[Global NK Commentary] Consistent Inconsistency: What one thirty-year-old cable reveals about US-DPRK relations
2021-05-04
Ben Forney
Global NK Commentary [Commentary 49]
Consistent Inconsistency
What one thirty-year-old cable reveals about US-DPRK relations
Ben Forney
PhD candidate at Seoul National University
Uncoordinated Efforts Deemed Less Useful Than No Efforts – An Insight into Why the North Korean Nuclear Regime Remains a “Grave Concern".
30 years have passed since North Korea’s then “nascent” nuclear program was identified as a “gravely serious threat.” Since 1991, its once budding nuclear program has amassed into a large-scale program, posing a grave challenge for the nuclear proliferation regime and regional security in Northeast Asia. In the following Global NK Commentary, Ben Forney, PhD candidate at the Seoul National University Graduate School of International Studies, explains that international coordination efforts to deter North Korea from developing its nuclear weapons have been inconsistent and ineffective. Manifest in cable exchanges between Washington, Seoul, and Tokyo and President George H.W. Bush’ solo enactment of the Presidential Nuclear Initiatives, unaccompanied by any consultation of his international counterparts, the US stance towards North Korea since 1991 has been contradictory and erratic. With the Biden administration facing a long list of domestic and international concerns not pertaining to the North Korean nuclear regime and the Moon administration’s difficulties into its final year, Forney asserts that prospects for meaningful progress on the North Korean nuclear issue seem bleak.
