US should establish diplomatic ties with ‘enemy’ North Korea: former Singapore diplomat Kishore Mahbubani

The United States should recognise that sanctions and isolation have had little effect on North Korea’s nuclear ambitions and try a radically different approach – like establishing diplomatic relations with Pyongyang.

That’s according to Kishore Mahbubani, a Singaporean former diplomat who addressed the 7th annual Milken Institute Asia Summit on Tuesday.

Washington’s approach to Pyongyang over the past 30 years had failed to alter its behaviour, though US President Donald Trump had made the right move by engaging North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in face-to-face summits, said Mahbubani, currently a distinguished Fellow with the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore.

Speaking at a virtual session titled Defusing Asia’s Geopolitical Flashpoints, Mahbubani – once Singapore’s Permanent Representative to the UN – argued that diplomacy entailed speaking to one’s enemies, “and since North Korea is an enemy, [the US] should establish diplomatic relations with the enemy”.

North Korea currently has formal diplomatic relations with 164 countries, according to the US-based National Committee on North Korea, but not with the US, Japan or South Korea.

Over the years, efforts to censure North Korea over its nuclear ambitions have been largely ineffectual. Since 2006 the UN Security Council has passed dozens of resolutions sanctioning Pyongyang for developing nuclear weapons and related activities. These have included banning the trade of weapons and military equipment, freezing the assets of people involved in the nuclear programme, and restricting scientific cooperation.

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But some experts say that rather than feel pressured into denuclearisation, Pyongyang has in fact managed to expand its nuclear arsenal.

“Yet more UN and US sanctions are unlikely to prove any more effective than the many previous ones. Meanwhile, North Korea is inching towards – or perhaps already possesses – the capacity to hit US cities with multiple nuclear warheads on long-range strategic weapons,” Victor Cha, senior adviser and Korea Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, wrote in Foreign Affairs magazine last month.

Cha wrote that Pyongyang had already amassed 20 to 30 nuclear warheads and fissile material for scores more.

Agreeing on the need for a new approach, Cha, who also spoke at the Milken Institute session, suggested US president-elect Joe Biden take a four-step approach.

The first step was to cap and freeze all plutonium and uranium nuclear operations in and around the Yongbyon nuclear complex and to put a stop to North Korea’s fissile material production.

The second, more controversial, step was to transform the US-North Korea relationship into one that tried to officially end the Korean war and create an environment in which both sides could work towards a nuclear declaration, including a pledge from Pyongyang not to transfer weapons, material, or technology. Technically, as the Korean war ended in an armistice, the two sides remain at war.

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The third step was to establish a framework for North Korea to focus on threat reduction and arms control in the short term, and abandoning all nuclear weapons and programmes in the long term

The fourth and final step was total denuclearisation.

“All these are pieces that we have talked about before but we have never used them in this sequence,” Cha said, adding that Washington had tried everything including summit diplomacy, bilateral talks and six party talks (which included South Korea, Japan, China and Russia).

“None of these things worked. So to go back to any of those would be the definition of insanity. We have to try something different,” said Cha.

Cha predicted that unless severe food shortages and the coronavirus outbreak prevented it from doing so, Pyongyang was likely to provoke the incoming Biden administration by carrying out missile or nuclear tests within the first quarter of 2021, repeating a pattern that occurred during the past two US presidencies.