I agree that north Korea should be a foreign policy priority for the next Administration. The north is very dangerous with multiple complex threats from proliferation and provocation to war and regime collapse to the mother of all humanitarian disasters happening as we speak. However, the first thing the new Administrations of both the ROK and US need to do is reaffirm their commitment to Korean Unification as the foundation for Alliance policy and strategy and then work on dealing with north Korea. But we should never call the north a nuclear power, even a small one. As Bruce Bennett has termed it the regime is an a non-compliant, unsafe, nuclear experimenter and proliferator.
As the United States dithers, an emboldened North Korea is quietly establishing itself as a small nuclear power.
BY JOEL S. WIT , JENNY TOWN | NOVEMBER 5, 2012
Whoever wins Tuesday's election will face a long list of foreign-policy challenges, ranging from Iran's nuclear weapons program to the Arab Spring. Usually lurking somewhere behind the frontrunners is North Korea and its own home-grown nuclear effort. But there are good reasons why dealing with the threat presented by Pyongyang should be near the top of the to-do list for a new president. After all, if the North follows its historical playbook, it may present him with one of his first crises abroad.
Why should a new administration view the challenge of North Korea as a priority? First, regional perceptions that the United States is not paying sufficient attention to the North Korean threat would raise doubts about the credibility and seriousness of the American "pivot" towards Asia. Second, we cannot ignore the fact that a hostile, nuclear-armed North is located next door to South Korea and Japan, two major military allies and trading partners. Both countries will question U.S. security commitments if they perceive a weakening of American resolve to reduce the North Korean threat to their security. For these reasons alone, whoever wins on Nov. 6 should pay more attention to the North Korean problem before it gets out of hand.
Even more disturbing, U.S. diplomatic passivity in the face of a growing North Korean threat feeds Pyongyang's narrative that it now has the upper hand in its relationship with the United States. North Korea believes it has emerged from a difficult three years with flying colors. Pyongyang has successfully weathered a U.S.-South Korean effort that, in the words of one former Obama administration official, was intended to "force North Korea to reassess the value of its program and therefore maximize the chance of pursuing denuclearization seriously."
How did that work out?
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