Must Read: Daily NK Interviews Heritage Foundation’s Bruce Klingner

Klingner, formerly a CIA analyst and a private consultant with the Eurasia Group, has been with Heritage since 2007. He’s also a daily reader of this site. Here’s a sample of his assessment of the current situation:

Pyongyang is increasingly desperate to have the UN sanctions removed. Obama administration officials have commented that the Banco Delta Asia (BDA) sanctions of 2005-06 were very effective and it was a mistake for the Bush administration to have removed them. This is, of course, a dramatic reversal from Democratic Party criticism of the Bush administration at that time, when they characterized the sanctions as merely a neoconservative attempt to undermine the Six-Party Talks. Obama officials explain that the UN sanctions are even more effective than the BDA sanctions since it is the United Nations telling member nations to comply rather than the unpopular Bush administration requesting nations abide by U.S. regulations.

Washington is more pessimistic about the potential for success in achieving North Korean denuclearization than ever before. The trip by Ambassador Stephen Bosworth is widely perceived as a failure. Of course, the coming year may bring another bilateral U.S.-North Korea meeting or even a resumption of the Six-Party Talks. There are even rumors in Seoul of a possible third inter-Korean summit. However, the real measure of the success of any such meeting must be what was accomplished rather than simply whether such meetings occurred.

In 2010, we can expect more of the same from North Korea. It will alternate provocations with seemingly conciliatory behavior. But the landscape is different in both Washington and Pyongyang. There is far less patience in Washington for Pyongyang’s antics and far fewer experts and officials who still believe that unfettered engagement will actually achieve denuclearization.

And there is a greater potential for instability in North Korea. Kim Jong Il’s failing health; doubts of a successful succession to Kim’s third son Kim Jong Eun; worsening economic conditions brought on by systemic problems and the tightening noose of international sanctions; and unrest following North Korea’s currency revaluation could combine to create a tinderbox of dangerous change in North Korea. [Daily NK]

I tend to think that the danger of change is grave for North Koreans, but less than advertised for foreign powers. If North Korea is in a state of unrest, we’re likely to see an amplification of mostly-empty rhetoric and mostly-harmless provocations to raise the specter of external threats in a vain effort to unify North Koreans, but in fact, the last thing an internally unstable state needs is a real external threat to constrain a flexible redeployment of its forces.

Frankly speaking, North Korea is proliferating so many dangerous things to dangerous people (and that’s just the things I know about) that regime collapse is probably safer for us than the status quo. As I see it, the real danger lies in the risk of clashes with China as multiple nations enter North Korean territory, and for any foreign (that is, non-Korean) power that that tries to occupy North Korea.

I wholeheartedly agree with Klingner’s assessment of the Obama Administration’s policy, and how much its performance has exceeded expectations.

Read the rest on your own.