Executive Summary

The first Korea - West Coast Strategic Forum held in Seoul on December 11-12, 2006, convened policymakers, scholars and regional experts to discuss the North Korean nuclear issue, the state of the U.S.-ROK alliance, and notions of a formalized mechanism for security cooperation in Northeast Asia. Participants engaged in lively and frank exchanges on these issues. Gi-Wook Shin, Daniel C. Sneider, Siegfried S. Hecker, and Kristin C. Burke represented the Freeman Spogli Institute.

Participants were concerned that North Korea's drive toward nuclear weapons has exposed disparate interests among the five parties committed to arresting this ambition, including differences in threat perception between the United States and South Korea. But they also believed that multilateral dialogue still offers the best possibility for resolving the DPRK nuclear issue through peaceful means. Participants argued that in the wake of the nuclear test, pressure and use of force should be discounted as viable options and "rollback" through negotiations should be pursued. Such an approach necessitates clearer articulation of North Korea's options, a new consensus on mutual priorities, hard work on sequencing, and a more developed vision for alternative policies should diplomacy fail.

The U.S.-ROK alliance has entered a new era characterized by new American security imperatives, such as nonproliferation and counterterrorism, as well as a new Korean policy of engagement toward the DPRK. These factors, coupled with domestic political challenges and an evolving regional security environment, call for serious, strategic discussions on the state of the alliance. Though the U.S. and the ROK have exhibited diverging threat perceptions of North Korea the - core of the strategic rationale for the alliance - the instructive precedent set by NATO demonstrates that alliances can survive redefinition of the primary security threat, though not the absence of a common threat.

Participants discussed the prospects for greater regional cooperation in Northeast Asia, including the possibility of converting the six-party talks into a new institutional mechanism for multilateral security cooperation. However, there are serious obstacles to deeper integration in the region, not least unresolved historical issues that still elicit passionate responses. But if understandings on these issues can be reached, a regional security organization could address critical traditional and non-traditional security issues and mitigate uncertainty about China's rise.

The full text of the report can be found at The First Korea-West Coast Strategic Forum.

The Administration's North Korea policy of "ABC"--Anything But Clinton--needs revision. When North Korea withdrew from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 2003, President Bush responded by refusing to talk to Pyongyang for fear of rewarding bad behavior. As an initial gut reaction to abhorrent North Korean behavior in 2003, this response may have been understandable. But from a perspective of accomplishing the goal of denuclearizing North Korea, this policy continues to be a demonstrable failure.

The decision to play chicken with the North Koreans in 2003 gave them precisely what they wanted--plenty of time to develop their own nuclear capabilities. Finally after nearly a year had elapsed, the Administration belatedly embarked upon substantive multilateral talks spearheaded by Secretary Rice. Now, three years later, North Korea has finally demonstrated its nuclear capability. Nonetheless, the Administration continues to reject calls for direct, bilateral talks with the North Koreans, a condition North Korea has said would be a precursor to implementing the denuclearization agreement of September 2005.

Ideally the current UN sanctions will force North Korea to understand that it must denuclearize. But what if sanctions fail to persuade Kim Jong Il? Does the Administration have a second order strategy to deal with a nuclear North Korea?

With bilateral talks the Administration would be taking the first confidence building step to break the stalemate in what has been over a year without dialogue. This gesture would send a clear signal: the U.S. is not trying to topple the regime and it is serious about stabilizing relations between the two countries.

So what are the risks of initiating such direct talks?

First, the Administration has argued that multilateral talks are necessary because the U.S. needs the influence of China and South Korea. But there is no reason that bilateral and multilateral talks cannot co-exist. The Administration should continue to encourage coordinated Six Party Talks but also engage with North Korea on a one-on-one basis at the track-II diplomatic level. This way, the U.S. leverages Chinese and South Korean support on North Korea while still engaging with Pyongyang in a direct dialogue. Bilateral talks would also show our partners in China and South Korea that we are responsive to their preferences for a more diplomatic approach. Such an approach might give Kim Jong Il a face-saving way to say "yes" to reasonable incentives. At the same time, such a move would help rehabilitate the Administration's poor reputation for diplomacy in the international community.

Second, there are hard-liners who fear that the U.S. might look weak by acceding to a precondition of talks that President Bush has refused since the beginning of his presidency. If this Administration had a track record of being bullied, a world reputation for timidity, we might worry about the second-order effects of such a move. However, the concern of the world is not that the Bush Administration is soft, but rather that it does not listen.

This presidency's foreign policy is at a crossroads. A mid-term correction, animated by a unilateral openness to bilateral talks, however it may seem to the unsophisticated observer, is not weak. After all, our strongest asset during bilateral talks is our power to say "no"--to refuse demands that fail to meet American economic and security interests. Sitting down to listen and talk knowing that we reserve the full right and ability to say "no" at any moment, gives up nothing. It is a sign of our power, not our weakness; our maturity as the world's strongest democracy, not our churlishness as a schoolboy on the playground of world politics.

Negotiating is not about refusing to blink first. The best outcomes occur when there are candid exchanges and confidence building measures that tip the balance toward peace. Bilateral talks should not be regarded as rewards for bad behavior, but as another powerful tool--along with sanctions and continuing Six-Party Talks--by which we may secure our policy aims.

Some may question the advisability of bilateral negotiations if we believe that North Korea will not denuclearize. The truth is the stakes are too high to make such assumptions. Until we sit down and talk directly with Pyongyang, we cannot be certain of its true intentions. It is possible that North Korea will flout our direct gestures, signaling to the world its unwillingness to renounce nuclear weapons. If that happens, the Administration's hand will be strengthened in its diplomatic efforts with its allies to adopt a harder stance toward Pyongyang. But it is also possible that the Administration will have traded the insignificant "concession" of listening to the North Koreans in a bilateral forum for the end result of a nuclear-free Korean peninsula, the avoidance of an Asian arms race, and the reduced threat of nuclear proliferation to terrorist groups.

There are times when the hard line is necessary. We should never fear to take that path. But we should not confuse toughness on the real-life issues with stubbornness on pre-conditions for dialogue. It's high-time that the Administration understand that listening and talking--at bilateral, multilateral, and second-track levels--are tools that may yield better results than playing a silly game of chicken.

Robert C. Bordone is the Thaddeus R. Beal Assistant Clinical Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and the Director of the Harvard Negotiation and Mediation Clinical Program.

Albert Chang is a first-year student at Harvard Law School with expertise in U.S. foreign policy toward East Asia. A Harry S. Truman Scholar and Paul & Daisy Soros Fellow, Albert graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Stanford University in Political Science and International Security Studies.

Paul Stockton joined CISAC this fall as a senior research scholar, bringing academic and political experience in homeland security policy issues. His research and teaching focus on how U.S. institutions respond to changing threats--especially the rise of terrorism.

As the first researcher CISAC has hired who specializes in homeland security, Stockton will help build the center's research in this area, which is gaining scholarly and public interest.

"Stockton's return to CISAC," where he held a postdoctoral fellowship in 1989-1990, "adds both new depth and breadth to the Center's research on terrorism and homeland security," said Scott Sagan, CISAC director. "He has great practical experience with Congress and national security policy making and in-depth knowledge about how government, military, and private industry forces interact in the homeland security arena."

A former advisor on defense, intelligence, counter-narcotics and foreign affairs to Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Stockton also studies interactions between Congress and the president in creating budgets and institutions to address security threats. He is writing an article that explores the congressional response to hurricane Katrina and examines the unresolved challenges that Katrina-scale catastrophes pose to the U.S. disaster response system. He is editing a graduate textbook, Homeland Security, to be published by Oxford in 2007. Stockton will also write a book manuscript analyzing the domestic political constraints that shape homeland security budget and policy decisions, in a work tentatively titled The Politics of Homeland Security.

Stockton came to CISAC from the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., where he served as associate provost and directed the school's Center for Homeland Defense and Security. Besides shaping CISAC's research program in homeland security, Stockton, who has PhD in government from Harvard, is co-teaching the center's undergraduate honors program with senior fellow Stephen Stedman.

FSI convened its second annual international conference on November 16, bringing scholars from across the university together with visiting security experts, policymakers, members of the international community, and practitioners in the fields of political science, economics, law, business, and medicine. The theme of this year's conference was "A World at Risk," juxtaposing debate and discussion on hard security issues such as nuclear proliferation, terrorism, and failed states with problems presented by "softer" security threats such as pandemic diseases, energy shocks, natural disasters, and food security and the environment.

The conference opened with welcoming remarks from Stanford Provost John Etchemendy and FSI director Coit D. Blacker, who shared their perspectives on pressing global issues and their sense of how Stanford's mission of interdisciplinary research and teaching fits into a changing world. Rounding out the opening session were remarks from former secretary of defense William J. Perry and former secretaries of state Warren Christopher and George Shultz. Secretary Perry analyzed how security threats have evolved in the 10 years since he was secretary of defense, while Secretary Christopher addressed the strategic importance of the Middle East and need for renewed diplomacy and Secretary Shultz discussed the opportunity and imperative for the United States to assume a global leadership role. The three secretaries' institutional knowledge and experience collectively established a rich context for discussion in the plenary and breakout sessions that followed.

The morning and afternoon plenary sessions offered scholarly analysis of two types of risk, with the morning session focusing on systemic issues - measuring risk, managing the nuclear nonproliferation regime, and controlling fissile materials - and the afternoon, on human security issues - improving the resiliency of critical infrastructure and managing energy shocks to oil, natural gas, and electricity markets. Plenary I was moderated by Coit D. Blacker, with Elisabeth Paté-Cornell, Scott D. Sagan, and Siegfried S. Hecker as panelists; Plenary II was moderated by Michael A. McFaul, with Stephen E. Flynn and David G. Victor as panelists.

Drawing on Pate-Cornell's earlier discussion of statistical risk analysis, Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, assured conference participants over lunch that unlike other issues being debated that day, the risk of a human influenza pandemic "is one; it is going to happen...the issue is what will it mean when it happens." His assessment showed how our global just-in-time economy makes our world extremely vulnerable to an influenza pandemic. This vulnerability, Osterholm argued, will need to be managed on a local level through family preparedness, community leadership, and business preparedness and continuity.

Overlapping breakout sessions followed the morning and afternoon plenary sessions, allowing for interaction and dialogue in smaller, less formal settings. FSI's five centers and two of FSI's programs sponsored sessions that drilled down into some of the issues discussed in the larger forum throughout the day, including:

• Center for Environmental Science and Policy (CESP): "Food Security and the Environment"
  Rosamond L. Naylor, Kenneth Cassman, and Scott Rozelle
• Center for Health Policy/Center for Primary Care and Outcomes Research (CHP/PCOR): "Pandemics, Infectious Diseases, and Bioterrorism"
  Alan M. Garber, Michael Osterholm, Douglas K. Owens, and Lawrence M. Wein
• Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC): "Insurgencies, Failed States, and the Challenge of Governance"
  Jeremy M. Weinstein, Larry Diamond, and Stephen J. Stedman
• Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL): "Responding to a World at Risk: U.S. Efforts at Democracy Promotion in Russia, Iraq, and Iran"
  Michael A. McFaul, Abbas Milani, David S. Patel, and Kathryn Stoner
• Forum on Contemporary Europe (FCE): "The European Union: Politics, Economics, Terrorism"
  Amir Eshel, Josef Joffe, Hugo Paemen, and James J. Sheehan
• Program on Energy and Sustainable Development (PESD): "China's Rise: Implications for the World Economy and Energy Markets"
  Thomas C. Heller, Fred Hu, and Edgard Habib
• Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC): "Cross Currents: Nationalism and Regionalism in Northeast Asia"
  Daniel C. Sneider, Michael H. Armacost, Gi-Wook Shin, and Xiyu Yang

The conference concluded with a cocktail reception and dinner. Peter Bergen, CNN's counterterrorism analyst and the first Western journalist to have interviewed Osama bin Laden, offered closing remarks on the successes and failures in the war on terrorism since 9/11.

To read the seismic signal sent from an abandoned coal mine in the mountains of North Korea's coast, you must first recognize that it represents four major failures, two grave dangers, and one big opportunity.

The apparent explosion of a nuclear device, coming after two decades of trying to stop North Korea from achieving this goal, is a manifest failure of policy on four fronts -- a failure of U.S. nuclear non-proliferation policy, a failure of international diplomacy, a failure of Chinese leadership and a failure of South Korea's strategy of engaging the North.

Having failed so completely, the world now faces two grave dangers. The first is the very real threat of war on the Korean Peninsula, triggered by a series of escalatory actions in the wake of the bomb test. The second is the danger that North Korea will proliferate its nuclear technology, materials or know-how to others -- not the least to another nuclear hopeful, Iran.

But there remains a lone and tenuous opportunity. Having removed all ambiguity about its nuclear ambitions, North Korea may finally have created a common sense of threat that will galvanize the kind of concerted international action that so far has been absent.

THE FOUR FAILURES

Non-proliferation failure

The United States has spent two decades trying to stop North Korea from going nuclear, a turbulent period of crisis and negotiation that even went to the brink of war. At least three administrations confronted this problem and none, certainly not the Bush administration, can escape blame.

North Korea agreed to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1985, but it stalled before signing an agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in 1992 to place its nuclear facilities under international safeguards and inspections. During that time the North Koreans reprocessed some spent fuel from their reactor into plutonium - an amount that American intelligence believes was enough for building one or two warheads.

North Korea's resistance to full inspections, while it kept pulling spent fuel rods out of its reactor, provoked a crisis in 1994 and led the Clinton administration to ready military forces to strike the North's nuclear facilities. In a last-minute deal, North Korea froze its reactor and reprocessing facilities, effectively halting plutonium production under IAEA supervision. In exchange, the United States, Japan, South Korea and others agreed to construct two light-water reactors for North Korea and to supply fuel oil until the reactors came online.

The deal was troubled from the start. Neither party was satisfied with the compromise or the way it was to be implemented. By the late 1990s, the North had begun a secret effort to acquire uranium-enrichment technology from Pakistan and, in 1998, tested a long-range ballistic missile. Despite this, the plutonium freeze remained in place. But it did not survive the Bush administration.

The Bush administration came into office challenging the value of the agreement and froze contacts with the North. After receiving intelligence showing moves to build enrichment facilities, it confronted North Korean officials at an acrimonious meeting in Pyongyang in October 2002.

The United States halted fuel shipments a month later, and, in early 2003, the North Koreans expelled IAEA inspectors and withdrew from the Non-Proliferation Treaty. They proceeded to reprocess the fuel rods they had stored for a decade, producing enough plutonium, intelligence estimates say, for four to six nuclear warheads. In February 2005, the North Koreans announced they had manufactured nuclear weapons. Last week, they apparently made good on that declaration.

Blame aside, North Korea's emergence as the world's ninth nuclear power may be the most serious failure in non-proliferation history. Unlike India and Pakistan, which remained outside the system of international treaties, North Korea acted in defiance of those controls. Who might be next?

Diplomatic failure

Unlike Iraq, the attempt to stop North Korea's nuclear program has relied on the tools of diplomacy, accompanied by economic incentives and coercive sanctions.

But serious questions have been raised from the start about the sincerity and methods of the diplomatic efforts, particularly on the part of the United States and North Korea. The Bush administration has insisted -- and the president continues to make this argument -- that direct talks with North Korea do not work. Pyongyang has tried to frame everything as an issue with Washington, undermining talks that involved others, including South Korea.

Bush's stance lends credibility to those who charge the administration seeks "regime change," not a compromise that it believes will lend legitimacy to Kim Jong Il. The North Koreans now appear to have used the talks to buy time and build bombs.

Diplomacy has, at American insistence, consisted of six-party talks, held under Chinese auspices and including both Koreas, Japan and Russia. In truth, little real negotiating went on at these gatherings, at least until the last full round of talks in September 2005. In contrast to the thousands of hours of negotiations between Americans and North Koreans that led to the 1994 deal, there have been only tens of hours of actual give and take.

It is intriguing that the September agreement on a statement of principles for denuclearization came only after the State Department's chief negotiator was finally allowed to talk to his North Korean counterpart at length. Even then, their agreement evaporated almost immediately as they dueled publicly over the deal's meaning. American financial sanctions against North Korean currency counterfeiting further clouded the atmosphere, and direct contacts ground to a halt.

China's failure

The North Korean nuclear crisis is also a failure of China's bid for regional, if not global leadership. North Korea is an ally of China, a relationship that goes back more than half a century to the Korean War, when Chinese "volunteers" poured across the border to prevent an American victory. Their relationship has become more difficult since China embarked on market reforms while North Korea clung to its peculiar brand of Stalinism.

China has been torn between its loyalty to Pyongyang, its desire to maintain a stable balance of power in the region and its fear that the North's nuclear ambitions could provoke conflict on its borders. By becoming host for the six-party talks, Beijing stepped into an unusual leadership role.

The Bush administration was eager to move the burden of the North Korean problem onto the Chinese. Some administration hard-liners argued that China had the power to trigger the collapse of Kim Jung Il's regime by cutting off energy and food supplies.

Time and again, Beijing dragged the North Koreans back to the negotiating table, while also pushing Washington to engage Pyongyang in the talks. But Chinese irritation over American inflexibility has now been trumped by North Korea's defiance. Chinese policy-makers now wonder how they can punish the North without creating chaos, or war.

Failure of engagement

The final failure lies on the doorstep of South Korea's 10-year-long policy of engagement. The "sunshine policy" asserted that the North could be induced to give up its nuclear option by opening up the isolated communist state and promoting the forces of Chinese-style reform.

After a historic summit meeting in 2000, South Korean aid and trade, even tourists, flowed into the North. South Koreans lost their fear of a former foe, seeing it more as an impoverished lost brother than a mortal threat. Tensions with their American allies rose because of a gap in the North's perceived threat. The United States wondered why its troops should continue to defend South Korea.

Now South Koreans must confront the possibility that the North may have used engagement only to buy time.

THE TWO DANGERS

Threat of war

With eyes on Iraq and the Middle East, the Korean Peninsula has been far from the center of American attention. American forces based in South Korea and Japan have been dispatched to Iraq.

Yet the demilitarized zone that separates the two Koreas remains the most militarized frontier on the planet, with hundreds of thousands of well-armed soldiers poised against each other. Clashes along that frontier used to be commonplace and there are signs of a renewal of tensions. The danger of unintended escalation cannot be dismissed.

What might happen if a U.S. naval vessel, moving to inspect a North Korean freighter - as the U.N. resolution may authorize - is fired on or even captured, as the USS Pueblo was in 1968? It is a frightening scenario already worrying some at the Pentagon and the State Department.

Risk of proliferation

More than anything else, American policy-makers fear that North Korea, emboldened by its nuclear success and perhaps desperate for funds amid economic sanctions, might sell its nuclear expertise to Iran and others, including terrorist groups.

For Pyongyang, an alliance with Iran is a logical response to American and global pressure. The North Koreans have sold ballistic missiles to Tehran since the 1980s and rumors of nuclear cooperation persist.

An American effort to interdict the movement of ships and planes to Iran -- with possible U.N. backing - is probable. But the most likely transit is across the long and loosely controlled land border with China. The amount of plutonium needed to make a warhead is the size of a grapefruit and hard to detect - creating yet another nightmare scenario.

THE OPPORTUNITY

In this otherwise bleak landscape, there is an opportunity. For the first time, there is a chance of a consensus among the key players -- China, Japan, South Korea, Russia and the United States. The passage of a U.N. resolution is a small step in that direction. But the real test will come next, as the nations must cooperate to put pressure on North Korea, while coolly navigating the perils of war and making sure to leave open a diplomatic exit.

There is a slim chance of such concerted action, and a limited window for achieving it. Not everyone sees the dangers the same way. Signs of rethinking errors of the past are no more evident in Beijing and Seoul than they are in Washington or Tokyo. Ultimately, however, if they are to seize this moment of opportunity, all parties must face up to the fact that the policies of the past have failed.