The DPRK has been identified by global organizations — the UN, NATO, SEATO, the G7, the G20, and others — for its brutal inhumanity. It arrests, beats, imprisons, tortures, and murders its citizens for offenses like possessing certain books or failing to be sufficiently enthusiastic about the regime. That regime started with Kim Il-sung in 1945, was inherited by Kim Jong-il in 1994, and inherited by Kim Jong-un in 2011: a hereditary dynasty of dictators.
Recalling the North Korean situation as it stood during the first decade of the new millennium — the decade in which the DPRK realized its dream of obtaining functioning nuclear weapons — Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld wrote:
As long as Kim Jong Il was in power, I thought we had little prospect of inducing his regime to abandon its nuclear weapons program. Every day Kim and his officials focused on ways to consolidate and protect their dictatorship. Their disastrous policies spawned famine, torture, and oppression. The inhumane leadership of North Korea seemed to believe that the surest hold on power was the pursuit of weapons programs.
North Korea has long isolated itself from nearly every nation on earth. Its original allies — the USSR and Mao’s PRC — developed in ways which drew them away from the DPRK. The Soviet Union fell apart in 1991, abandoning its doctrinaire Marxist ideology. China tweaked its definition of communism in ways which made it less similar to North Korea. So the DPRK has no true allies. But it does retain at least working relationship with China.
So it is that diplomats from around the world look to China to communicate with North Korea. The global community hopes that China will be able to at least persuade the Kim dynasty to see reality. It is probable that the Chinese hierarchy sees the DPRK as a problem, and sees the leadership of the DPRK as unrealistic. Certainly, it would make life easier for China if the North Koreans were at least a bit rational.
At the same time, however, China does not want to be triangulated into the role of being the spokesman for the world community. China will not simply present the world’s demands to North Korea, and thereby become simply a messenger. So this is the tension: China wants the DPRK to improve its behavior, but it does not want to be seen as falling in line with the consensus of the globe’s nations, as Don Rumsfeld writes:
I thought it worthwhile to try to get China to work diplomatically to persuade North Korea to change its nuclear weapons policy, based on the view that our countries had a shared interest in keeping the Korean peninsula free of nuclear weapons. Unfortunately, China seemed more interested in blocking U.S. efforts against North Korea than in keeping the Korean peninsula nuclear weapons-free. The outcome the Chinese seemed to fear most was a collapse of their neighbor. Then they would be forced to deal with refugees and a failed Korean state on their border. As long as Kim Jong Il had China as a patron of sorts, I was not optimistic that negotiations with North Korea involving the Chinese, known as the six-party talks, would succeed.
So, during the first decade of the new millennium, the team which hoped to confront and reform the DPRK — the team which included the UN, NATO, SEATO, the G7, the G20, the Six Party Talks, and others — did not always receive much help from China.
Regarding China’s stance, Don Rumsfeld wrote:
China may one day regret its position if Japan, South Korea, or Taiwan decides to pursue nuclear weapons to counter the North Korean threat.
Moving from the first decade of the new millennium to the second decade of the new millennium, the global community adjusted its approach to the DPRK. Where words had failed, actions would have an impact.
But the perennial question facing the diplomat is this: If one seeks to employ actions instead of words, how does one avoid war? How do the agreed nations of the world take action against North Korea without starting a war?
Nikki Haley was the United States ambassador to the United Nations from January 2017 to December 2018. She was one of the leaders who helped to implement a new approach by the UN and the US:
The new policy came to be called the “maximum pressure” campaign. Part of the new policy was military preparedness. Although we were committed to finding a diplomatic solution, the president never took the possibility of military action off the table. We would deliver a devastating blow if North Korea used its missiles against the United States or our allies. And we made sure the North Koreans knew it.
The “maximum pressure” strategy included both military strength and economic leverage. A concerted enforcement of economic sanctions denied large amounts of income which North Korea would have otherwise received from its export of goods. The two factors — economic pressure and military muscle-flexing — did not replace, but rather joined, the diplomacy of the previous decades, as Nikki Haley writes:
We also exerted pressure through diplomacy, encouraging other nations to cut off political and trade ties with North Korea.
The new tactics had measurable effects: the number and frequency of nuclear weapons explosions and missile launches in North Korea declined detectably from 2017 to 2020.
North Korea and the United States held their first-ever summit-level talks, when Kim Jong-un met with President Trump on 12 June 2018 in Singapore. This was followed by two more summit meetings, in Hanoi in February 2019, and in the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) between North Korea and South Korea on 30 June 2019.
Starting in early 2021, this trend reversed itself, and North Korea began increasing its dramatic public displays by detonating nuclear weapons and launching missiles.
