North Korea and Iran occupy an important place in the strategic thinking of the United States and like-minded states. Across conservative and progressive administrations, American presidents have consistently identified these two states together in some of their most comprehensive policy addresses since the turn of the 21st century. Strategic national security documents published by the U.S. intelligence community, Defense and State Departments, and the White House overwhelmingly place the two countries together in formal conceptualizations of U.S. foreign and security policy interests and actions. They articulate a certain intuitive sense that Iran and North Korea pose a similar threat that has gained prominence in U.S. foreign policy practice, but the comparison has largely been left vague and underexplored.
At the beginning of the 21st century, this idea gained some additional clarity as an American administration deeply affected by the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States focused on a grouping of states perceived to be at the intersection of nuclear weapons pursuit and state sponsors of terrorism. Strategic policy documents shifted to articulate this intersectional challenge, though the more independent National Intelligence Strategies did not shift to subscribe to the thesis. Some elements of a concern connecting Iran and North Korea to nuclear terrorism survived into the following U.S. administration, but the comparison transferred into the next presidential administration with substantially less focus on the terrorism connection. Though there has been both substantial and minor variation in the articulation of the North Korea–Iran comparison that has grown in prominence since the early 2000s, the comparison has gained wide acceptance across political parties, branches of the U.S. government, and among like-minded partners.
The concept of a grouping of second-tier states with various countries included has evolved since the 1980s with a variety of names, including “outlaw states,” “rogue states,” “states of concern,” “the Axis of Evil,” “outlier states,” and others. The stated commonality of these countries has likewise evolved, as have the states included in the grouping, but the typology has never been clearly defined. The term “states of concern” exemplifies the vagueness and analytical confusion. The “concern” must be specified in order to address it.
This book shows that Iran and North Korea are illicit nuclear aspirants. They have pledged to forego nuclear weapons and taken overt acts over many years in violation of that legally binding and highly consequential pledge to the international community. They are not uniquely paired on other metrics, and other contemporary states do not bear inclusion as illicit nuclear aspirants currently. Illicit nuclear aspirants pose a similar type of threat to international peace and security that has prompted some of the same policy responses. However, this in-depth comparison of the two illicit nuclear aspirants provides a structured comparison that allows us to draw analytical and policy conclusions that this chapter details.
This book explored the Iran–North Korea comparison to refine and test the typology of the illicit nuclear aspirants. Both Iran and North Korea pose long-standing security challenges to international order, and an appreciation of the relevant history is important. North Korea and Iran lack a shared history and culture and are separated by 4,000 miles and thin and only historically recent interactions. When we delve deeper, we find that Iran and North Korea occupy opposite ends of the spectrum on most historical metrics. Iran has a history of feudal decentralization to help govern a geographically large and multiethnic polity; since its inception the Islamic Republic has had to maintain some elements of decentralized governance and created concepts of Iranian citizenship to accommodate this diversity. By contrast, North Korea has an ethnically homogenous population and history of centralized rule. It did not need to create a concept of citizenship with rights and duties, but relied on an ethnic-based conception of who belongs to the nation. North Korea did not need to contend with possible sectarian fault lines within the country, but had the distinct task of trying to extend its reach over all members of the ethnic group, including those in South Korea, as a foundational ideal.
North Korea and Iran recall intensely negative experiences with colonialism and skepticism about relying on foreign powers. Though the United States did not colonize either country, the role of the United States is central to both countries’ founding ideals and core purpose. For the Islamic Republic, the U.S. support for a coup that overthrew Iran’s budding constitutionalist prime minister in favor of the Shah and subsequent support for the Shah’s dictatorship fused the United States with a political leader that the revolutionary Islamic Republic organized against. The Islamic Republic envisioned itself as the alternative to the Shah’s regime, so its founding ideals include very significant anti-American/anti-Shah elements. The Shah is gone, but the United States remains. The Islamic Republic also saw the United States as critically supporting Iraq during the devastating eight-year Iran-Iraq War, which also remains a core founding memory for the Islamic Republic.
North Korea’s distrust for the United States has different origins but runs as deep. The DPRK’s founder was a nationalistic guerrilla fighter who became the leader of a state. However, that state only controlled half of the Korean nation, and Kim Il Sung considered unifying the whole Korean nation under the DPRK’s flag as fundamental to his efforts. In 1950 he launched the Korean War and would have achieved this goal quickly if it were not for U.S. military intervention that pushed back the DPRK advance. For the DPRK, the United States has frustrated Korean national unification since the end of the Japanese colonial rule. Foreign powers have trampled on the interests of Iranians and Koreans, especially since the late 19th century, and Tehran and Pyongyang both see a need to protect their own security independently. Intense anti-Americanism and a focus on providing for the country’s basic existence, or security, independently are deeply engrained concepts in both revolutionary countries.
This basic history explored in Chapter 2 leaves us with a few lessons. Iran and North Korea pursue this independent security by creating a nuclear weapons option; in this indirect way, nuclear technology is related to the two countries’ ideologies as an envisioned route to independent security. North Korea in particular has noted in recent years that it cannot envision an alternative means to deter superpower intervention and has placed greater rhetorical emphasis on its nuclear weapons. Insofar as sovereignty and national security can be preserved through other means outside a nuclear deterrent, however, neither country would need to explicitly modify its ideology to accommodate a shift away from nuclear weapons. Our study demonstrates that a nuclear weapons option has an important place in national security considerations for Iran and North Korea, but they are not founding or ideological goals in either regime.
The Iranian and North Korean nuclear programs affect many countries’ interests, so there is a natural pull for many countries to try to have a direct role in addressing these challenges. However, Iran and North Korea have both clearly identified their concern as an American one. Other parties can play important supporting roles, but ultimately the United States must be involved for any sustainable political solution to these strategic issues.
Significantly, neither the DPRK nor the Islamic Republic considers creating national prosperity a core purpose of either regime. Neither eschews national wealth, but it is not the reason for the regimes’ existence. Both leaderships have sought to address economic issues when they reach crisis proportions, but economic experts do not occupy the senior-most posts in either regime, and economic policy does not top either regime’s priority list. Pursuing certain political, ideological, and religious ideals comes first. In practice, both Iran and North Korea have been willing to accept economic consequences of their efforts to pursue their revolutionary political goals while trying to blunt the impact of outside economic pressure or removal of economic incentives. We conclude that economic pressure and incentives can contribute to tactical shifts by the targeted countries, but economic consequences or incentives must be particularly significant to sway the revolutionary regimes that value political and security goals far higher than economic ones.
Foreign powers seeking to persuade, pressure, entice, or cajole Iran and North Korea to make certain political decisions on the nuclear or other issues require an understanding of the political system they seek to influence. Likewise, attempting to impose economic pressure or provide economic inducements benefit from an understanding of how the target economy functions. Both are exercises in identifying levers of influence, and we show that addressing Iran and North Korea with similar tools says more about those utilizing the tools than the political and economic reality in Iran and North Korea. These two states stand on opposite ends of the spectrum of authoritarian governance and economics.
Chapter 3 shows that the two regimes’ domestic political and economic similarities are limited, and the regimes’ fundamental political and economic structure and orientation do not merit grouping them together in a typology of states. Both regimes began with charismatic founders who shifted from revolutionaries to rulers and created a political system in the process. This ordering of state formation importantly helped institutionalize revolutionary goals and structures in both governments.
The revolutionary character of the two countries is meaningful. Iran has had only two leaders since its founding in 1979 and the DPRK only three since its founding in 1948. Although both systems have a strong chief executive, succession has not dramatically changed either regime, suggesting a degree of institutionalization and structural constraints that shape policy before one considers proclivities of an individual leader. Both states also have differing views within the system and personality politics. In extreme form, both Iranian and North Korean leaders have utilized purges to remove perceived threats to their power, and the top leader in both countries has moved toward the conservative base when faced with domestic challenges. In more regular interactions, both states have accommodated or contended with different internal perspectives on policy approach. Economically, the state has an important role in the largest enterprises in both countries.
As Robert Litwak perceptively argues, this revolutionary commonality is important for policy. Following George Kennan’s advice, the outside world should look to contain revolutionary regimes like North Korea and Iran to expose internal contradictions and foment internal societal changes. Given difficulties in realizing denuclearization in both countries, such an approach seeks an indigenous regime transformation over time that may allow addressing these challenges more constructively in the future.1 Notwithstanding this strategic observation on the revolutionary character of the two regimes, peering closer at the comparison, we see that the specific differences between the two states are more pronounced. This more granular focus allows additional and distinct specific policy recommendations and conclusions.
Far more than North Korea, Iranian politics must contend with diversity, which has aided the rise of more meaningful electoral politics. Iran’s revolution brought together diverse and multiethnic interests that demanded a say in the new regime. Whereas Tehran attempted with some success to limit differing views during the Iran-Iraq War, those with different views reemerged after the war and advocated distinct approaches to cultural, economic, and even foreign policy. The reality of Iran’s founding prompted a degree of authoritarian pluralism from the outset that, combined with elements of Shi’a political thought, gave rise to Iran’s quasi-democratic institutions, including the parliament and the presidency.
By contrast, North Korea’s founder empowered himself and the families of his original band of 300 guerrilla fighters to create North Korea’s political class. He did not have to contend with sectarian divisions that provide more long-lasting groupings and allegiances as seen in Iran; rather, only personality-based opposition emerged that could more easily be eliminated. North Korea’s parliament is a rubber-stamp organization, and elections are better understood as national celebrations than meaningful opportunities for the electorate to express a view on policy or governance. Amid severe crisis situations and a position of weakness, North Korea’s second leader, Kim Jong Il, reluctantly moved toward a divide-and-rule method over its long-held emphasis on unity.
Iran also has a meaningful history with social protests, whereas North Korea does not. Domestic controversy over foul play in Iran’s elections in 2009 prompted mass protests around the country. Opposition politicians participated in and encouraged the protests, demonstrating the possibility of politically meaningful social mobilization in Iran on a scale that has not been seen in North Korea. Civil society, opposition media, and even limited political representation of citizens’ views are far more developed in Iran than in North Korea.
The differences in state–society relations that make Tehran more susceptible from demands from below are significant. The Islamic Republic quelled the protests in 2009, for example, but it is unclear how much memory of the incident has affected subsequent decision making in Tehran and sensitized the Islamic Republic somewhat to public demands. Chapter 5 shows that economic sanctions that imposed pain on the Iranian government and people alike helped to push Iran back to the negotiating table on the nuclear issue, suggesting some degree of responsiveness in Tehran to mass-based concerns. We cannot rule out that Tehran’s recent memories of the consequences of extreme popular dissatisfaction with regime policies that prompted nationwide protests played a constructive role in moving Tehran to accept a nuclear compromise in face of sanctions that affected the Iranian people’s livelihoods. We see no parallel in North Korea. Pyongyang has not had to respond to mass-based demands in the same way or shown a particular concern about the social consequences of sanctions that might encourage concessions on its nuclear program.
Also, our analysis of these two countries’ political players and interests reveals we should expect contradictory rhetoric and even some contradictory actions coming out of both regimes. Just as distinct political actors in the United States may articulate different preferred approaches to Iran and North Korea policy or seek to undermine competing policy approaches, we should expect something similar from Iran and even North Korea. Combined with the greater opaqueness in Iran and North Korea than democracies, we should also expect greater difficulty in assessing accurately the intent and consequence of contradictory comments and actions.
Given this basic understanding of domestic political players in Iran and North Korea, combined with the continued opaqueness of both systems, direct contact with authoritative power centers at the government-to-government level is a simple means to enhance accurate communication. For example, Iran’s President Ahmadinejad objected publicly to Israel’s existence and noted Iran hoped to wipe the Jewish state “off the map,” but Supreme Leader Khamenei eventually clarified Tehran’s position that it wants regime change in Jerusalem but does not seek to exterminate the Jewish people. Understanding the Supreme Leader’s superior position over the Iranian president can be understood from afar, but private government-to-government communications can help clarify a regime’s position in an authoritative and timely way. Similarly, analysts from afar may debate who ordered North Korea’s sinking a South Korean naval vessel or shelling a South Korean island, but direct government-to-government private communications can provide additional data points to help address the opacity in the regime’s domestic politics.2 As we explore later in this chapter as an outgrowth of Chapter 3’s analysis, responsible government officials can speak for the regime to correct off-message communications and actions, and private diplomatic channels provide a means to more effectively communicate.
Iran and North Korea contrast with one another on almost every economic indicator, and their economic situations do not make them easily comparable. Iran’s economy is nine to sixteen times larger than North Korea’s, with extremely limited information about the most basic North Korean economic data accounting for the tremendous variation in estimates. Iran is the second-largest economy in the Middle East, and North Korea holds a distant last place in Northeast Asia. On a per capita basis, the average Iranian earns about $12,000 per year, whereas the average North Korean earns about $1,000. The United Nations provides food aid to one-tenth of North Korea’s population, and this is just the prioritized groups of the most vulnerable, whereas the UN only has a few targeted aid programs for refugees inside Iran. Iran’s recent peak inflation rate was a very high 45 percent, whereas North Korea’s inflation reached 6,000 to 8,000 percent on certain basic commodities. Iran’s currency is useable; North Koreans are increasingly reliant on barter as the regime tries to ban foreign currencies amid completely eroded domestic confidence in the North Korean currency.
Iran is an energy-exporting state, reliant on foreign trade and usually producing annual trade surpluses. International efforts to cut off parts of that trade have created observable domestic economic and political reactions, including substantial moves even on nuclear diplomacy. North Korea imports energy to fuel its significantly shrunk industrial economy, has insulated itself from the benefits and costs of foreign trade, and consistently runs trade deficits financed by politically motivated loans from China that few believe will ever be repaid. North Korea’s complete loss of major trading partners, including Japan and South Korea, did not produce noticeable economic dislocation or changed political positions. It did not prompt North Korea to come back to the negotiating table on the nuclear issue. Iran has a variety of trading partners or potential trading partners, whereas North Korea has faced increased international isolation from an autarkic base.
These basic differences make applying lessons from one country’s experience with sanctions to the other difficult. In particular, contemporary calls to apply financial sanctions successes with respect to Iran to North Korea miss these important economic distinctions. The policy appeal is understandable, especially as the United States even imposed financial measures on North Korea over a decade ago that some have concluded brought Pyongyang back to the negotiating table on the nuclear issue at the time. But North Korea has adapted its operations based on this history and even further insulated itself from economic pressure.3 Iran is a wealthier and more internationally integrated country than North Korea, with consequent benefits, but this benefit also makes it more susceptible to international economic pressure in a way that North Korea largely is not.4
The politics of sanctions relief are substantially different between Iran and North Korea as well. If one concludes that imposing sanctions can pressure a regime, presumably offering to remove certain sanctions would entice it under the right circumstances. However, Iran’s domestic economic situation suggests it should be enticed more to this type of incentive than North Korea. Iran has its own domestic economic challenges, but it ultimately possesses a large quantity of a highly valued international commodity: crude oil. At least some international companies have found the infrastructure and legal system inside Iran sufficient to make doing business with Iran profitable.
North Korea should not be so confident. It lacks a similar commodity, and its poor communications and transportation infrastructure as well as lack of property rights and reputational risk of dealing with perhaps the world’s worst human rights violator all suggest that removing sanctions would not produce significantly more foreign investment in North Korea. North Korea may blame its economic woes on sanctions, but its economic problems run much deeper. Although engagement optimists might be encouraged by our conclusion that applying new Iran-style financial sanctions on North Korea do not pack much punch, they may be disappointed by our conclusion that lifting sanctions alone should not provide encouragement either.
However, our analysis shows that both countries’ domestic efforts toward economic reform have been short-lived, especially as they fail to show concrete achievements quickly. Iran and especially North Korea face daunting economic challenges, and their technocrats who are relatively isolated from the rest of the world are novices dealing with problems that would challenge the world’s top experts. Economic capacity building can help sustain alternative economic paths that show the importance of political accommodation with the outside world on contentious security issues in order to address persistent economic problems.
Although there is an understandable political appeal to add a variety of components to the comparison, our findings show that the fundamental similarity between Iran and North Korea is that both countries have signed the landmark Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and violated their commitments to the other 190 signatories through illicit pursuit of nuclear programs.5 This is what makes them illicit nuclear aspirants. Adding other components such as their revolutionary governments, human rights violations, past or present sponsorship of terrorism, or regionally destabilizing military behavior limits the typology and stretches its meaning. We do not discount the analytical or policy importance of these observations and issues, but they are not minimum characteristics of the typology. None of these other categories are uniquely applicable to the North Korea–Iran grouping as well.
Trying to show one’s commitment to critically important human rights issues is noble, and we strongly support efforts to improve the human rights situation in both countries. We should not lose sight of our values while trying to pursue security, and we understand the appeal to publicly articulate one’s commitment to human rights when discussing these two countries. This commitment, however, does not alter our core findings. North Korea and Iran are not similar because of their human rights situations.
Iran has human rights problems, including extensive use of the death penalty, discrimination against minorities, restrictions on the freedom of expression, and use of torture as repeatedly documented by the United Nations, European Union, NGOs, and various national governments, including the United States, as detailed in Chapter 4. But North Korea is on a completely different plane in terms of the scale and conduct of severe human rights violations that the UN has formally found amount to crimes against humanity, including “extermination, murder, enslavement,” and many other abuses. Tehran harasses government critics and opposition activists; Pyongyang eliminates them. Iran provides for its people’s basic right to food, whereas North Korea does not prioritize this objective for all. The human rights dimensions are different in scope and character,6 and we do not find particular inspiration or tactical approaches from efforts to promote human rights in North Korea to apply to Iran or vice versa.
Nevertheless, Iran and North Korea share a common concern about foreign human rights initiatives. Advanced democracies view human rights advocacy as stemming from a value-based foreign policy, but the Iranians and North Koreans argue that these democracies are much more insidious on the issue. The West uses human rights as a justification for interference in internal affairs and as a precursor to regime change, they claim. Unfortunately, states that abuse human rights are not limited to these two, and calls for noninterference in internal affairs is a familiar refrain from many states with poor human rights records.7 The general disregard for human rights and urging foreign noninterference in internal affairs does not make Iran and North Korea uniquely comparable or provide specific insights for policy recommendations.
Likewise, North Korea and Iran are not primarily comparable on terrorism concerns. Iran formed significant international terrorism organizations and continues to provide them material support today. The U.S. State Department continues to label Iran the most significant state sponsor of terrorism. North Korea once occupied a place on the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism, and the U.S. House of Representatives has required that the secretary of state make a determination on whether North Korea should be relisted, but the country has been removed from the list for nearly a decade. North Korea was added to the list after state operatives in the 1970s and 1980s tried to assassinate the South Korean president and killed multiple members of his senior staff in the process, downed a South Korean civilian airliner, and abducted foreign nationals. North Korea did not support separate terrorist organizations but carried out these actions directly. Iran is a current state sponsor of terrorism, whereas North Korea is an historical state conductor of terrorism. The distinction is important if one worries about these states transferring nuclear technology to separate, semiautonomous terrorist organizations that pose different challenges to deterrence. Iran has a deep history of relationships with semiautonomous terrorist organizations, but North Korea does not.
Any nuclear production facility poses some risk of nuclear transfer, either inadvertent or otherwise. In this regard, the North Korean and Iranian nuclear facilities contribute to the nuclear terrorism concern. However, it is again not unique to the two states and does not justify grouping the two states together in a unique typology. As we note in Chapter 4, Russian and Pakistani knowledge and facilities as well as a variety of developing countries with nuclear power programs pose greater threats to this concern than North Korea and Iran. The nuclear terrorism link dominated a U.S. administration’s thinking about the common threat posed by Iran and North Korea through the early part of the 2000s, but our study concludes that the empirical evidence does not support this view.
Iran and North Korea’s neighbors also worry about conventional military provocations and their role in fomenting regional instability in geostrategic regions. Saudi Arabia, the Gulf monarchies, and Israel share concerns about Iran’s conventional military’s overt and covert threats to their security along similar lines as South Korea and Japan worry about North Korea. But the Middle East and Northeast Asia are very different regions in terms of stability. Although Northeast Asia poses great risks of significant conflict among many well-resourced and increasingly well-armed states, there has not been any major international conflict in the region since the 1950–1953 Korean War. By contrast, the Middle East has been replete with war and conflict. Whereas North Korea initiated the only war in its relatively tranquil region, Iran notes it has never initiated a war in its much more violent neighborhood in the modern era. Iran and North Korea are not particularly comparable on this score.
We find that the only commonality between Iran and North Korea on their contributions to regional instability stems from their pursuit of nuclear weapons. Regional powers in Northeast Asia and the Middle East alike worry that functioning and deliverable nuclear weapons could embolden North Korea and Iran to act more aggressively with its conventional forces. Assured that foreign powers would not invade a nuclear-armed state, North Korea and Iran could pursue its revolutionary aims with greater abandon. However, we should understand this common threat to regional stability as a downstream consequence of the two states’ illicit nuclear aspirations rather than something separate about each country’s character.
Finally, the rise of China has animated some discussion about its similar role as the great power patron or protector of Iran and North Korea, but we have shown that the reality is more complex. China has an historical relationship with North Korea that has been on the wane for decades. China has legacy issues wrapped up in North Korea and concerns about what an alternative future for the Korean Peninsula means for Beijing. China’s North Korea policy is about minimizing losses. By contrast, China had virtually no strategic relationship with Iran in the 20th century but has rapidly expanded its trade and strategic relationship with Tehran since the 2000s. China’s Iran policy is about maximizing gains. China has a role to play in the sustainable resolution of the international community’s concerns about Iran’s and North Korea’s nuclear programs, but the large state’s complex and global interests should not be confused with helping to define a fundamental similarity between Iran and North Korea.
Signing the treaty with more signatories than any other international agreement besides the UN Charter is a simple signpost for the two states accepting the legally binding international norm on nonproliferation. North Korea has completely scuttled its commitment, declared the country’s withdrawal from the treaty, and tested a nuclear weapon multiple times. Iran has not gone as far as North Korea and tries to maintain a more ambiguous position on its nuclear program, but has aroused significant international concern about its nuclear aspirations. Iran and North Korea are unique among countries today that signed the NPT and accepted this important international norm to forego the pursuit of nuclear weapons and have taken overt and long-standing action in violation of that commitment. They are illicit nuclear aspirants. This section draws on the similarities and differences exposed in this book to suggest lessons learned for foreign policy considerations.
North Korea and Iran are highly committed to their nuclear programs that they have been pursuing since the early 1960s. Regime change in Iran in 1979 put on hold the country’s interest in nuclear technology as the new political leaders focused on the domestic revolutionary upheaval and the next immediate task of the Iran-Iraq War. But the new Iranian regime renewed the previous regime’s nuclear interest by the late 1980s. Without the interruption of regime change, North Korea has pursued nuclear technology more steadily since the 1960s. As our analysis of the two states’ ideological systems in Chapter 2 demonstrates, neither Iran nor North Korea identifies nuclear weapons as a founding ideal or ideological imperative, and both have shown a willingness to limit or temporarily halt nuclear work to satisfy other national interests. Nuclear weapons or a nuclear weapons option has become increasingly important in both countries, and international efforts to convince or cajole both states to fundamentally and irreversibly change course have not achieved that goal to date.
A nuclear program deemed fundamental to national security is difficult to forego, especially without a substitute means to provide for that security. Nuclear programs further wrapped into national narratives and histories risk taking on life of their own in the intangible. But this is different from claiming that these weapons are fundamental to a regime’s raison d’être or revolutionary orientation. Recognizing the distinction is necessary to conclude that denuclearization efforts engage central issues of national security for both countries, but are not fundamental ideological imperatives in Tehran and Pyongyang.
Our study also shows that Iran and North Korea address neighbors with substantial conventional forces,8 but they pursue long-range ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons to deter the United States’ conventional military superiority. Consequently, to address the root causes of the Iranian and North Korean anxieties that produce political decisions to pursue nuclear technology at great costs, we must recognize that any sustainable diplomatic solution requires involvement by the superpower. Our analysis has held that the Iranian and North Korean nuclear problems are not a mere outgrowth or byproduct of U.S.–Iran or U.S.–North Korea bilateral disputes, but a threat to nonproliferation principles and norms that undermines regional and global security. However, this does not discount the political rationale in Pyongyang and Tehran that sees nuclear weapons as a response to predominant U.S. military power that neither country can hope to match conventionally. This asymmetry in power common to the national security calculus in Tehran and Pyongyang is an important stimulant to advance and continue efforts toward equalizing nuclear forces. North Korea and Iran cannot match the United States in quantity or quality of nuclear weapons, but they only need to gain a capacity to impose unacceptable harm on the United States to gain a strategic military benefit to serve their deterrent purposes. As shown in Chapter 5, the EU-3; Northeast Asian regional powers; and out-of-area states, organizations, and individuals can help (or hinder) efforts but ultimately cannot resolve sustainably problems that Iran and North Korea say are motivated by a concern about the United States.
Our study further casts doubt on arguments that any single policy instrument “doesn’t work” as oversimplifying the nuanced historical record on nonproliferation outlined in Chapter 5. The Iranian and North Korean nuclear problems are unresolved despite decades of engagement and coercive efforts, so no policy has succeeded in its stated comprehensive objective. Selectively claiming that engagement or sanctions, military threats or security assurances, or inducements or pressure fail is an error in logic. Put more formally, the dependent variable (outcome) does not vary as failure is deemed a constant, so there is no hope that a research inquiry that begins with this premise can compare the success or failure of various independent (causal) variables. Regardless of the selected policy instrument under consideration, the study can only conclude that this particular instrument failed.
Exploring that variance in whether Iran or North Korea decided to advance their “stop and go” nuclear programs at a given time allows one to test causal hypotheses about what prompts these two states to temporarily relinquish or advance their nuclear programs. Chapter 5 also shows there have been a wide variety of policy initiatives directed at both North Korea and Iran, which provides a diversity of independent variables. Some policy initiatives have produced verifiable and, in more limited instances, verifiable and irreversible, limits on one of the nuclear programs and ballistic missile programs.9 That variance opens up the possibility of a structured comparison that judges what options contributed to these regimes halting, reversing, continuing, or accelerating their nuclear programs. In other words, no initiative has ended the illicit nuclear aspirations of North Korea and Iran, but one can analyze which policies have contributed to verifiable progress toward that goal.
There are no champagne cork–popping moments in the diplomacy with Iran and North Korea. Negotiators often recognize that, judged against the ultimate purpose of achieving a “long-term comprehensive solution” to the Iranian nuclear problem or “verifiable denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula,” their deal falls short. Government officials from all sides have repeatedly agreed that a nuclear weapons–free Iran and North Korea is an ultimate goal of diplomatic accommodation, but this complex undertaking must proceed in steps.10 In effect, the diplomatic history shows that the states concerned agreed to subdivide the problem to establish specific stepping-stones along a path to the overall objective. Policymakers establish goals within a wider purpose. In this regard, capping or freezing a nuclear program does not completely resolve North Korea’s or Iran’s illicit nuclear aspirations, but it is well within precedent as an objective in the direction of that stated end. The lack of closure is what makes the enduring nuclear aspirations of North Korea and Iran intractable, but progress can and has been significant – as has backsliding.11 Progress has been seen with limiting these states’ illicit nuclear aspirations by hitting a series of singles rather than a diplomatic home run.
Those engaging the illicit nuclear aspirants are also likely to find working with both states frustrating and distasteful at a minimum but must focus on sustainable agreements. Negotiators invariably tell their domestic audiences that the imperfect agreement was the best deal possible, while domestic critics invariably want a better one. It is healthy and important to push for the most biased outcome that advances one’s national interests. Buying the cheapest product is not always the best purchase, and doing business with the only seller who you feel cheated you in the past is an unsavory prospect. Mutual distrust stems in part from grievances over past deals gone awry with both sides pointing the finger at the other. The United States does not want to “buy the same horse twice” from North Korea (or Iran), whereas North Korea and Iran hold that the United States and the international community never paid the first time. Chapter 5 shows the perils of frontloading irreversible carrots, which allows the nuclear aspirants to keep these irreversible concessions, such as removing North Korea from the terrorist list, even if they renege on the quid pro quo. Neither likes or trusts the other side, so agreements must be self-enforcing, reciprocal, and seen to be in each side’s continued tangible interest to make it sustainable.
Whereas Washington notes Pyongyang’s and Tehran’s backtracking on previous commitments, those two states articulate the reverse. There is a dynamic interplay between these states, and failure to fully live up to any agreement has often prompted the other side to retaliate with its own noncompliant behavior that has made sustainable agreements challenging. The United States can point most fundamentally to both Iranian and North Korean accession to the NPT, multiple reaffirmations of these commitments, and explicit pursuit of nuclear weapons in North Korea’s case and noncompliant nuclear behavior on Iran’s part. The Iranians and North Koreans point to their own views of broken American promises. Absent an independent authority to judge enforcement, a relationship that gives context to actions, or even robust and regular government-to-government private communications, accusations from either side can scuttle necessarily fragile agreements with Iran and North Korea.
Disagreements over implementing international agreements are endemic among allies and adversaries in foreign affairs. Unlike in business or even interstate trade disputes, there is no legal body that can adjudicate disputes in this security context. Among allies, the respective parties have a history of interaction and a broader relationship that gives context to disagreements and allows most differences to be worked out quietly and in a mutually satisfactory way. The international community does not have a long and positive history of interaction with Iran and North Korea, making sustaining agreements in face of the inevitable differences in implementation more difficult. We conclude that diplomatic agreements on the Iranian and North Korean nuclear issues must be self-enforcing to continually encourage both sides – through the credible threat of removing offered carrots or imposing new sticks – to maintain its commitments.
Our analysis also reminds us that the same deal at two different points in time is not the same deal given technological progress. For example, in Chapter 5 we show that Iran highlights the fuel swap arrangement that Turkey and Brazil brokered with the Islamic Republic in 2010 was very similar to the U.S.-Russia–proposed deal a year earlier. But the Iranians fail to mention that Iran moved to 20 percent enrichment in the intervening year. Although the text of the two agreements may be similar in content, they would achieve different things. Because of Iran’s technological advances, the 2010 fuel swap deal that did not address this new reality had less value for the P5+1 in 2010 than when similar terms were proposed the year before.
Technological advances introduce an added element of dynamism into diplomatic proposals that take months or years to negotiate, and both the illicit nuclear aspirants and their negotiating partners must recognize this dynamism if agreements seek to be connected to contemporary reality. North Korea last negotiated a major multilateral nuclear agreement in 2005 when its nuclear program was still a theoretical capacity. Pyongyang claims that deal has gone awry, and North Korea now has a demonstrated nuclear capability after a series of nuclear tests. The other Six Parties demand that North Korea continue to sell its program at the previously agreed 2005 price, whereas North Korea finds the startup pricing for its now-established enterprise unappealing. The two sides’ proposals are far apart. Just as Iranian nuclear advances made the fuel swap arrangement that Turkey and Brazil negotiated with Iran in 2010 less than appealing to the West, North Korean nuclear advances have made the specific terms of the 2005 Six Party Talks Joint Statement less than appealing to Pyongyang.
One does not need to accept the North Korean logic to understand it. For Western powers, buying at the old price is hard to swallow, and raising the price is deemed out of the question, especially given well-founded suspicions about North Korea’s delivery on its commitments. The United States and its allies focus on one side of its tool belt to pressure Pyongyang to change the regime’s calculation and push the North Koreans back to the table. It would seek to change the game and show North Korea that it would not enjoy rewards for provocations. The United States sought to shape North Korea’s options and not compensate North Korea for concessions already agreed, leaving only increased pressure on the regime through economic sanctions and strengthening the United States’ military alliances in the region.12
Another lesson learned from the Iran–North Korea comparison is threats must be judged credible by the other side to deter unwanted action. The 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action with Iran has many limitations, and its prospects for success are uncertain. Critics charge that providing sanctions relief when those sanctions are finally causing pain in Iran in exchange for extending the time Iran needs to go nuclear from two months to twelve months is simply not worth it. Iran could break out of the nuclear agreement clandestinely if international monitoring is not airtight. Even if the international community does detect an Iranian breakout, the international community may not decide to coalesce around a tough response, especially military action.13
The experience with North Korea suggests a need for humility in our confidence in “red lines” in the latest Iran deal. North Korea’s nuclear tests each elicited only another round of UN Security Council censure and sanctions that did not sway the autarkic regime; Tehran may find threats associated with its nuclear breakout to be a bluff. North Korea proliferated nuclear technology to Libya and Syria, flight-tested long-range ballistic missiles, sank a South Korean naval vessel, and shelled a South Korean island. One can identify each of these actions as a “red line” that would trigger a significant response, but an overwhelming international response, including military action, never came. It remains to be seen if Iran will believe implicit and vague threats if it does not comply in part or in full with the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or if North Korea will respond to the Trump administration’s re-articulation of long-standing U.S. policy that “all options are on the table” in dealing with North Korea.
North Korea’s nuclear program shows how the priority of the day can shift quickly, and any nuclear deal must focus on both the uranium and plutonium routes to the bomb. In the 1994 Agreed Framework, the United States focused exclusively on North Korea’s plutonium program, as it was the only established program at the time. This focus continued controversially through the mid-2000s as the evidence of North Korea’s uranium enrichment program grew, but the plutonium program still posed the greatest threat to nuclear weapons development. With a temporary shutdown of North Korea’s plutonium reactor at Yongbyon, the diplomatic focus shifted to the more pressing uranium enrichment threat rather than actively trying to verifiably and irreversibly end North Korea’s plutonium route to the bomb. Although North Korea’s plutonium reactor was shut down, the North Koreans and those outside the country were unsure if Pyongyang could restart the aging reactor; it had effectively switched back from a real to a theoretical nuclear capability, which one should expect would reduce the cost to eliminate it. However, focus on the near-term threat and misplaced confidence that North Korea could not restart the reactor prompted focus on the enrichment program. North Korea now has two active paths to the bomb.
The lesson from this experience with North Korea appears to have been learned for Iran, as the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action addresses Iran’s budding plutonium threat in a comprehensive way and addresses the more acute Iranian uranium enrichment program. Although the latest Iran deal is not without technical and political shortcomings,14 this approach has greater prospect for success on this score than the Six Party Talks approaches to North Korea’s nuclear program and offers a model for North Korea–related diplomacy going forward.15
Governments in Washington, Pyongyang, Tehran, and beyond remain skeptical, if not hostile, toward one another, and engagement strategies pose certain domestic political risks to both the democratic and autocratic governments. However, each of these states has shown a willingness at times to take domestic political risks under the right circumstances, as the history of nonproliferation agreements demonstrates. The assumption that the domestic political challenges are insurmountable is not supported by the empirical record. Absolutist claims about Tehran’s and Pyongyang’s domestic or ideological constraints is overstated. The challenge is finding the overlapping time and circumstances that allow all of the related parties to make difficult political decisions for peaceful resolution of outstanding security challenges.
The core finding of this book is that Iran and North Korea are similar because of their illicit nuclear aspirations, but Chapter 4 shows that the international community has many additional discrete interests to pursue with the two countries. One common thread is that North Korea and Iran remain the only two major countries in the world without a U.S. diplomatic presence, making diplomatic contact relatively rare and high level. When U.S. diplomats meet with Iranian or North Korean counterparts to discuss their illicit nuclear aspirations, those advocating for important non-nuclear interests naturally press for widening the agenda. Given the limited capacity of ad hoc official meetings to explore these issues, we have not seen these fora as effective means to advance these interests.
Chapter 2 also details our understanding of North Korea’s and Iran’s domestic political and economic institutions and behavior. Although it is inappropriate to claim that the outside world cannot know anything about either regime as the data in Chapter 2 show, there is area to improve our collective understanding of the Iranian and North Korean political, economic, and social systems. We must surmise and use proxy tools to interpret the North Korean regime functions in particular, and the declassified record we cite suggests that government sources are not much further along.
It is not a new idea that the United States should consider establishing a diplomatic presence in Tehran or Pyongyang. However, North Korea’s and Iran’s similarities on the nuclear issue and lack of diplomatic representation create an opportunity to leverage the Iran–North Korea comparison to mitigate downside risk. A U.S. diplomatic presence in Tehran and Iranian diplomatic presence in Washington would help inform decisions on a similar diplomatic presence for North Korea. As we show in earlier chapters, the nuclear challenge in North Korea is more developed, and Iran offers a more open system; consequently, we believe Tehran would be a better test case than Pyongyang for a U.S. diplomatic presence. Also, Iran has something positive to offer the United States on promoting regional stability, including the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and engaging Hezbollah, as well as possible collaboration on stability issues in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. Iran is a significant player in its region regardless of its nuclear capabilities. North Korea is not. Efforts with North Korea focus on containing and eliminating the negative, whereas relations with Iran have that element plus an opportunity for positive-sum cooperation in other areas.
Opening a diplomatic representation in the other’s capital, by contrast, powerfully shows a commitment to a broader bilateral relationship where human rights, state sponsorship of terrorism, conventional provocations, the nuclear issue, economic restructuring, commercial opportunities, environmental collaboration, cultural and educational exchanges, facilitation of international travel, and all the regular business of any standard embassy will take place. Human rights reports would no longer be written from Washington, but from Pyongyang and Tehran, with trained professionals searching out opportunities to learn more about the problem and finding means to make headway. American military officers can observe open displays of military hardware and seek to engage foreign military counterparts. U.S. Treasury Attaché experts can explain in depth to a variety of players what is required to address legacy sanctions and the economic and financial benefits of resolving the nuclear issue.
Diplomats representing a variety of agencies do not go overseas to soft-peddle their government’s positions. Their responsibility is to present the unvarnished view of their country and find ways in the foreign capital in which they temporarily reside to lobby effectively for those interests. Opening an embassy or interests section is not a means to coddle despots but rationalize communications and aggressively push one’s national interests.
Many of the United States’ closest partners, including the British, Germans, Japanese, South Koreans, and various European allies, have embassies in Pyongyang or Tehran. These good allies are invariably willing to assist, but our study again shows that the Islamic Republic and DPRK link their diplomacy on the nuclear issue to the United States, and these American allies will be the first to recognize that they cannot substitute for a direct U.S. diplomatic presence. The relationship between two states tends to define access. American ambassadors regularly meet with the highest echelons of government in a way that is rarer for most other countries, and proxies can do only so much.
The United States runs a variety of exchange programs out of its embassies, especially its flagship International Visitor Leadership Program, to help midcareer leaders in foreign countries get a more in-depth understanding of the United States. The programs have been utilized historically for the Soviets and others explicitly in the U.S. enemy camp, but North Koreans and Iranians are excluded from the programs. Iranian and North Korean leaders in various segments of government, the economy, and society have limited exposure to the United States. Some influential Iranian leaders have been educated in the United States16; though the numbers are small, they are larger than North Korean leaders. The situation is mutual as U.S. analysts, experts, and even officials readily note insufficient information and insight into the two countries. Diplomatic representation raises the prospect of widening the bandwidth for the immediate policy agenda, as well as broadening a relationship that we have argued previously makes agreements more mutually sustainable.
In a similar vein, interest sections and embassies do much more than interact with governments. While gaining more regular insight into the government, they also engage with other social and economic actors, speak to university students and their professors, and generally attempt to learn as much as possible about the policy environment of another state and influence it accordingly. Diplomatic representation in some form and including the two states in existing exchange programs are two elements that have not been tried with either the DPRK or the Islamic Republic. Leveraging the comparison and testing these tools on one of the illicit nuclear aspirants may provide useful insights into the applicability for the other.
As Ambassador Thomas Pickering has noted about U.S.-Iran relations more generally, “Direct contact between the parties to the issue and especially between the United States and Iran are essential … The parties are separated by over 30 years of mistrust, sporadic contact, and misunderstanding.” One of the United States’ most well-respected diplomats appeared to consider it necessary to softly justify his taking the simple move of writing the foreword to a former Iranian official’s book; another prominent American considered it necessary to make a more explicit preemptive rebuttal to critics for publishing the same official’s insider perspective on Iran’s nuclear negotiations. These should not be politically controversial moves. Hearing the other side’s positions, perspectives, and even talking points has value. Adversaries’ positions should not be taken at face value, but allies’ positions often cannot be either. Spin is a constant part of any advocacy that analysts and policymakers alike sort through as a regular part of their jobs.
Currently, debate about the costs and benefits of establishing a diplomatic presence with either of these countries is merely theoretical and cannot be tested empirically, given the same segment of relevant states is limited, and there is no history of a U.S. diplomatic presence in the Islamic Republic or the DPRK.17 The United States and Iran officially exchanging diplomats to represent their government’s interests in each other’s capitals would be a bold move that informs options for Iran policy – and also North Korea policy.
A move in this direction requires acceptance from the Iranian or North Korean side, and both appear conflicted on whether they seek a normalized relationship with the United States. Iran’s Supreme Leader is skeptical of improving relations with the United States, which he distrusts intensely.18 More directly, North Korea has officially backed off its previous demand for an exchange of diplomats and rejected a U.S. offer to open liaison offices as a step toward normal diplomatic relations.19 This specific point could likely be overcome, but it would need to be addressed bilaterally.
Sanctions come in different forms that need to be dissected to be properly analyzed. Sanctions range from efforts to restrict nuclear-related imports and other illicit goods to punitive measures aimed at certain individuals and institutions to blanket trade bans or financial efforts that seek to affect the target country’s wider economy or trade.20
The UN Security Council has imposed sanctions on North Korea and Iran that prohibit UN member states from exporting certain nuclear- or ballistic missile–related technology to either country.21 This builds upon existing multilateral nuclear export controls and relies primarily upon national governments to enforce.22 The restrictions are relatively straightforward as a matter of policy, though implementation remains challenging. However, a deep understanding of the economics and politics of the two states is not required to support steps to restrict North Korea and Iran from importing parts and equipment that advance their nuclear and ballistic missile programs. Even critics recognize that targeted sanctions and export controls help constrain nuclear progress, even if they do not believe these measures effectively alter leadership decision making.23 We view these restrictions as noncontroversial and commonsensical, but our study does not find specific lessons learned from the Iran experience to apply to North Korea or vice versa.24
National governments also seek to freeze the assets within their jurisdiction or impose travel bans on individuals or entities associated with nuclear and ballistic missile programs. Restrictions on Iran and North Korea draw on similar national legal authorities.25 Targeted sanctions attempt to “sharpen choices” for leaders in Tehran and Pyongyang and place pressure on core support groups in assumed decision-making circles.26 At the same time, outside experts and officials regularly note the opacity of decision making in both countries and lack of true insight into who is important beyond the top leader in both countries. These sanctions are highly specific, often related to a single individual or institution given particular information about their role in these illicit nuclear efforts, and difficult to determine if they are having the intended effect. Beyond that general observation, however, the particularity of these sanctions makes it difficult to assess the comparative effectiveness of these measures in a macro context as found in this study.
This study provides the most insight into sanctions with more general economic consequences, including unilateral third-party financial sanctions and multilateral trade restrictions on legal trade. As referenced in Chapter 5, third-party financial sanctions are a tool of financially powerful states to encourage foreign countries and businesses to stop conducting business with Iran or North Korea. The United States as a matter of national law can prohibit its businesses from trading with Iranian companies; this is a simple trade barrier. However, that law does not apply to a Canadian business, for example, that is beyond the jurisdiction of the U.S. government. Financial sanctions allow the United States government to note that if the Canadian business in this example does business with Iran, then that Canadian company will be prohibited from doing business with U.S. banks and businesses. It effectively makes foreign firms choose between doing business with the world’s largest economy (and utilizing the dollar as an international currency) or with Iran. Given the high costs of association with a firm violating this rule, third-party financial sanctions allow one powerful state to dramatically influence the business decisions of firms outside its jurisdiction and impose general economic pain on Iran. Given the role this tool played before the most recent nuclear deal with Iran, it should come as little surprise that some have advocated the same approach be applied to North Korea.
Some have advocated more robust sanctions on North Korea that follow the Iran model, contending, “the U.S., the European Union, and the United Nations have counter-intuitively imposed far less restrictive sanctions on Pyongyang than on Tehran,” and urging the United States “should use its action against Iran as a model and impose the same severity of targeted financial measures against North Korea.” Indeed, the North Korea Sanctions and Policy Enhancement Act of 2016 and subsequent executive actions like designating North Korea a money laundering concern attempted to do this, but the DPRK has not shown a proclivity to come back to the negotiating table as Iran did after the imposition of broader financial sanctions. North Korea lacks Iran’s oil resources, prompting at least one advocate to claim the poorer North Korea is more vulnerable to “enhanced economic pressure.”27 One of South Korea’s conservative thought leaders and former National Security Advisor Chun Yung-woo advocates a similar approach.28
Our comparative study of the economic systems, state–society relations, and political decision making in North Korea and Iran found in Chapter 3 provides lessons learned for applying to North Korea the same financial sanctions utilized against Iran. Our analysis suggests a different policy conclusion, given wide differences between the Iranian and North Korean economies and nature of state–society relations. Precisely because Iran is a trading state in contrast to North Korea, the West can impose greater economic bite on Iran. Our economic analysis shows there is relatively little opportunity to impose more pain on North Korea with these particular financial tools. Iran’s relative integration in the international economy creates leverage for external actors, whereas North Korea’s autarky insulates itself from this concern.
The United States has applied a type of financial sanction on North Korea previously when Washington cited a Macau bank in 2005 as a “primary money laundering concern” due to its dubious dealings with North Korean entities. Banco Delta Asia quickly went bankrupt, and North Korea found itself cut off from the international financial system as other banks shunned their business. Arguments that Washington should utilize the same playbook again to pressure the DPRK back to the negotiating table on its illicit nuclear program implicitly assumes that North Korea has not adapted its banking practices in the intervening decade. However, our Freedom of Information Act requests and newly declassified information detailed in Chapter 5 reveal evidence that the United States made concerted diplomatic efforts to end North Korea’s traditional banking relationships, and North Korea has adapted with greater use of barter, cash transfers, and other means to facilitate international transactions. Sanctions must affect the economic reality of the target at a given point in time to be effective, and North Korea has adjusted its way of banking. The BDA moment for North Korea has passed.
In a similar vein to financial sanctions, multilateral trade restrictions on legal trade likewise seek to impose macro-economic consequences for illicit nuclear behavior.29 This is in contrast to more targeted multilateral efforts to restrict trade on goods directly related to nuclear or ballistic missile programs. The UN Security Council has restricted UN member states’ ability to purchase North Korean coal and other minerals. Some member states argue the proceeds of that trade could fund North Korea’s nuclear program, providing a link to past sanctions targeted at blocking the illicit nuclear-related trade, whereas independent observers note the sanctions apply general macro-economic pressure on North Korea, given the large role coal plays as a North Korean export.30
Sanctions that seek to influence a political decision on the nuclear issue in Tehran and Pyongyang by targeting the macro-economy of North Korea and Iran require a correct understanding of those two political systems and levers of influence. The Iran sanctions model functions on the basis of a government somewhat responsive to popular demands. Sanctions that impose a cost on society only affect governmental decisions if the government responds to popular agitation. In Chapter 3, we saw how Iran has a history of mass protests that at least capture the attention of the regime, if not influence its behavior, whereas North Korea largely does not have a history of meaningful popular protests. Absent an analytical conclusion that there is some connection between popular will and government decisions in North Korea, the applicability of the Iran sanctions model to North Korea becomes strained.
Unlike in Iran, we have not seen evidence in our study that externally imposed economic pressure on the North Korean populace encourages the North Korean government to take action. As noted in Chapter 3, Japan was North Korea’s second-largest trading partner, accounting for 20 percent of its exports, prior to Tokyo’s ending this trade completely after North Korea’s first nuclear test in 2006. South Korea likewise was the North’s largest trading partner after China but cut off virtually all trade in February 2016 by closing the Kaesong Industrial Complex in response to DPRK nuclear and ballistic missile tests.31 In both cases of sudden and substantial losses of North Korean trade partners, our study did not observe any shift in North Korea’s approach to nuclear weapons and their means of delivery.
Some argue that the United States must be willing to signal credibly the threat of military force to augment sanctions pressure and elicit a diplomatic solution on the Iranian nuclear issue.32 Others hold that the West ought to prepare for the contingency of failed diplomacy and consider how to minimize the consequences of an Iran that breaks out of the latest nuclear accord.33 If engagement and economic pressure do not produce the sought outcomes to these critical security issues, then policymakers may consider military options before the problems grow to unmanageable levels.
American policymakers on the left and right have recognized for two decades that there is no serious military solution to the North Korean nuclear issue,34 whereas a judgment on the Iran case is less well formed. Addressing the prospect of a military solution to the North Korean nuclear problem, the United States’ former chief negotiator put it bluntly:
You find some people who talk about the need for either regime change in North Korea or a forceful military response. If I could figure out some way to make that happen without putting 25 million South Koreans in grave danger [referring to the population of the greater Seoul area], I will be all for it. But I’ve not been able to come with that. So I think on any political or moral basis, the notion that somehow there’s a military response here is just not right.35
As former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice recalls in her memoirs, “the Pentagon wanted no part of armed conflict on the Korean peninsula” and its unintended consequences, including the “near-certainty of significant damage to Seoul.” She acknowledged that some members of the Bush administration favored regime change in North Korea, but it never became administration policy. Washington judged that the “malnourished” North Korean people are unlikely to rise up against the Kim regime, regional powers like China and South Korea ultimately would not support military action, and risks of a general military conflict on the peninsula were too costly.36 President Trump’s comments at the beginning of his administration in 2017 have seemed to suggest the United States may consider military strikes in the future, but it remains unclear if these statements are intended to shape negotiations or be utilized preemptively.37
Debate on military options against Iran is more robust. As one academic urged, “Washington should conduct a limited strike on Iran’s key nuclear facilities, pull back and absorb an inevitable round of Iranian retaliation, and quickly seek to de-escalate the crisis.”38 Iranians seize onto public comments by the most hawkish public servants whether in power or not. Iran’s former spokesperson for the nuclear negotiations cites Senator Joe Lieberman’s public suggestion of using military force against Iran’s nuclear program a decade after his bid for the vice presidency as evidence of Washington’s support for regime change.39
But this advocacy has never been effectuated, and it is more challenging for policymakers in responsible positions to take the gamble. Then Defense Secretary Bob Gates noted publicly that military strikes on Iran risked creating a generation of terrorism and coercive responses. Senior U.S. military officers and defense officials have repeatedly noted that the military option is “on the table” with respect to Iran but also warned about significant downsides and urged Israel to refrain from taking military action.40 Some of Iran’s nuclear facilities, including the enrichment facility at Fordow, are buried, making aerial bombardments’ success far from assured.41
A pair of simulations with former senior U.S. officials and Iran experts showed more precisely projected outcomes of a limited military strike on Iranian nuclear targets. It found that the dangers of miscalculation run high in U.S.-Iranian interactions, and Washington’s efforts to conduct surgical or limited military strikes on Iranian facilities would prompt Iranian retaliation in the form of terrorist attacks, dispersal of low enriched uranium stockpiles, and moves to close the Strait of Hormuz. Given the economic consequences associated with closing the strait, including increased oil prices, limited military strikes were projected to escalate to war, regional instability, and an Iranian nuclear breakout. The war gaming showed efforts at military measures perceived by both sides as restrained were viewed differently by the other side, reducing the margin of error for coercive efforts that stop short of general war.42
Beyond challenges of destroying nuclear infrastructure in limited military strikes, states can decide to reconstitute them. Given Iran’s technological know-how, the former director general of the IAEA concluded the country could reconstitute any enrichment facility underground “in a matter of months.” Robust inspections are more important than enrichment suspension, Elbaradei concludes.43 The conclusion is reasonable but incomplete. Robust inspections with timely consequences for noncompliance and lengthening the time from revelation of noncompliance to obtaining a nuclear weapon amount to the current approach.
The international community has not conducted surgical military strikes on the Iranian or North Korean nuclear infrastructure, leaving us without an empirical comparison derived from our study. However, the general thinking about challenges to successfully destroying North Korean or Iranian nuclear sites, probability of reconstituting nuclear infrastructure given each nation’s learned nuclear know-how, risks of asymmetric retaliation, and possibility of escalation to a wider war applies to both cases.
Regime change applies military force beyond limited military strikes in a way that tries to address challenges stemming from North Korea and Iran more comprehensively.44 Given the wide range of grievances with both regimes outlined in Chapter 4 and extreme difficulties in resolving them, one may find it tempting to consider regime change as a long-term solution to very serious problems. As we have seen in Iraq and Afghanistan, foreign efforts to change regimes by force and build new democratic institutions is a massive undertaking, and cross-national studies find regime change rarely leads to sustained democratization.45 Our study contributes to this debate by drawing upon our assessment of the political, economic, and social systems of North Korea and Iran to consider this policy option.
A regime change effort must remove the existing government and replace it with something better. To be deemed successful in a simple cost–benefit calculation, the immediate transition costs of the inevitable death and destruction brought by war must be less than the benefits that come with the new regime. Our study does not add value to debate on the prospect for success in removing the DPRK or Islamic Republic from power, nor does it seek to estimate the costs of war in either country. However, our assessment of the two political, economic, and social systems allows us to add value to discussions of postconflict nation building in a North Korean or Iranian regime change scenario.
The role of Korean unification makes questions of new political leadership in Iran and North Korea fundamentally different. The unification of the Korean Peninsula offers the most sustainable prospect for a denuclearized Korean Peninsula over the long term. This would be historic and offer not only a complete, verifiable, and irreversible denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, but also address chronic humanitarian and human rights problems in North Korea.46 There should be no doubt that Pyongyang is fundamentally opposed to a unified Korean Peninsula under Seoul’s leadership, and this effectively seeks North Korean capitulation in a far broader sense. However, the unification angle should not be forgotten, especially as it is one of the key differences between the Iranian and North Korean cases. In case of crisis in North Korea that requires the strategic attention and difficult choices by regional powers, national leaders and societies should remember that unification offers the best prospect of providing a sustainable and comprehensive resolution to problems that have dogged the international community for generations.
The Korean Peninsula already has a well-entrenched democratic government with its capital in Seoul, and the Korean people and governments on both sides of the DMZ have called for Korean unification since partition. A military effort that eliminated the DPRK as a governing and military force would confront calls for unification and integrating the northern half of the Korean Peninsula into existing democratic structures and institutions found in the southern half of the peninsula. By contrast, Iran is not a divided nation. There is no singular democratic state seeking to take responsibility for and integrate Iran into its body politic. Eliminating the Islamic Republic would require inventing a new government or confronting chaos.
Iran’s ethnic diversity sets up areas of possible sectarian conflict in postconflict nation building, whereas North Korea’s ethnic homogeneity makes this an unlikely worry. North Korea’s strong state institutions offer opportunities for local governance, whereas Iran’s convoluted institutional arrangements point toward greater confusion. However, North Korea’s poor economy and lack of history of democratic institutions make nation-building prospects more challenging, whereas Iran’s relatively strong economy, quasi-democratic institutions, and civil society provide reason for optimism. Neither is a clear-cut case, and lack of access to possible opposition leaders and groups inside both of these countries further degrades prospects for sustainable success, suggesting any regime change effort would be a rocky transition at best with uncertain prospects of producing a functioning democratic state on the other end of the process.47
Simple solutions to complex problems are appealing. North Korea and Iran continue to defy the international community with their illicit nuclear aspirations and contribute to a host of other international problems as detailed in Chapter 4. But we should be cautious about assuming a military option is a simple or straightforward manner with questionable prospects for near- or long-term success and significant transition costs in terms of the loss of human life on both sides.
Iranian officials have suggested maintaining a threshold nuclear weapons capability is a sustainable position from its perspective48; as noted in Chapter 5, the P5+1 tacitly accepts this premise, although it would never articulate it as such. Iran with an inspected, transparent civil nuclear program that does not convert this capacity for weapons purposes is acceptable to the five permanent member states of the UN Security Council and Germany. If Iran breaks out of that agreement, it would face consequences. The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action does not remove Iran’s fundamental nuclear aspiration or means to develop a nuclear weapon, but seeks to manage that threat and expose it for punitive action if Iran decides to blitz toward nuclear weapons capability.
North Korea articulates itself as a nuclear weapons state. For Pyongyang, the sustainable outcome is the world accepting this as reality. North Korea wants to be understood as an NPT nuclear outlier like India, Pakistan, and Israel that face less international pressure and isolation than North Korea and Iran. Once the international community accepts North Korea as a nuclear state, relevant parties can move to address other pending matters, Pyongyang argues. Unlike in the Iran case, North Korea’s advocacy has no support from its international negotiating partners or permanent members of the UN Security Council.49
Our study shows that the international community demands a higher bar for North Korea than Iran. Diplomatic efforts with North Korea seek the “verifiable denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula,”50 whereas those with Iran seek to “ensure that Iran’s nuclear programme will be exclusively peaceful.”51
The nuclear deal with Iran lays out the mutually agreed ways that Iran can use its existing uranium enrichment facilities, whereas the North Korea agreement did not establish parameters for acceptable nuclear behavior inside North Korea and heavily suggested all nuclear activity should cease.52 The nuclear agreement with Iran explicitly abandoned the calls for “zero enrichment” in Iran as unrealistic, but North Korea’s nuclear program is more developed than Iran’s and North Korea agreed to a higher bar.53 North Korea agreed to “disable all existing nuclear facilities subject to abandonment under the September 2005 Joint Statement and the February 13 agreement,” effectively eliminating all of North Korea’s mutually recognized fissile-material production facilities.54
The Iran–North Korea comparison also suggests lessons learned on the fundamental targets of nuclear negotiations with these states. Defenders of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action point out that “zero enrichment” would not eliminate Iranian scientists’ nuclear knowledge, and they could reconstitute a program. Nuclear know-how cannot be unlearned, and Iran would only need to collect again the necessary supplies to embark again upon the same path. The diplomacy with North Korea has not yet taken on board this point that scientific knowledge precludes the theoretical possibility of complete denuclearization and has focused more narrowly on nuclear infrastructure.
The Iran deal looks to freeze Tehran as a nuclear threshold state, whereas the North Korea deal tries to convince North Korea to give up its established nuclear weapons program and nuclear infrastructure in a standard beyond zero enrichment. For the North Korea negotiations, the central issue is reversing its nuclear weapons capability, whereas the Iran negotiations try to ensure the country does not decide to move ahead with building nuclear weapons. The former is a much harder challenge and should give those working on an Iran deal a sense of urgency as the North Korea case gives a concrete picture of how the Iranian situation can get much worse.
North Korea’s pursuit of nuclear weapons is much more explicit than Iran’s, helping explain the higher bar as North Korea has seemingly eschewed a civil nuclear program. Iran maintains that it wants a civil nuclear program, creating space for discussions of civil nuclear cooperation. North Korea publicly articulates its nuclear infrastructure as part of a nuclear weapons program, making efforts to discuss civil nuclear cooperation nonsensical. North Korea’s more advanced nuclear weapons program and public posture on that nuclear program sets the higher bar, which makes the North Korean nuclear program a far harder diplomatic challenge than even the Iranian one.
More meaningfully, the comparison highlights an uncharted path for North Korea to walk back its nuclear program to the Iranian level. Though it opens a whole host of new technical issues, reducing North Korea’s nuclear production capability to a well-monitored program that does not produce fissile material for weapons as laid out in the P5+1–Iran deal in 2015 is one unexplored opportunity for putting the North Korean nuclear genie back in the bottle. Completely eliminating a country’s nuclear infrastructure is not required to reduce it to a nuclear threshold state, and infrastructure can always be reconstituted.
Fuel swap arrangements previously explored with Iran that are documented in Chapter 5 and that would limit or eliminate Iran’s domestic enrichment capacity while providing for its stated need for reactor fuel is another unexplored option to address North Korea’s growing fissile material threat. The Iranians can certainly brief the North Koreans on the benefits of shifting the nuclear file from the UN Security Council to the IAEA board of governors as Iran has advocated for years, and North Korea would need to take substantial steps toward denuclearization to facilitate this type of action.
The United States rebuffed criticisms of the 2015 Iran deal in particular by noting that the correct standard for evaluating a nuclear deal is whether it is better than the status quo or alternative policy options. This is a reasonable standard to apply to the North Korea–related diplomacy as well. Criticizing any proposal is easy as flaws are inevitable; offering a more constructive alternative is much harder.
The Iran–North Korea comparison also offers a variety of tactical lessons. For example, should negotiators concentrate exclusively on the forward-looking element of these nuclear programs or consider their past efforts to pursue weapons programs as well? More knowledge about past activities provides greater information on current programs. But there can also be trade-offs between information collection goals and foreign policy goals of shutting down programs, and it can become a question of prioritization. On the Iranian nuclear issue, this contemporary historical research is pursued through an IAEA investigation into the possible military dimension (PMD) of the regime’s nuclear program. In the North Korean case, this comes in the form of state-led efforts to obtain a correct and complete nuclear declaration from the DPRK as it promised in 2007.55
Declarations allow inspectors to learn new things and define the scope of the problem more clearly to make sure any negotiation is comprehensive. Cooperation risks exposing information that Iran and North Korea may prefer to keep from the international community, so they tend to minimally cooperate at best. For example, the IAEA’s environmental sampling in North Korea in 1994 and in Iran in 2003 showed that the IAEA was at least a step ahead of both countries on the science behind nuclear safeguards. North Korea and Iran learned they could try to deceive the more advanced nuclear experts at their own political peril. Sampling – and the involvement of the IAEA in any bilateral or multilateral agreement in verifying its implementation – subsequently became a tough sell with the North Koreans in particular. Likewise, the IAEA’s detection of highly enriched uranium on centrifuges in Iran that the Iranians purchased from the A.Q. Khan network prompted the Iranians to argue that the HEU residue was a product of the original owners, the Pakistanis. The claim was reasonable, but foreign observers focused on a worst-case assessment can draw different conclusions.56 Given the risks to their interests associated with cooperating with the IAEA on inspections, Iran’s greater willingness than North Korea after the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action to engage with the UN nuclear watchdog is more evidence that its program has greater chance of being held in check.
The lack of written agreements with Iran and North Korea is often a harbinger for trouble. North Korea and the United States publicly disagreed over the content of their oral agreement in 2012 intended to build confidence, and the agreement fell apart in less than three weeks. The P5+1 “political understanding” with Iran in April 2015 likewise did not produce a joint text, prompting both sides to make significantly contradictory statements about what was agreed. Ultimately, these oral agreements made in private are easily dismissed by either side if judged to not serve national interests, and the lack of a joint text only makes finding an excuse to scuttle a deal easier. But the real binding glue of an agreement is sustainability where both sides continually find the presence of the deal more advantageous to their own interests than no deal. Trust does not exist in these relationships, and implementation lapses on either side risk derailing any negotiated settlement.57
The United States has sought to break the cycle of “buying the same horse twice” with North Korea and has insisted on preconditions to negotiations to ensure those discussions focus substantively on the nuclear issue. Our study shows that the structural reality is that diplomacy with and around both of these countries has never ended and only becomes more or less direct. The U.S.-DPRK Agreed Framework process came to a clearly delineated end in 2002, and the Six Party Talks began in 2003. The EU-3 process with Iran ended in 2006 as it directly transitioned into the P5+1 effort with a referral to the UN Security Council. Also, nonverbal communications that can be even more instructive than words cannot be unilaterally shut off; North Korea and Iran can and have flight-tested ballistic missiles, utilized inflammatory rhetoric in international fora, taken provocative actions in their respective regions, and, in North Korea’s case, conducted nuclear tests. Alternative communications can also be more positive, including messaging through Track 2 conversations with former officials or well-connected individuals, conciliatory rhetoric and letters between governments, and outreach to regional partners. Another lesson of this study is that, although it may take two to have a discussion, it only takes one side to message.
It is worth noting that symbols matter, and opportunities to swap symbols for substance should not be discounted. North Korea took substantial steps to disable its plutonium route to the bomb at least in part due to a U.S. move to remove the state from the terrorism list. As noted in Chapter 5, North Korea’s foreign ministry publicly acknowledged that it understood a U.S. Treasury publication that the removal would not create any additional economic opportunities for the state, as other authorities still blocked all the same economic transactions. However, Pyongyang appeared motivated by the intangibles of removing this label and would likely see being placed on the terrorist list anew a symbolic sanction regardless of economic affect. We do not advocate removing Iran from the list given the substantial differences between North Korea’s and Iran’s relationships with terrorist organizations as shown in Chapter 4. Instead, we seek to highlight that intangibles can play differently in Pyongyang and Tehran than they might in other capitals and can be utilized to one’s tactical advantage.
The North Korea–Iran comparison shows that these two states’ actions speak louder than words. Although public pronouncements are important, one should understand them as one data point. This observation may seem obvious, but it is also often forgotten in favor of advocacy-driven analysis on both sides of foreign policy debates. It is often noted that one should not take at face value these two states’ promises to forego nuclear weapons; however, our study shows that one should likewise not take at face value these two states’ promises never to make concessions on the nuclear issue.
The fundamental premise of this book is North Korea and Iran have violated their commitments not to pursue nuclear weapons. However, Chapter 5 shows that the illicit nuclear aspirants have also pledged to never concede on any aspect of the nuclear issue and backed off that rhetorical commitment when it was deemed advantageous. Our study shows that both Iran and North Korea want to convince the West to lower the bar to be “realistic” given the changed ground realities in their nuclear programs and argue that more ambitious goals are futile.
Prior to the latest nuclear accord, Iran’s former spokesman for the nuclear negotiating team noted, “[A] tenet, central to the ninth [Ahmadinejad] government’s foreign policy program, maintained that the West would have to get used to an atomic Iran sooner or later.”58 Iran articulates itself as a major regional player with key roles to stabilize Iraq and Afghanistan, says U.S. military action against Iran is too costly, lacks international support, risks Iranian actions again the Strait of Hormuz with consequences for the international energy market, and would prompt retaliation by affiliated terrorist organizations to upset any possible future progress in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.59 The Iranians wanted the world to believe that international pressure would not dissuade them.
Iran sought to dilute international pressure and pursue its nuclear ambitions. How Iran’s spokesperson for the nuclear negotiations in the Khatami administration recaps the goals of negotiations with the EU-3 is telling. The Iranian nuclear delegation’s goals as he articulates them were all tactical – preventing the referral to the UN Security Council, protecting Iran’s perceived rights to enrichment and gain international legitimacy for the civil nuclear program, undermine U.S.-led pressure and work with Europe instead, showcase suspensions as voluntary and not legally binding, keep discussions at the technical level, and refocus international attention on Israel’s nuclear program and double standards.60 Fundamental to this approach was an argument that Iran’s nuclear program was peaceful and scrapping that nuclear infrastructure wholesale was beyond the pale.
Iran’s rhetoric on its imperviousness to external pressure and unwillingness to compromise showed itself untrue. No country wants to make concessions, but Iran did so in the 2015 nuclear accord and has largely upheld those commitments. Iran’s rhetoric that trying to address the nuclear issue was futile proved false. This lesson is applicable to North Korea. North Korea claims itself a nuclear state and has even enshrined the claim in its constitution, prompting reasonable analysts to note that the window of opportunity for denuclearization may have closed.61 The lessons from the Iran deal suggest that analysts should understand Pyongyang’s messaging as its clearly articulated preference but not accept denuclearization efforts as futile as Pyongyang seeks. Analysts can draw conclusions based on North Korea’s actions but should be cautious in substituting regime rhetoric for reality whether it supports the hawk or dove policy preferences.
Iran and North Korea threaten the international nonproliferation regime by accepting this important norm and disregarding it. Other states, regardless of their relationships with certain foreign partners, must clearly understand that going nuclear in violation of their NPT commitments will put them in the same category of illicit nuclear aspirants. Regional powers in the Middle East and Northeast Asia in particular whose livelihoods are inextricably tied to international trade and are close partners and allies of the United States should recognize that efforts to pursue a nuclear weapons program will undermine the very basis of their security and national prosperity.
Responsible statesmen in regional capitals have foresworn any intent to develop nuclear weapons repeatedly. The risk of South Korea or Japan going nuclear in the near term is low. However, there is a strategic logic for both countries to go nuclear, which is appealing to some domestic audiences that have unrealistic expectations about the grave costs of such a decision. Japan’s then Foreign Minister Taro Aso told the Diet in October 2006 that if a “neighboring country” has nuclear weapons, Japan should have a discussion on the topic as well. The debate quickly dissipated but not before receiving international attention and shining a light on segments of the Japanese political establishment theoretically open to going nuclear under specific conditions in the unspecified future.62 An indigenous Japanese nuclear weapons program would almost certainly prompt China, which has supported UN Security Council actions against its ally North Korea for its nuclear pursuits, demand the same treatment for Tokyo as Pyongyang in this scenario.
Similar advocacy has appeared in South Korea with greater staying power. Though largely associated with a single former presidential candidate and prominent businessman and lawmaker, the idea has taken hold among some serious foreign policy thought leaders. Polls after North Korea’s third nuclear test showed majorities of South Koreans supporting an indigenous nuclear weapons program, and South Korea’s previous autocratic government had a short-lived nuclear program in the late 1970s as noted in Chapter 5. South Korea’s strategic logic is the same as Japan’s: a nuclear North Korea that can strike the United States risks Pyongyang judging that it can deter the United States from getting involved in a Korean Peninsula contingency and increase its aggressive military approach against the non-nuclear ROK.63 Given this concern about abandonment, the ROK can also seek to bolster U.S. extended deterrence commitments or try to become like India or Israel and pursue an indigenous nuclear weapons capability and convince their ally that Seoul should not be subject to the same treatment as Iran and North Korea due to its long-standing alliance relationship with Washington. This study demonstrates why Seoul and Tokyo should understand that considering an indigenous nuclear weapons capability is fundamentally contrary to their interests, and a ROK or Japanese nuclear program, if ever pursued, would create no less than a full-blown crisis in the alliance and likely worse.
Middle Eastern powers like Saudi Arabia and some of the Gulf states concerned about an Iranian nuclear capability likewise should not be tempted to become nuclear dominoes.64 It is more difficult for the United States to apply extended deterrence commitments credibly to these close partners, which are not U.S. allies, in the Middle East. The Middle East has a much greater incidence of conflict and war than Northeast Asia, creating more frequent tests to these commitments. Similar fears of abandonment in the face of an Iranian nuclear threat make the strategic logic of nuclear proliferation even more pronounced in the Middle East.65
Each of these Northeast Asian and Middle Eastern powers in particular should recall that North Korea and Iran decided to endure great costs for their decisions to pursue nuclear weapons. They do not provide a model to other states, as this decision has effectively destroyed great potential in both countries. An NPT signatory like Japan, South Korea, or Saudi Arabia that withdraws from or abrogates the treaty to pursue nuclear weapons with impunity would pose a new kind of challenge to the nonproliferation regime. North Korea and Iran violated this norm and faced international isolation as a result. If another signatory does the same without consequence, then this unhinges the basic deal that has kept the number of nuclear weapons states low throughout the nuclear age. A model for successfully withdrawing from the treaty would inject a new and serious obstacle to the global nonproliferation regime that extends well beyond that individual state. This is not merely a decision for the United States, but would likely be taken up by the UN Security Council.
The NPT has other challenges.66 It includes the vast majority of the countries in the world, but India, Pakistan, and Israel have refused to join. Universality is important and should continue to be pursued, but an international norm on nonproliferation has emerged regardless. India, Pakistan, and Israel belong in their own grouping of NPT nuclear outliers as shown in Chapter 1, and Iran and North Korea occupy an analytically distinct and unique place in the international order as illicit nuclear aspirants. Israel, India, and Pakistan have never signed on to the agreement and have always retained their perceived right to pursue this technology. But other states that may find a degree of desirability in a nuclear weapons program should not take solace in the idea that the NPT nuclear outliers is an open club, recognizing firmly that pursuing nuclear weapons in violation of their NPT commitments would place them in the same category as North Korea and Iran and related consequences.
The nuclear weapons states have made significant moves in recent years to reduce their stockpiles of nuclear weapons, but the nuclear disarmament called for in the NPT also appears to many around the world to be a distant prospect. This is a well-studied challenge to the NPT but also an analytically distinct challenge to the nonproliferation regime than the one posed by the illicit nuclear aspirants, as also noted in Chapter 1. We do not argue that Iran and North Korea are the only problems to nonproliferation principles or practice; rather that they are the only contemporary states to accept the norm against pursuing nuclear weapons programs that have taken substantial and sustained steps to put aside that commitment.
North Korea and Iran are different from one another in most respects, but they share the critically common attribute of signing the Non-Proliferation Treaty that established the bedrock of the international nonproliferation norm and took significant steps in violation of those commitments. They are illicit nuclear aspirants that threaten international peace and security. A detailed look at the two political and economic systems as well as the recent historical record shows some new policy tools that could be applied to one or the other state; our analysis also shows where replicating policy toward one country would not apply well with the other. The world has faced significant challenges with these two nuclear programs for decades, and these problems are not likely to vanish quickly. But by studying options and thoughtfully applying policy tools to the Iran and North Korea problems, we may be able to lessen the risk and move toward a safer world.
1Robert Litwak, “A New Containment Policy for Iran, North Korea,” Foreign Affairs, April 11, 2013, www.cfr.org/proliferation/new-containment-policy-iran-north-korea/p30427.
2National governments must take responsibility for provocations carried out by its militaries, and we should have complete confidence that the regime can decide how it reacts to this type of event after the actions. In other words, we should be cognizant of diverse power centers, comments, and even possibly actions, but we should not allow this analysis to excuse actions.
3See also Andray Abrahamian, “Call 311: What the New Money Laundering Designation Means for N. Korea,” NKNews, June 6, 2016.
4Lodgaard and Sigal, p. 2.
5There are 191 state parties to the NPT. North Korea violating this commitment to all other state parties includes Iran as a state party and vice versa. Consequently, each illicit nuclear aspirant violates its commitment to 190 other state parties.
6We showed that the Kim regime suppresses potential internal regime opponents as a basic element of regime control, and it remains an open question whether Pyongyang could comprehensively address its human rights record without changing the fundamentals of the regime itself. The UN Commission of Inquiry on North Korea’s systematic human rights abuses criticized the nature of the DPRK as giving rise to human rights–abusing practices and policies. The Iranians’ human rights abuses are also wide ranging but differ on scale and emerge from different regime motivations.
7UN Security Council, “Speakers in Security Council Urge Balance between UN Role in State Sovereignty, Human Rights Protection, But Different Over Interpretation of Charter Principles,” February 15, 2016, www.un.org/press/en/2016/sc12241.doc.htm.
8Especially since the First Gulf War weakened Iran’s main military rival, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, the Islamic Republic could impose enough harm on any potential regional adversary to discourage war initiation against Tehran. Although North Korea’s conventional military has aged, it still possesses enough artillery along the DMZ that threatens to destroy South Korea’s political, economic, and social capital of Seoul and asymmetric capabilities, including naval assets, which have made South Korea’s own historical ambitions of unifying the Korean Peninsula by force an unrealized and obsolete ambition.
9Lodgaard and Sigal, pp. 1, 4.
10The first line of the P5+1–Iran Joint Plan of Action of 2013 clearly notes, “The goal for these negotiations is to reach a mutually-agreed long-term comprehensive solution that would ensure Iran’s nuclear programme will be exclusively peaceful.” But “[t]his comprehensive solution would build on these initial measures” found in the 2013 agreement. The last set of negotiating principles with North Korea in the 2005 Joint Statement hits the same note: “The Six Parties unanimously reaffirmed that the goal of the Six-Party Talks is the verifiable denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula in a peaceful manner.” But the North Korea agreement follows with the same operational logic as the Iran agreement: “The Six Parties agreed to take coordinated steps to implement the aforementioned consensus in a phased manner in line with the principle of ‘commitment for commitment, action for action.’ ” In both cases, the parties to the agreement recognize a need for actionable steps toward the ultimate goal.
11Lodgaard and Sigal, pp. 6–7.
12Scott Snyder, “North Korea’s Missiles, Nukes, and False Promises: How to Respond,” Testimony Before the Foreign Affairs Committee, United States House of Representatives, April 18, 2012. Scott Snyder, “U.S. Policy Toward North Korea,” SERI Quarterly, January 2013.
13For a one-page summary designed for policy- and law-makers oppose to the P5+1 Iran nuclear deal, see “Iran in Focus: The Danger of a Short Iranian Breakout Time,” AIPAC, May 1, 2014.
14For a thoughtful critique of the April 2015 P5+1–Iran agreement with specific suggestions for improvements on the technical and political level, see David Albright et al., “P5+1/Iran Framework: Needs Strengthening,” Institute for Science and International Security, April 11, 2015, www.isisnucleariran.org/assets/pdf/Assessment_of_Iran_Nuclear_Framework_April_11_2015-final.pdf.
15Patricia Lewis and Beyza Unal, “Iran Lessons Can Provide Guide to Dealing with North Korea,” Chatham House Expert Comment, January 11, 2016.
16Mousavian, pp. 3–4.
17The U.S. Embassy in Tehran briefly functioned after the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran in February 1979 before the embassy was overtaken and its diplomats held hostage from November 1979.
18Mousavian, p. 462.
19Hill, pp. 253–54.
20Daniel Wertz and Ali Vaez, “Sanctions and Nonproliferation in North Korea and Iran: A Comparative Analysis,” Federation of American Scientists Issue Brief, June 2012, pp. 6–15. Kenneth Katzman, Iran Sanctions (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, December 14, 2016). Dianne Rennack, Legislative Basis for U.S. Economic Sanctions (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, January 14, 2016).
21For an excellent summary of UN Security Council Resolutions and related sanctions on North Korea, see Kelsey Davenport, “UN Security Council Resolutions on North Korea,” Arms Control Association Fact Sheets and Briefs, March 2016. See also Kelsey Davenport, “UN Security Council Resolutions on Iran,” Arms Control Association Fact Sheets and Briefs, October 2015.
22Nuclear Suppliers Group, “Guidelines for Nuclear Transfers,” INFCIRC/254/Rev.13, updated November 8, 2016, www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/publications/documents/infcircs/1978/infcirc254r13p1.pdf. Fred McGoldrick, Nuclear Trade Controls: Minding the Gaps (Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and International Studies, January 2013). U.S. Department of State, “Overview of U.S. Export Control System,” 2011, www.state.gov/strategictrade/overview/.
23Takeyh and Maloney, pp. 1306, 1311.
24Critics of sanctions also argue that the economic measures contribute to the regime’s domestic standing by allowing Tehran or Pyongyang to highlight Western powers’ efforts to undermine Iran’s sovereignty, suggesting the moves are not completely cost free for the imposing side’s interests. WMD-focused sanctions also give states an incentive to enhance indigenous capabilities to develop these same technologies, though that indigenous process is likely to take much longer and have a higher chance of failure than procuring proven technology from abroad.
25For a review of U.S. unilateral sanctions on Iran, see U.S. Department of the Treasury, “Resource Center: Iran Sanctions,” updated January 24, 2017, www.treasury.gov/resource-center/sanctions/Programs/pages/iran.aspx. For a similar review of U.S. unilateral sanction on North Korea, see U.S. Department of the Treasury, “Resource Center: North Korea Sanctions,” updated January 24, 2017, www.treasury.gov/resource-center/sanctions/Programs/pages/nkorea.aspx. Other national governments impose their own unilateral sanctions on these two regimes, often corresponding closely to U.S. or UN lists. For an assessment of UN and U.S. unilateral sanctions, see John Park, “The Key to the North Korean Targeted Sanctions Puzzle,” The Washington Quarterly 37:3 (Fall 2014), pp. 199–214.
26Litwak, pp. 17, 172.
27Bruce Klingner, “Time to Go Beyond Incremental North Korean Sanctions,” 38North, April 29, 2014. Other points of advocacy, such as enhancing interdiction and enforcement of existing UN Security Council–imposed restrictions on North Korea’s nuclear- and missile-related components trade, are easily supported at the policy level and an ongoing effort of implementation.
28Chun Yung-woo, “The Iran Nuclear Deal and Its Implications for North Korea,” Asan Institute Article, February 7, 2014, www.theasanforum.org/the-iran-nuclear-deal-and-its-implications-for-north-korea/.
29National governments have imposed trade sanctions on the DPRK since its founding, but the UN Security Council had refrained from multilateralizing blanket trade barriers. Instead, the international body previously focused on restricting trade related to the illicit nuclear and ballistic missile activity or those conducting that trade. UN Security Council Resolutions 2270 and 2321, both unanimously agreed to in 2016, expand the international body’s sanctions considerably by requiring UN member states restrict trade with North Korea on legal goods such as coal and other minerals.
30UN Security Council, “Security Council Imposes Fresh Sanctions on Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), Unanimously Adopting Resolution 2270 (2016),” United Nations Meeting Coverage and Press Releases, March 2, 2016, www.un.org/press/en/2016/sc12267.doc.htm. Bradley Babson, “The North Korean Economic System: Challenges and Issues,” International Journal of Korean Studies (Spring 2016), pp. 149–75. UN Security Council, “Security Council Strengthens Sanctions on Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Unanimously Adopting Resolution 2321 (2016),” United Nations Meeting Coverage and Press Releases, November 30, 2016, www.un.org/press/en/2016/sc12603.doc.htm. See also Marcus Noland, “Analysis of UNSCR 2321 Sanctions on North Korea,” Peterson Institute for International Economics Article, November 30, 2016. Nick Wadhams, “UN Security Council Targets North Korea Coal Sales in Resolution,” Bloomberg, November 30, 2016.
31Although the two Koreas consider inter-Korean trade a special type of domestic economic exchanges given both countries’ claim to sovereignty over the entire peninsula, our data follow standard practice of external observers of integrating data on inter-Korean trade into wider data on the two countries’ foreign trade. We also note in Chapter 3 that the Kaesong Industrial Complex closed in 2013 for five months with similarly no outward sign of impact on the North Korean nuclear program.
32See for example Michael Eisenstadt, “Not by Sanctions Alone: Using Military and Other Means to Bolster Nuclear Diplomacy with Iran,” Strategic Report 13 (Washington, DC: Washington Institute for Near East Policy, July 2013).
33See for example Colin Kahl, Raj Pattani, and Jacob Stokes, “If All Else Fails: The Challenge of Containing a Nuclear-armed Iran,” CNAS Article, May 2013.
34Robert Litwak, Preventing North Korea’s Nuclear Breakout (Washington, DC: Wilson Center, 2017), pp. 69–70, 78–82.
36Rice, pp. 158–59, 712. See also Gallucci, p. 27. See also Victor Cha, The Impossible State: North Korea, Past and Future (New York: Ecco, 2012), pp. 212–13.
37Christopher Wallace, “Military Strike on North Korea May Be Only Option, Gen. Keane Says,” Fox News, April 5, 2017. John Delury, “Trump and North Korea: Reviving the Art of the Deal,” Foreign Affairs, March/April 2017.
38Kroenig, pp. 4–5.
39Mousavian, p. 9.
40Sebenius and Singh, p. 62.
41Bowen and Brewer, p. 939.
42Kenneth Pollack, “A Series of Unfortunate Events: A Crisis Simulation of a U.S.-Iranian Confrontation,” Middle East Memo, October 2012.
43Elbaradei, pp. 140, 278.
44If one accepts that limited military strikes could escalate to general war, then the responsible analyst must be willing to consider how to successfully conclude a war. In the North Korean and Iranian cases, that is usually articulated as regime change. Consequently, a regime change policy can be initiated consciously or as a reaction to unforeseen events, including precipitating limited military strikes.
45See Alexander Downes and Jonathan Monten, “Forced to Be Free? Why Foreign Imposed Regime Change Rarely Leads to Democratization,” International Security 37:4 (Spring 2013). William Nomikos, Alexander Downes, and Jonathan Monten, “Correspondence: Reevaluating Foreign-Imposed Regime Change,” International Security 38:3 (Winter 2013/14), pp. 184-95.
46Others have also argued about unification as the only sustainable solution to the North Korean nuclear issue, though practical paths to reach that end state remain. See Richard Haass, “Time to End the North Korean Threat for Good,” The Wall Street Journal, December 23, 2014.
47Downes and Monten, pp. 104–6, 130–31.
48Mousavian, p. 461.
49“Rocket Launch Sheds New Light on N.K.-Iran Ties,” The Korea Herald, December 20, 2012.
50Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China, “Joint Statement of the Fourth Round of the Six-Party Talks,” September 19, 2005, www.state.gov/p/eap/regional/c15455.htm.
51European External Action Service, “Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action,” July 14, 2015, https://eeas.europa.eu/statements-eeas/docs/iran_agreement/iran_joint-comprehensive-plan-of-action_en.pdf.
52The 2005 Joint Statement did not rule out all nuclear activity in North Korea as the parties agree to discuss “at an appropriate time, the subject of the provision of light water reactor [sic] to the D.P.R.K.” See also Perkovich, pp. 6–7.
53Jennifer Weeks argued in the late 1990s during the implementation of the U.S.-DPRK Agreed Framework that the reverse was true at that time. The United States engaged North Korea and offered incentives while seeking to isolate Iran. See Jennifer Weeks, “Iran and North Korea: Two Tests for U.S. Nuclear Cooperation Policy,” in Proceedings of Global ’99: Nuclear Technology Bridging the Millennia, a conference held in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, 30 August–2 September 1999, www.belfercenter.org/publication/iran-and-north-korea-two-tests-us-nuclear-cooperation-policy.
54“Initial Actions for Implementation of the Joint Statement,” February 13, 2007, www.mofa.go.jp/region/asia-paci/n_korea/6party/action0702.html. “Second Phase Actions for Implementation of the Joint Statement,” October 3, 2007, www.mofa.go.jp/region/asia-paci/n_korea/6party/action0710.html.
55“Initial Actions for Implementation of the Joint Statement,” February 13, 2007, www.mofa.go.jp/region/asia-paci/n_korea/6party/action0702.html. “Second Phase Actions for Implementation of the Joint Statement,” October 3, 2007, www.mofa.go.jp/region/asia-paci/n_korea/6party/action0710.html.
56Mousavian, pp. 112–13.
57For the perspective from former officials involved in the U.S.-DPRK Agreed Framework negotiation and implementation effort, see Robert Gallucci and Joel Wit, “North Korea’s Real Lessons for Iran,” The New York Times, April 11, 2015, p. A19. For another perspective on the critical importance of implementation, see Bill Burns, “The Fruits of Diplomacy with Iran,” The New York Times, April 2, 2015, p. A23.
58Mousavian, p. 237.
59Mousavian, pp. 197–98.
60Mousavian, pp. 179–82.
61Scott Snyder, “Confronting the North Korean Threat,” Hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, January 31, 2017.
62Mike Mochizuki, “Japan Tests the Nuclear Taboo,” Nonproliferation Review 14:2 (July 2007), pp. 303–28. Joseph Coleman, “PM Says Japan Won’t Build Atomic Weapons,” The Washington Post, October 18, 2006.
63Robert Einhorn and Duyeon Kim, “Will South Korea Go Nuclear?” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist, August 15, 2016. Toby Dalton, Byun Sunggee, and Lee Sang-tae, “South Korea Debates Nuclear Options,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Article, April 27, 2016, http://carnegieendowment.org/2016/04/27/south-korea-debates-nuclear-options-pub-63455.
64For a conciliatory view on possible Saudi efforts to go nuclear, see Nuclear Threat Initiative, “Saudi Arabia,” July 2016, www.nti.org/learn/countries/saudi-arabia/. Sarah Burkhard, Erica Wenig, David Albright, and Andrea Stricker, Saudi Arabia’s Nuclear Ambitions and Proliferation Risk (Washington, DC: Institute for Science and International Security, March 21, 2017). Richard Nephew and Robert Einhorn, The Iran Nuclear Deal: Prelude to Proliferation in the Middle East? (Washington, DC: Brookings Arms Control and Non-Proliferation Series Paper 11, May 2016). For a different view, see Con Coughlin, “The Saudis Are Ready to Go Nuclear,” The Telegraph, June 8, 2015. Yaroslav Trofimov, “Saudi Arabia Considers Nuclear Weapons to Offset Iran,” The Wall Street Journal, May 7, 2015.
65Robert Gallucci, “North Korea, Iran, and the Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons: The Threat, U.S. Policy, and the Prescription … and the India Deal,” in Stephen Van Evera (ed.), How to Make American Safe: New Policies for National Security (Cambridge, MA: The Tobin Project, 2006), pp. 23–24.
66United Nations, A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility – Report of the Secretary General’s High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges, and Change (New York: United Nations Department of Public Information, 2004), pp. 118–41. In addition to calling for more robust disarmament pledges by the nuclear weapons states in accord with the NPT, the UN report recommends the IAEA recognize the more robust Model Additional Protocol as the new standard, noting the need for these more intrusive inspections to ensure states retain their rights to nuclear power but do not exploit this right to develop nuclear weapons. Also, it urges the IAEA to serve as a supplier of low enriched uranium for civilian nuclear users to avoid the proliferation of enrichment and reprocessing technologies that have dual uses. It calls on all states to join the Proliferation Security Initiative to interdict illicit shipments and amend the Convention for the Suppression on Unlawful Acts against the Safety of Maritime Navigation to increase national legal mechanisms to address these illicit shipments.