CAPP Events: 2003

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The U.S. and Korea: Where Do We Go From Here?

RAND analyst Gregory Treverton presented a talk on the future of North Korea and U.S. policy at a conference at the University of California, Irvine on January 31, 2003. Treverton is also a fellow at the Pacific Council on International Policy (PCIP) and leader of the PCIP task force, a group of representatives from government, business, academia, and non-government organizations who focus on countries critically important to, but not well understood by, people in the western United States. Treverton discussed the task force’s current examination of Korea, describing the three drivers of change on the peninsula as economic restructuring, political reform, and relations between the North and South.

He called the recent election of Roh Moo-hyun as president of South Korea “the end of the era of the ‘three Kims’" - three men in their 70s, including the sitting president, Kim Dae-jung, who have dominated Korean politics for a generation, an event that presents a real opportunity for political restructuring. Roh is a generation younger than his Nobel Prize-winning predecessor and is less burdened by the lifetime of deals, compromises and secret money that hung over all his predecessors, even Kim, according to Treverton.

He discussed north-south relations and commented that, given North Korea’s recent violations of the 1994 Agreed Framework and withdrawal from the nonproliferation treaty (NPT), the future depends on Pyongyang. North Korea’s recent actions could be interpreted as “business as usual”, as the Bush administration has claimed, but Treverton also thought Pyongyang’s intransigence could represent a “cry to be recognized.” Whatever the motivation, the key question U.S. officials are grappling with now is how the U.S. and allies in the region can mitigate the crisis. Reconstituting the Agreed Framework is not possible, he stated, and neither economic nor military coercion are viable choices.

He mentioned the possibility of a “Grand Bargain” within the next year – either a bilateral non-aggression agreement between the U.S. and North Korea and/or a multilateral agreement involving the U.S., China, Russia, Japan, and the two Koreas. Such an agreement could lead to a reduction of U.S. forces in South Korea, if the south pressures the U.S. to withdraw or expanded U.S. military commitments around the world bolster the argument currently proposed by some in the Pentagon that Army forces could be better utilized elsewhere.

If Pyongyang subsequently decides to deploy its nuclear weapons, and Roh continues South Korea’s “Sunshine Policy” of engagement with Pyongyang with satisfactory results, a political strategic crisis could erupt between the U.S. and the south. If the Sunshine Policy collapses, Treverton warned that South Korea could develop nuclear weapons, and Japan might ramp up its theater missile defense capability and pursue a tighter U.S.-Japan security relationship in response. A nuclear competition between China and Japan could result. How the Grand Bargain is concluded, he stated, will have a large impact on security in the region and will ultimately determine whether North Korea’s actions herald the beginning of the end for the NPT.