Author

Wade L. Huntley Simons Centre for Disarmament and Nonproliferation Research
Presented to Workshop ”America in Question: Korean Democracy and the Challenge of Non-Proliferation on the Peninsula”
Seoul, ROK 10-11 May 2005 (revised for publication September 2005) 

US policies toward North Korea under the Bush Administration are frequently critiqued for being insufficiently responsive to the “real” circumstances currently prevailing on the Korean Peninsula and in the East Asian region. This article argues that this critique is insufficient. The ideological and almost personal predilections driving the Bush Administration’s North Korea policy are not incidental shortcomings easily rectified. Rather, this orientation expresses the administration’s deeper ideational foundations. The Bush Administration’s North Korea policy is but one of many expressions of this foundation, the commitment to which impinges “realistic” US response to North Korea’s growing nuclear ambitions.

This article first briefly reviews the current state of the Korean Peninsula nuclear crisis. The article next focuses on US responses to the threats this crisis poses to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and the wider array of global nonproliferation efforts that treaty spearheads. Because the inadequacy of the present US position stems from the Bush Administration’s dogmatic adherence to a particular broader global outlook, the article then examines the ideational roots of the Bush Administration’s broader concept of American grand strategy in the post-Cold War world. The article concludes that meeting the challenge to prevent emergence of a nuclear North Korea, and impede proliferation of nuclear and other weapons of mass violence more broadly, will require not simply realistic assessment of the problems, but supplanting the ideational dispositions of US policy-making that are impeding effective responses.

The confrontation between North Korea and the United States reflects metaphorically the Biblical parable of David and Goliath. David prevails because he has unshakable faith in the certainty that of victory despite his evident inferiority, and because, fearless in this faith, he finds and then exploits weaknesses Goliath didn’t realize he had. Goliath’s similarly unquestioned faith in his own strength blinded him to his vulnerabilities. The United States, facing an adversary correspondingly uninhibited by US potency, risks encountering an equivalent fate...(Continued)