NEWPORT -- Waiting for North Korea "to blink first" in the standoff over its renewed development of nuclear weapons could force the United States into deeper military involvement in Asia and lead to the spread of nuclear weapons beyond the region, a Naval War College professor warned in a speech yesterday.
"Despite all of the headlines, some in the government may believe there is not yet an imminent crisis," said Jonathan D. Pollack, chairman of the college's Strategic Research Department and Asia-Pacific Studies Group. "I don't think we should be wasting a lot of time here. There is a potential urgency that shouldn't leave any of us easy or happy."
Pollack, speaking before several hundred people at the college's 54th annual Current Strategy Forum, recapped the events surrounding North Korea's recent announcements that it had nuclear weapons and was reactivating its nuclear-power facilities without United Nations supervision. In January, one year after President Bush labeled the country an "axis of evil," North Korea announced that it was withdrawing from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.
Pollack said North Korea has indicated it would negotiate if the United States formally recognizes it as a nation, agrees not to attack it and assists with its energy woes. The United States, Japan and South Korea stopped supplying oil to North Korea in November after U.S. officials reported discovering evidence of nuclear-weapons programs there.
The United States, meanwhile, has taken a firm stance with North Korea, whose military is one of the most formidable in the world and which has demonstrated its ability to fire missiles at Japan and at ships in the Sea of Japan.
"The U.S. insists that North Korea must first undo its recent actions before the U.S. is prepared to hint at steps that it might be prepared to undertake to address Pyongyang's [the nation's capital] economic and security concerns," he said. "In my own view, the U.S. has put forward a proposal that it has no expectation North Korea will accept."
U.S. policy appears to preclude any immediate military response to North Korea, he said. But he speculated that if North Korea persists in developing nuclear weapons, the United States might eventually seek to step up its military involvement, both to prevent the export of such weapons off the Korean peninsula and to serve as a regional deterrent to North Korea.
"Is there a way out?" Pollack said.
China and Japan could play a vital role in bringing North Korea and the United States to the negotiating table, but they appear to want to relinquish the lead role to the United States, Pollack said.
"The fact that we have done a lot of arm waving over this crisis and that there are all these kinds of words that sound good betrays the fact that we have not sat down and mapped out a coherent strategy, . . ." he said. "The assumption is that ultimately it is going to have to be North Korea that blinks first. I hope we're right, but I wouldn't want to count on it."
He said U.S. officials may find it "distasteful" bargaining with a nation it fought in the Korean War and which remains ruled by an oppressive regime.
"In some sense, it requires us to validate the North Korean system," he said. But, he said, "We have to begin with North Korea as it is, not as we would wish it to be. Because if the alternative is to say it is unacceptable for us to ever come to some kind of agreement with them . . . then I think we better start reconciling ourselves to a nuclear-armament period, and if we prefer that as an outcome, let's at least be honest about it."
Reporter Richard Salit can be reached at 253-1200 or by e-mail at rsalit@projo.com.
