The fact is there are too many crises, foreign and domestic, for the Administration to manage.  The best course of action is for the Administration to ensure the strength of the ROK/US Alliance to provide the foundation for President Park to continue the execution of her policy of trustpolitik.  The US is just not going to be able to effectively deal with north Korea at this time given all that is on the Administration's plate.  But this is a damned if you do and damned if you don't situation.  If we do we are likely to again be taken to the cleaners by the Kim Family Regime as we have in the past because we are so distracted.  If we do not we will be blamed as the north continues its blackmail diplomacy and the development of its nuclear program.  If I could make one recommendation if would be for the President to sign a finding to target the north's financial activities to pressure the regime and force it to deal with the ROK, undercut the legitimacy of the regime among the elite as it will lose the ability to provide luxury goods, and perhaps most important the loss of access to its illicit funding activities will hinder the development of its nuclear program.  

Of course as a superpower we should be able to manage all these crises but apparently at this time we are unable to.

Preoccupied Obama criticized over North Korea policy

http://www.stripes.com/news/pacific/preoccupied-obama-criticized-over-north-korea-policy-1.249724

By MATTHEW PENNINGTON

Associated Press

Published: October 29, 2013

This Oct. 9, 2013 satellite image taken by Astrium, and annotated and distributed by 38 North shows the Sohae site where North Korea launched a long-range rocket into space in December 2012. U.S.-Korea Institute at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies said Monday, Oct. 28, 2013, North Korea is conducting major construction at its main missile launch site, apparently to accommodate larger rockets and new mobile missiles.

AP PHOTO/ASTRIUM - 38 NORTH

WASHINGTON — Preoccupied with domestic woes and high-stakes Mideast diplomacy, the Obama administration has little time these days to focus on the ominous signs that its enemy North Korea is advancing its nuclear weapons program.

Within the past two months the secretive nation has restarted a reactor that can produce plutonium for bombs. Recent satellite photos also appear to indicate new tunneling at its underground nuclear test site and major construction at its main missile launch site.

The Obama administration, like Congress, is deeply skeptical about negotiating with the North, which says it wants to restart aid-for-disarmament talks. The U.S. has opted to tighten sanctions on Kim Jong Un's regime, while also pressing China to exert more pressure on its troublesome ally.

But the administration's own first appointee as envoy to North Korea, Stephen Bosworth, and former Clinton administration negotiator, Robert Gallucci, said the U.S. government has not had direct contact with a senior North Korean official for more than a year and that the current diplomatic impasse only buys time for Pyongyang to develop its nuclear program further.

The former envoys said that in informal talks last month, North Korean officials told them they were willing to negotiate about their nuclear weapons program. "Whatever risks might be associated with new talks, they are less than those that come with doing nothing," Bosworth and Gallucci wrote Monday in the International New York Times.

Coming from Bosworth in particular, that's pointed criticism. On his watch, the administration's engagement with Pyongyang was very cautious — a policy dubbed "strategic patience" — and actually drew criticism from then Sen. John Kerry who favored more active efforts to talk with the reclusive regime.

But the United States appears unlikely to re-enter talks with North Korea anytime soon, although Kerry, now secretary of state, has kept that possibility open if Pyongyang takes concrete steps to show it is serious about denuclearization.

For one thing, the administration has its hands full. On foreign policy, it is embroiled in diplomacy on Iran's nuclear program and the Syrian civil war — adopting moderate stances that have rankled some of its allies in the Mideast. It's also fending off anger from allies in the West, such as Germany, France and Spain over spying allegations.

On the domestic front, President Barack Obama has lurched from a budget-standoff that sparked a 16-day partial government shutdown and brought the U.S. within a whisker of debt default, to damage limitation over the botched roll-out of his landmark health care policy.

That leaves little time, or perhaps political appetite, to chance the administration's arm at another round of diplomacy with Kim Jong Un, whose government spoiled the last round in spring 2012 by launching a rocket into space — what the U.S. regarded as a test of ballistic missile technology that could potentially threaten America. Then this February, the North conducted an atomic test and later threatened pre-emptive nuclear strikes on the U.S. when it led the international effort to tighten sanctions.

Now North Korea says it wants to restart multi-nation nuclear talks, but is resisting any preconditions and is asking for the U.S. during those talks to conclude a peace treaty to replace the temporary armistice that ended the 1950-53 Korean War.

Bosworth and Gallucci are urging the administration to relax its requirement that "North Korea meet its demands before any dialogue begins" — a reference to Washington's desire to see a freeze in the North's nuclear and missile programs before returning to the six-nation talks, that also include China, Japan, Russia and South Korea.

(Continued at the link below)

http://www.stripes.com/news/pacific/preoccupied-obama-criticized-over-north-korea-policy-1.249724

Facing the Facts: Towards a New U.S. North Korea Policy By: Evans J.R. Revere

A good history of the evolution of US policy toward north Korea.  The 25 page paper can also be downloaded directly at this link: http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/papers/2013/10/16%20north%20korea%20denuclearization%20revere/16%20north%20korea%20denuclearization%20revere%20paper.pdf

He proposes a new negotiating paradigm but prior to that I think he has written a key summary of the problem.  

4) The Problem is the Regime. The tortured history of negotiations with the DPRK suggests strongly that unless and until a way can be found to transform the nature of the North Korean regime and its priorities, denuclearization of the DPRK is unlikely. The regime in Pyongyang shows no sign of serious interest in denuclearization, and in fact has declared its intention to strengthen its nuclear capabilities. 

The collapse of the current regime and the onset of new leadership would open up prospects for a new relationship between North Korea and the international community and bring with it the possibility of a denuclearized North Korea. But a U.S. policy of forcible regime change is both dangerous and unlikely. The U.S. track record in seeking regime change is not a good one, and America’s South Korean ally is unlikely to concur in a policy that would risk chaos on the Korean Peninsula. 

But if the problem is the regime, the current array of sanctions and other pressures is unlikely to alter the regime’s course in the near or medium term. And the ongoing development of the North’s nuclear weapons and missile capabilities suggests that the serious threat posed by these capabilities will become a reality during this same timeframe. Time is not on our side. 

Of particular concern is the ability of the North Korean regime to evade or reduce the impact of current sanctions. This suggests the need to do a better job enforcing and strengthening the current sanctions regime. A particular goal should be to undermine the relationship between the regime and its “base”—the elites who are largely resident in Pyongyang. To an important degree, the regime’s stability depends on its ability to maintain elite support. Thus far, the regime has managed to keep the flow of goods and privileges flowing to this group. Staunching that flow should be an even greater priority for the current sanctions regime. 

New mechanisms should be explored to increase and fine-tune pressure on North Korea. The DPRK’s banking system remains an important target, and additional steps by the international community to sanction North Korean banks and business entities would threaten the regime’s viability, sending an important message to the leadership in Pyongyang. The United States has by no means exhausted the array of sanctions-related tools that could be used to increase pressure on Pyongyang, including measures that have been used to good effect on Iran. The DPRK’s continued refusal to give up its nuclear program, its future success in developing that program, and the fears that this success will generate among its neighbors and the international community are likely to ease the United States’ task in building support for such new measures. The goal of U.S. sanctions-related policy should be to present North Korea with a stark choice between nuclear weapons and economic survival, with the hope that Pyongyang will choose the latter. 

Paper | October 2013

Facing the Facts: Towards a New U.S. North Korea Policy

By: Evans J.R. Revere

http://www.brookings.edu/research/papers/2013/10/16-north-korea-denuclearization-revere

Summary

For two decades, the United States has sought to end North Korea’s nuclear weapons program. Occasional success in freezing elements of that program, together with pledges by Pyongyang to end it, inspired hope that denuclearization could actually be achieved. Hope also grew from the belief that there existed a collection of incentives, including diplomatic normalization, security guarantees, and food assistance, which would convince Pyongyang to abandon its nuclear ambitions. These hopes have been dashed. U.S. policy has failed to achieve its objective.

Important lessons have been learned from years of negotiating with Pyongyang. Among them is that North Korea probably was never serious about ending its nuclear and missile programs. We have learned that even the most robust package of inducements was insufficient to stop Pyongyang’s nuclear pursuit. North Korea has shown itself willing to endure tough sanctions to preserve its nuclear and missile assets. We have seen nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles become twin pillars of the regime’s survival plan. And Pyongyang has enshrined its nuclear status in its constitution and declared that it will not give up its nuclear weapons under any circumstances.

Today, North Korea is advancing its nuclear and ballistic missile programs, which it calls its “strategic deterrent.” Pyongyang knows that the international community will never recognize it as a nuclear weapons state, but believes it can secure the world’s grudging acceptance of its nuclear status. 

Meanwhile, China hopes to reconvene the Six-Party denuclearization talks that collapsed in 2008.  Experience tells us that such negotiations, if they were to resume, will not end Pyongyang’s determined pursuit of nuclear weapons. Occasional North Korean declarations claiming interest in denuclearization notwithstanding, Pyongyang is embarked on the development of a nuclear strike capability that will soon threaten Northeast Asia, including U.S. allies and American bases in the region.

Faced with these facts, U.S. policy must change to meet the stark new reality of a North Korea that possesses nuclear weapons and has threatened to use them, including against the United States. 

The United States should recognize that the current North Korean regime has no intention to denuclearize. Nevertheless, denuclearization should remain the goal of U.S. policy, and the United States should remain open to negotiations if talks offer a serious prospect of achieving that goal. We should also recognize that only direct dialogue with North Korea’s leaders has any chance of changing DPRK policy – although the odds are slim that even this will succeed.  

While leaving the door open to credible negotiations, Washington should expand and intensify current sanctions, thereby greatly raising the economic and political cost to Pyongyang of its nuclear weapons program. The United States should adopt stronger deterrence and counter-proliferation measures and impress on North Korea that its nuclear ambitions will not only prevent the regime from achieving its economic development goals, but could lead to instability. In short, U.S. policy should present North Korea with a stark choice between nuclear weapons and economic survival. 

We must understand and accept that the problem we face is the nature of the North Korean regime itself. Intensifying economic pressure, highlighting the regime’s dismal human rights record, and increasing the flow of information to the North Korean people could hasten the transformation of the regime’s thinking. So, too, could targeted sanctions and other measures designed to shake the confidence of the elites on which the regime depends. But all of these measures could also contribute to the regime’s demise, even if the goal of U.S. policy is not regime change. Accordingly, Washington should intensify discussions with Seoul and Tokyo (and Beijing, if it is willing) on how to respond to the collapse of the North Korean regime.

(Continued at the link below)

http://www.brookings.edu/research/papers/2013/10/16-north-korea-denuclearization-revere

Making Sense of North Korea

Excerpt:

The North Koreans are staunchly resolved to build a nuclear arsenal. We may entertain fantasies that we can stop them. But they know better.

The north Korea with the Kim Family Regime is like an illness – the international community is trying to treat only symptoms rather than curing the disease.  Policy and strategy to deal only with the nuclear program are bound to fail (as they have failed for the past 19 years since the 1994 Agreed Framework).

V/R

Dave

Making Sense of North Korea

Steve Chapman|Feb. 18, 2013 7:00 am

http://reason.com/archives/2013/02/18/making-sense-of-north-korea/print

The old definition of insanity is doing the same thing again and again and expecting a different result. The new definition, which applies only in the case of North Korea, is: doing something different and expecting a different result.

The North Koreans have been pursuing a nuclear arsenal for a couple of decades. We have tried negotiating; we've tried cutting off negotiations; we've tried threatening them; we've tried ignoring them, and we've tried whistling "Camptown Races" while standing on our heads. Nothing has made any visible difference. Come rain or come shine, they keep pursuing a nuclear arsenal.

So it should have come as no surprise when the Pyongyang government conducted a nuclear test, the third it has done. Given the regime's record, it was not a matter of if it would light the fuse but only a matter of when.

Maybe it was significant that the explosion took place the same day as President Barack Obama's State of the Union address. Maybe it was significant that it occurred before rather than after the inauguration of a new South Korean president. Maybe it was an auspicious day in the eyes of the regime's astrologers and Tarot card readers. Or maybe none of this stuff played any role whatsoever.

(Continued at the link below)

http://reason.com/archives/2013/02/18/making-sense-of-north-korea/print