Is There Any Hope for Negotiation? Michael O’Hanlon Nearly Persuades Me

I’ve never considered myself a great fan of Brookings or Michael O’Hanlon, but I may need to reassess my thinking. His comment in today’s Washington Times is one of the more insightful things I’ve seen in the last five years. Has O’Hanlon migrated as much as I suspect?

We should test North Korea’s willingness to reform economically and even politically, Vietnam-style. If Pyongyang proved willing to do so, the United States and its allies could help — for instance, aiding improvement of North Korean ports and roads, providing more donations of fertilizer and agricultural equipment, offering greater energy assistance, and gradually lifting U.S. trade sanctions. Japan, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund would be likely to offer much more development assistance if we chose this path ourselves. But the price we demanded of North Korea for such generosity would have to be steep. In addition to denuclearizing over several years, North Korea would also have to give up chemical weapons and long-range missiles, cut its conventional military substantially to reduce the enormous drain it imposes on the economy as well as the threat it poses to Seoul, begin a dialogue with the Red Cross about human-rights conditions in its prisons, and allow Japanese kidnapping victims to go home.

The thinking is that we have legitimate questions about North Korea’s sincerity, and that its willingness to fundamentally reform itself is a good test of its sincerity. That might seem familiar to regular readers of this site. I strongly recommend the entire piece.

It’s really too bad nobody thought of this in 1993. Or since.

If you’re in the mood for something more entertaining, however, check out Selig Harrison’s wistful pining for the North Korean moderates that we alienated. Even Harrison doesn’t have the chutzpah to use the phrase “North Korean moderates,” since we all know how the Iranian counterpart to that particular theory turned out. And while I could believe in a certain degree of dissent and debate in the Iranian regime, Harrison’s suggestion of two competing and debating factions within the North Korean regime can’t pass the laugh test.

Like every appeaser of unappeaseable regimes, Harrison faces a seemingly insurmountable wall of fact–in this case, North Korean mendacity, barbarity, and matching rhetoric. Just as every losing gambler must believe that his luck is about to turn, every stickless diplomat must believe that he is on the verge of a great diplomatic opening. This often requires the invention of moderates. I have no doubt that Harrison is completely sincere in his projection of moderation on some of the more affable scoundrels he’s met in Pyongyang. After all, this is a delusion that the intransigent regimes are predictably willing to oblige when they seek benefits from their more gullible foes.