The Foreign Service Journal, October 2005

F O C U S 38 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / O C T O B E R 2 0 0 5 nuclear weapons. Its one-man rule, its internal regimentation and its dogmatism would alienate any freedom-loving American. Pyong- yang’s harsh diatribes against Washington, its penchant for brink- manship and its nasty habit of float- ing concessions on a sea of threats all continue to antagonize even the most level-headed observers. So did its past acts of terrorism, like the 1983 bombing in Rangoon that barely missed South Korea’s President Chun Doo-hwan and killed 17 members of his entourage. Yes, in many respects, North Korea makes a perfect foe. Yet ever since 1988, it has been trying to end its historic enmity against the United States. Beginning in that year, it stopped sponsoring terrorist acts against other states, and even softened its anti-American rhetoric. Nevertheless, the image of a rogue state ruled by a latter-day Genghis Khan has been difficult to shake, leaving the North an easy target for demonization. Name-calling does more than foster a domestic polit- ical climate of hostility. It also infects official thinking. Epithets like “rogue” or “pariah” become a pernicious premise of U.S. policy and intelligence estimates, blind- ing officials to the motives of states for acquiring nuclear weapons. They predispose American policy- makers to take a coercive approach to stopping the spread of nuclear arms, threatening isolation, economic sanctions and military force. And they impede diplo- matic give-and-take, which is the best way to probe the intentions of such states and try to induce them to change course. After all, a rogue is a criminal, and the only way to handle criminals is to punish them. Yet, again and again, the crime-and-punishment approach has failed to dissuade states from seeking their own nuclear arsenals. By contrast, American reassurances and induce- ments have a long record of accom- plishment. They helped convince South Korea, Taiwan, Sweden, Brazil, Argentina, South Africa, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan to abandon their nuclear ambitions. Only with Iraq and Pakistan did such efforts fail. The Good Cop Approach Branding potential prolifera- tors as rogue states actually gets in the way of disarming them. Washington would be better off referring to them by a more appropriate name — perhaps “insecure states” — and treating them accordingly. That means offering encouragement and incentives instead of threats to get such governments to stop arming, and moving to contain and deter them only if that approach fails. Hard-liners dismiss such talk as sympathy for the aggressor. They take it on faith, for example, that Pyongyang is motivated by paranoid hostility to America and will not stop its campaign to become a full-fledged nuclear power. So what if it is reaching out to its neigh- bors and the world and establishing diplomatic ties with them? That’s just a tactic. So what if it agreed to freeze its plutonium program in 1994 — the only nuclear weapons program it then had? That was just a ruse to dupe the credulous while it began acquiring the means to enrich uranium. So what if the DPRK is now offering to freeze and dismantle its nuclear weapons programs — if only the United States will normalize political and economic relations and provide assurances that it won’t attack, interfere in its internal affairs, or impede its economic development by maintaining sanctions and discouraging aid and investment from its neighbors? Even to discuss such proposals, say the hard-liners, would amount to coddling criminals, or in their favorite turn of phrase, rewarding bad behavior. But the trouble is that by not upholding the 1994 Agreed Framework, the United States failed to reward North Korea’s good behavior, even though the accord gave Washington what it most wanted up front: a freeze of Pyongyang’s plutonium production, a program that Leon V. Sigal directs the Northeast Cooperative Security Project at the Social Science Research Council in New York. He is the author of Disarming Strangers: Nuclear Diplomacy with North Korea (Princeton University Press, 1998) and the editor of The North Korean Nuclear Crisis: Regional Perspectives , which can be found at http://northkorea.ssrc.org/. Pyongyang’s harsh diatribes against Washington and penchant for brinkmanship have antagonized even the most level-headed observers.