Ending a Decade of Diplomatic Stalemate: Applying Maximum Pressure to North Korea

Since 1945, North Korea has been under the repressive regime of a three-generation hereditary dictatorship. In succession, the grandfather, the father, and the son have oppressed the citizens of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). The name of the country is unintentionally ironic: the government is not democratic, it’s not chosen by the people, and it’s not a republic.

Kim Il-sung was placed into power by the Soviet Union, which obtained the northern half of the Korean peninsula in a post-WW2 agreement. The USSR wrote the constitution for North Korea and created the structure of the state, which was officially codified as the DPRK in 1948. Kim Il-sung led the provisional government from 1945 until 1948, and then led the DPRK from 1948 until his death in 1994.

In 1994, Kim Jong-il became the leader of North Korea, inheriting the power from his father.

By 2006, the DPRK had developed a weapons of mass destruction (WMD) program, and the growth of that program was significant and troubling. World leaders were divided on how to deal with this situation. Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense at the time, advocated placing significant economic pressure on North Korea. But Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of State, argued for continued purely diplomatic talks, without concrete actions. Rumsfeld recalls:

Instead of offering inducements of financial aid and heating oil, I thought there might be a remote possibility that if we put enough diplomatic and financial pressure on the country, some of its senior generals might overthrow Kim Jong Il. By 2006, Rice and the State Department envoy to North Korea, Christopher Hill, made clear that North Korea was the State Department’s issue alone, and that the views of the Defense Department would carry little weight. Rice and Hill seemed to believe they could obtain an agreement with North Korea to end its WMD programs. Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Asian and Pacific Affairs Richard Lawless, a veteran expert on the region with years in the CIA, was no longer included in discussions.

So it was that talks continued, but no concrete actions were taken to make the DPRK feel the consequences of its bad behavior. In fact, after 2008, some of the few economic sanctions which had been enacted against North Korea were relaxed.

Kim Jong-il died in 2011, and his son, Kim Jong-un became the DPRK’s dictator.

From the time North Korea achieved nuclear weapon capability in 2006, a decade has passed. During those years, the DPRK continually conducted weapons tests: either exploding a nuclear warhead, or launching a long-range missile. These tests were not primarily “tests” in the sense of determining whether the technology would function correctly. These “tests” were threats to other nations: a belligerent saber-rattling exercise.

These tests became more and more dangerous, and the world’s diplomats, organized as NATO, the UN, the G7, the G20, and the Six-Party Talks, hoped to persuade North Korea to abandon the continuous testing.

While various nations, in the organizations listed above, or in other ad hoc organizations, or individually, were persistent in their efforts to dissuade the DPRK from its bullying behavior, they were also ineffective in those efforts. North Korea was not influenced by words. Diplomacy was futile. The nations of the world would need a different approach if the DPRK’s warmongering was to be moderated.

From January 2017 to December 2018, Nikki Haley was the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. During that time, she would be instrumental in developing and applying a new strategy. This “maximum pressure” strategy would employ more than words. The collected nations of the world would inflict economic pain on North Korea. The pain would be presented as a consequence of the DPRK’s belligerence, and the pain would be removed when the warlike behavior stopped.

Various nations would impose financial penalties on North Korea as a consequence of its weapons development and weapons testing programs. These penalties — called “sanctions” in diplomatic jargon — would make life uncomfortable for the ruling elite in the DPRK, as Nikki Haley explains:

At the center of the pressure campaign was sanctioning the North Korean regime — making Kim Jong Un and the ruling elite “bleed” until they finally agreed to serious, unconditional negotiations that would ultimately eliminate their nuclear weapons. After the North Koreans launched their first ICBM capable of reaching the United States on July 4, we began to work at the United Nations on the first of what would be three sanctions packages.

Nikki Haley presented the “maximum pressure” approach to the UN Security Council. “When I took to the Security Council chamber to announce our new, more aggressive approach,” she recalls, the torture and murdered carried out by the DPRK was “very much on my mind.” Statistics reveal the millions of people arrested, beaten, imprisoned, and executed by the North Korean government. A single case can give a human face to impersonal numbers: she spoke to the UN in July 2017, only a few weeks after an American college student named Otto Warmbier died as a result of the physical abuse he’d received from the DPRK. Warmbier had been touring North Korea as part of a study trip to several east Asian countries.

The North Korean government had arrested and detained Otto Warmbier for allegedly taking a poster off the wall in his hotel. Whether he in fact took the poster is unclear. What is clear is that the DPRK organized a trial — dictatorships tend to present “show trials” or “mock trials” in “kangaroo courts,” events with no legal legitimacy, but which serve as a pretext for imprisoning and killing anyone who displeases the dictatorship. Warmbier was declared guilty after this meaningless trial. The court sentenced him to fifteen years of hard labor, but less than two years after his conviction, he was released to the U.S. government. He was in a coma, and had been for some time. In June 1017 he was flown back to the U.S., where he died only a few days after landing.

Nikki Haley alluded to Otto Warmbier in her speech at the U.N.; she spoke to those present in the assembly, but she was aware of the larger audience as excerpts of the speech would be televised:

I spoke directly to the American people about the unique evil of the North Korean regime.

“Americans had seen how barbarous the North Koreans treated” a college student who had deserved no such treatment. It was a crystalizing incident, and Warmbier gave a human face to those millions of people who’d been tortured and killed. Brutality on an individual level was indicative of brutality on a massive scale: why would the world allow North Korean to continue to build an arsenal of nuclear weapons? Nikki Haley writes about the case of Otto Warmbier:

It was a sign to all of us that the Kim regime was capable of barbaric acts on a much larger scale.

The DPRK’s profile among the world’s nations was, and is, shaped by two factors: its relentless drive to build a significant WMD arsenal, and its brutality toward both its own citizens and other individuals.

After a decade of diplomatic stalemate from 2006, when North Korea had its first fully operational nuclear weapon, to 2016, when Nikki Haley was nominated to be the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, a new tactic was implemented. The “maximum pressure” campaign did not rely on words alone, but on real-world economic measures which affected the daily functioning of Kim Jong-un and his dictatorship.

After Haley was confirmed and took office in early 2017, and after the implementation of the maximum pressure strategy, some detectable progress was made: North Korea dramatically reduced both the number of nuclear weapons tests and the number of long-range missile tests. After dozens of missile tests in 2017, the DPRK performed none in 2018.

North Korea exploded atomic bombs in 2016 and 2017; it exploded none in 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021.

In addition to a significant reduction in weapons activity, diplomatic progress was made in the first-ever summit meetings between a member of the Kim dynasty and a U.S. president. Summit meetings occured in Singapore in June 2018, in Hanoi in February 2019, and in the DMZ in April 2019. The DMZ is the demilitarized zone, a strip of land along the border between North Korea and South Korea.

The actions taken by the world’s nations, acting together, prompted by the U.S. policy of maximum pressure as presented by Nikki Haley, made a measurable and quantifiable difference.

In 2022, however, the DPRK resumed both missile tests and nuclear weapons tests. This was apparently in response to a perceived laxness which had crept into the implementation of the maximum pressure strategy.

Roman Military Success: Strategy, Not Tactics

Around 27 B.C., the Roman Empire replaced the Roman Republic. The republic had already begun an era of amazing expansion, growing from the city-state of Rome, to much of the Italian peninsula, to other parts of Europe, to North Africa, to the British Isles, and to the Ancient Near East.

Indeed, one of the factors in the morphing of the republic into an empire was the need for a new form of government which could manage this large and growing territory. The republic was a type of government best suited to a city-state which had a modest amount of surrounding land under its rule. A large, multi-continental required a different governmental structure.

Although not as sharply distinguished as in the twenty-first century United States, it can still be said that in the Roman Empire there was some distinction between the civilian government and the military. To be sure, that distinction was at times blurred, as in the case of the civil wars between 49 B.C. and 27 B.C. which led up to the end of the republic and the beginning of the empire.

The Roman military featured private armies which owed their primary allegiance to their commanding generals, and not to the nation or government.

While the military devoted attention to tactics — the different types of weapons and how they were used, various formations of soldiers in combat, etc. — historian Edward Luttwak argues that it was not tactics, but rather strategy, which primarily shaped the Roman armies and which led to their victories and defeats.

Luttwak writes that the successes of the Roman military were achieved, not because of their tactics, but rather despite their tactics:

Had the strength of the Roman Empire derived from a tactical superiority on the battlefield, from superior generalship, or from a more advanced weapons technology, there would be little to explain, though much to describe. But this was not so. Roman tactics were almost invariably sound but not distinctly superior, and the Roman soldier of the imperial period was not noted for his élan. He was not a warrior intent on proving his manhood but a long-service professional pursuing a career; his goal and reward was not a hero’s death but a severance grant upon retirement. Roman weapons, far from being universally more advanced, were frequently inferior to those used by the enemies whom the empire defeated with such great regularity. Nor could the secular survival of the empire have been ensured by a fortunate succession of great feats of generalship: the Roman army had a multitude of competent soldiers and a few famous generals, but its strength derived from method, not from fortuitous talent.

Over time, there were shifts in emphases: At some times, the Romans looked more toward fortifications — walls, watchtowers, fortresses — to solidify the borders; at other times there was less emphasis on such structures, and more emphasis on keeping mobile groups of soldiers ready to move into regions of sudden or unexpected conflict. Likewise, there were variations between times in which the army was composed mainly of Romans, and other times in which many of the soldiers were mercenaries, foreigners, or both.

Changes in the priorities of the civilian government led to changes, Luttwak asserts, in the strategies employed by the military:

Three distinct methods of imperial security can be identified over the period. Each combined diplomacy military forces, road networks, and fortifications to serve a single objective, functioning therefore as a system up to a point, albeit with local variations, interruptions, and exceptions. But each addressed a distinct set of priorities, themselves the reflection of evolving conceptions of empire: hegemonic expansionism for the first system; territorial security for the second; and finally, in diminished circumstances, sheer survival for the imperial power itself. Each system was based on a different combination of diplomacy, direct force, and fixed infrastructure, and each entailed different operational methods, but more fundamentally, each system reflected a different Roman world view and self-image.

This tripartite division of the imperial era can be illustrated with examples. The first, expansive, phase is seen in, e.g., the conquest of Gaul, or the invasion and occupation of the southern half of Great Britain. The second phase, securing the borders, led to the construction of structures like the limes between the Rhine and the Danube, or the construction of Hadrian’s Wall between England and Scotland. The final phase, during the gradual contraction of the empire, included defensive fighting against Germanic tribes, Huns, and Persians.

While the five centuries of imperial military activity make for a rich and complex narrative, Edward Luttwak’s identification of these three stages creates a useful larger framework for understanding both the military history of the Roman Empire, as well as the interrelations between the civilian and military histories.