Next Stop, Pyongyang? Obama's Diplomatic Trifecta

April 6, 2016 Topic: Politics Region: Asia Tags: North KoreaUnited StatesCubaIranForeign Policy

Next Stop, Pyongyang? Obama's Diplomatic Trifecta

After Iran and Cuba, diplomacy with North Korea could be next.

In Havana, the president made it clear that he heard Raúl Castro’s criticisms of the United States, and somewhat indirectly suggested agreement with the Cuban president’s point about economic inequality here and the persistent “legacy of slavery and segregation.” He highlighted how democracy can be “frustrating” and stated clearly that we have “too much money in American politics.” All of this would go down well with Pyongyang, too. Our interlocutors might delude themselves, however, that we were talking about moral equivalence, so some careful wordsmithery would be in order.

North Korea, fortunately to my mind, is much more than ninety miles away from U.S. territory, but that doesn’t make a constructive relationship with the United States any less valuable to the North Korean leadership than to the Cuban one. It was only through U.S.-North Korean bilateral negotiation, for example, that it was possible in 1994 to delay, though not definitively block, North Korea’s withdrawal from Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. For all its crazed bluster, Pyongyang has continued to communicate in many ways in the subsequent twenty-plus years that a new relationship with the United States is the “carrot” it really craves. (I hope the implied analogy to a mule does not land me on the North Korean enemies list.)

Would reconciliation with North Korea really be any more unexpected, in the context of U.S. diplomatic history, than the rapprochements with Iran and Cuba? In Obama’s 2009 inaugural address, he offered an outstretched hand to those who were prepared to unclench their fists, and expectations were high that he might try a bilateral approach to North Korea. Pyongyang’s 2009 nuclear and missile tests effectively scuttled that prospect, and the North Koreans have continued to clench their fists even as other approaches have seemed on the verge of success. But the president’s desire to break with the decades-long, confrontational approaches to what were once termed “rogue states” remains evident, and he has pursued this path with undeniable determination. Iranian missile tests prior to implementation of the July 2015 nuclear deal were not allowed to derail the deal. And there seems little reason to believe that Fidel Castro’s denunciation of Obama’s “sweetened words” in Havana will have any impact on the U.S.-Cuba rapprochement. At the risk of sounding flippant, a reconciliation “trifecta” would seem consistent with the president’s vision, and his obvious desire to get past foreign policy “old-think.”

For a U.S. foreign policy that looks to the future, the youthful, dynamic leadership in North Korea may be an even better bet than Cuba’s geriatric Castro brothers or the mullahs in Iran, who certainly are graying, albeit elegantly (and admittedly are better dressed than their counterparts in Havana or Pyongyang). How many guys, like Kim Jong-un, get to be Supreme Leader before their twenty-ninth birthday? And he’s doing a bang-up job getting rid of the dead wood, although even the staunchest U.S. advocates of cleaning up the bureaucracy might find antiaircraft-gun firing squads a little extreme.

If Kim Jong-un starts eating healthy salads and going to the gym, we may have to deal with him for a long time to come. Perhaps, to quote the immortal words of the late Marion Barry, often referred to as Washington, DC’s “mayor-for-life,” we should just “get over it.”

Eric R. Terzuolo was a U.S. Foreign Service officer from 1982 to 2003, and focused on international security affairs. In 2001-2003, he was the senior U.S. resident representative to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons in The Hague. He is author of NATO and Weapons of Mass Destruction: Regional Alliance, Global Threats (Routledge, 2006) plus other books and articles on WMD proliferation.

Image: Flickr/Roman Harak.