuring the West to disarm. The danger for the West is that war may be inevitable and that it is likely to come only at a time chosen by the North Koreans, when they have perfected their weaponry and can be confident of surviving the conflict.

In the closing years of the twentieth century, allied policy has produced a curious spectacle: the world’s strongest democracies attempting to cajole an unwilling tyrant to negotiate an accommodation that would extend his regime’s survival or, at least, cushion its collapse. The United States seeks an accommodation to avoid the violence it fears may accompany North Korea’s decline. North Korea, to the contrary, seeks to deny accommodation and uses both collapse and the threat of war as leverage.

The West can correct its misconceptions about North Korea's character. After almost fifty years of negotiation, patterns have emerged from the negotiating record that can allow the West to deal with North Korea’s negotiating strategy. Although North Korea pursues a deceptive strategy, the West need not be deceived.