Next Stop, Pyongyang? Obama's Diplomatic Trifecta

Eric R. Terzuolo

Politics, Asia

After Iran and Cuba, diplomacy with North Korea could be next.

North Korea was not officially on the agenda of the just-completed Nuclear Security Summit in Washington. The absence of any reference to North Korea in the summit communiqué is no surprise. But President Obama used the occasion to restate his objectives vis-à-vis Kim Jong-un’s regime, and to signal that the Chinese president and the prime ministers of Japan and South Korea, with whom he met on the margins of the summit for some joint hand-wringing, shared those objectives.

In a scene-setting Washington Post op-ed, the President described his aim as “the complete and verifiable denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula in a peaceful manner.” The phrasing is, to say the least, diplomatic. It sidesteps the nasty issue of North Korea’s work on intercontinental ballistic missiles. The inclusive reference to the “Korean peninsula” presumably is designed to avoid pointing fingers, even though South Korea has been militarily denuclearized since late 1991, thanks to then president George H. W. Bush’s decision to remove all U.S. nuclear weapons. And the emphasis on “a peaceful manner” is probably welcome in Pyongyang, after calls in the United States for clearer threats of use of force to deter North Korean acquisition of nuclear weapons capable of threatening the U.S. homeland. The president is leaving open the door to a negotiated solution with the North Koreans, even though the history of past attempts is a chronicle of frustration.