US Tit for Tat Policy With North Korea Does Not Work

Christiane Amanpour, CNN's Chief International Correspondent believes new policy incentives are necessary to keep North Korea in check. In other words, she feels we should set up benchmarks that North Korea can meet and then those will keep North Korea from continuing on its confrontational trajectory. Now, I generally like Amanpour and find her reporting to be decent, but I have to state that I totally disagree with her analysis and with the constant chatter that is coming out from those who consider themselves to be "experts" on North Korea.

Here's a part of her article:

North Korea now says it is slowing down its disabling of Yongbyon and that it will engage in "action for action."

Some analysts now say that despite North Korea's "provocative" rocket launch, the U.S. and its allies should launch new policy incentives and expectations with clear benchmarks for North Korea's nuclear disarmament.

Why should I have an opinion on this? Well, I used to be a counterintelligence agent in South Korea some decades ago, and I dealt with this sort of thing first-hand some time ago. The situation was no different back then. We were making the same mistakes back then, and we're going to continue to make the same mistakes in the future.

First off, we have to stop trying to "reward" North Korea for not doing certain things. They don't care. North Korea is a nation that has always gotten the rewards it achieves by doing something that pisses everyone off, and then they wait for the rest of the world to reward them. And it usually works. It's like the Bizarro interpretation of game theory's tit for tat where you continue to reward a partner for continuing to play the game, even if that partner falls out of the game a few times. In this tit for tat, we're all tat and haven't received a single bit of tit (okay, that didn't sound good, but the point still stands). We keep rewarding the player for not engaging the game, as if we're convinced that if we continue to keep upping the ante and offer more rewards, that player will somehow jump back into the game again.

It doesn't work that way. They have no incentive to jump back into the game when they know they're going to be rewarded anyway.

Twenty years ago, North Korea was facing a famine because they happened to isolate themselves from the rest of the world, and they suddenly realized that most of their arable farmland is on the side of cliffs, meaning they have nowhere to grow the rice they need. So they needed food from outside. When China and the Soviet Union were their allies, this wasn't so bad. Then the Soviet Union collapsed. So they were left begging from China. Now, China is having enough trouble feeding its own. North Korea is now relying on South Korea and Japan. Japan gave up on North Korea, pretty much just giving North Korea the middle finger and saying it wasn't worth it. North Korea responded this last week by shooting a Taepodong-2 missile through Japanese airspace, claiming it was a satellite that was going to transmit North Korean nationalistic music back to the motherland, claiming it succeeded, even though the missile never even came close enough to inserting a satellite into the atmosphere.

Today, North Korea has as much ability to feed itself as it did 20 years ago, and what nations have discovered is that a lot of times the food aid sent to North Korea was sold to fund the military complex that is literally the entire economy of North Korea.

So what is the solution? Stop the tit for tat game and let North Korea come to the table on its own. North Korea is already isolated so that military action is national suicide for North Korea, so if they take that direction, it was because they were planning for it long ago, not because they felt they needed to. By not engaging them in discussion, you let them do whatever it is they want to do. Engage China in real diplomacy, and let China know that North Korea is THEIR neighbor, so if they want their neighbor to run around with nuclear weapons, that's pretty much going to be on them.

All diplomatic efforts need to cease with North Korea immediately. If they come to the table and want to engage in diplomacy, that's another thing. Let them. But if they're going to play the hard to get girl at the dance, then let that girl sit in the corner and watch everyone else dance for awhile.

For too long now, our foreign policy has attempted to threaten, cajole, bribe and shame North Korea to do what we desire. Stop doing that immediately and within a few years North Korea will have to approach the table all by itself. The whole quasi-nuclear test and the missile launch were all responses to all of our previous attempts at cornering North Korea into compliance.

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