Should A Nuclear Freeze Strategy Be Tried with North Korea?
Scott Snyder from the Council on Foreign Relations has an article published that advocates what many in the think tank establishment have been saying that banks and companies doing business with the Kim regime have to be targeted for sanctions to work. Snyder also calls for a nuclear freeze strategy before negotiating for a denuclearization deal:
To show the North Koreans that nuclear development is indeed a dead-end option, the United States must work with its allies to expand sanctions to target businesses and banks that refuse to cease cooperation with North Korea. North Korea must bear a tangible cost for its defiance of repeated warnings from its neighbors to desist from further nuclear and missile tests. Such a course is a necessary self-defensive step short of regime change to contain North Korea’s continuing nuclear and missile development efforts and to impose a de facto freeze on its program.
China’s cooperation toward this end is an essential litmus test of Beijing’s willingness to work together on a clear and present common threat to regional and global security. Only if the international community can impose a freeze on North Korea’s nuclear and missile development will there be a prospect that Kim might move back to denuclearization. [Washington Examiner]
You can read more at the link.
The young Kim’s claim to have developed hydrogen bomb capability underscores the fact that the nuclear program has become a useful tool for maintaining domestic legitimacy of the Kim regime.
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According to other sources, the average North Korean citizen doesn’t care about the regime’s nuclear capabilities. The concept of a “useful took for maintaining a domestic legitimacy” is invalid since the regime maintains its power through fear and intimidation, and doesn’t have to justify itself to the general population. The people of North Korea aren’t going to just wake up one day and decide to overthrow the government. It doesn’t work like that.
Only if the international community can impose a freeze on North Korea’s nuclear and missile development will there be a prospect that Kim might move back to denuclearization.
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Impose a freeze? Without a military strike, how would we ever be able to do this? North Korea has never stopped working on its nuclear weapons program, even back when they were pretending to cooperate with the international community. No amount of sanctions or diplomacy have ever stopped them from pursuing nukes. The author seems to be convinced that there is some secret solution — that one magic sanction that just hasn’t been tried yet — that will shut down NK’s nuclear program. History has proven that as long as the Kim regime is in power, they will keep pursuing nukes. If you want to stop the nukes, you have to remove the regime.