With the United States and South Korea engaged in a stepped-up version of their annual Vigilant Ace 18 war games this week featuring 230 U.S. aircraft, including at least one B-1B bomber, U.S. ambassador to China Terry Branstad told CNBC in Beijing Wednesday that North Korea’s “illegal and aggressive development of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles ... are the biggest threat to humankind right now."
At the same time, Branstad, the former Republican governor of Iowa, told Bloomberg that talks between the U.S. and North Korea might be possible if the government in Pyongyang will stop testing those weapons. Branstad didn’t say whether Pr*sident Trump had okayed his statement. Two months ago, Trump publicly scolded Secretary of State Rex Tillerson for “wasting his time trying to negotiate with Little Rocket Man,” a sneering reference to North Korea’s Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un.
While Branstad praised China for supporting more sanctions on North Korea, he said more could be done:
"I want to compliment the Chinese for the changes they've made in the last three months, they've supported both of the resolutions passed by the United Nations Security Council and I believe they're working hard to enforce the sanctions," he said.
"But I think there's still more that needs to be done. We need to keep on working together and we share the conviction that we need to denuclearize the Korean Peninsula, and China and America can play a key role in working with the rest of the world."
If he and Boss Tweet back in the White House really are serious about talks, one thing Ambassador Branstad (and also U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley) ought to avoid in future interviews and statements is the claim that North Korea’s testing of nukes and missiles is “illegal.” The United Nations Security Council has strongly condemned these tests for years, but it has not stated that they violate international law for the simple reason that they don’t.
They would be illegal if North Korea were still signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which forbade non-nuclear nations from building or otherwise obtaining nuclear weapons and the nuclear-armed nations from helping them do so. But Pyongyang formally withdrew from the NPT in 2003, as allowed under the treaty’s provisions.
Another treaty ratified by 166 nations and signed by 17 others would also make testing nukes illegal. It’s the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty approved by a large majority of the U.N. General Assembly in 1996. But it has not come yet into effect because eight of the 44 states in Annex 2 of that treaty are not on board. The United States, China, Egypt, Iran, and Israel have signed but not ratified it; India, Pakistan, and North Korea have not signed at all. Thus, one key roadblock to making North Korea’s (and everybody else’s) nuclear tests illegal is the United States.
Just because they’re legal, of course, doesn’t make North Korea’s tests and tough-guy rhetoric from both sides any less frightening or destabilizing.
But this brings us to the second point that Branstad should abandon because reality demands it: denuclearization of the Korean peninsula is not going to happen in the near future. That would be true whoever is in the White House. It’s all the harder with Trumptweets threatening to rain brimstone on North Korea and Kim responding with equal bluster.
Pyongyang now has a nuclear deterrent even though experts continue to question the nation’s ability to accurately deliver those bombs. And despite the fact a U.S. attack remains on the low end of possibilities—even with impulsive, reckless Trump at the helm—it surely will take a major bargain for Kim to surrender that arsenal. That’s true even though he must divert massive resources from the nation’s economically beleaguered civilian population to make that arsenal effective (or at least persuade the world that it is so).
One way to nudge North Korea toward getting rid of its nukes is for the United States to get serious about (and get the other nuclear powers to get serious about) Article VI of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. It states:
Each of the Parties to the Treaty undertakes to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.
Critics have long taken that article to be a throwaway provision antithetical to U.S. interests. They view Ronald Reagan, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Barack Obama as wrong to support moves toward zero nuclear weapons. They argue that we must forever maintain a nuclear arsenal, that it would be suicide not to. You can bet that Kim Jong-un and his military advisers think likewise.