US should establish diplomatic ties with ‘enemy’ North Korea: former Singapore diplomat Kishore Mahbubani
- Washington should see sanctions and isolation have done little and take a new tack, former Singapore diplomat Kishore Mahbubani tells Milken Institute Asia Summit
- Second expert says Pyongyang is likely to provoke incoming president Joe Biden with nuclear tests in first quarter of 2021
That’s according to Kishore Mahbubani, a Singaporean former diplomat who addressed the 7th annual Milken Institute Asia Summit on Tuesday.
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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.
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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.