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Jake Sullivan

Under the foreign policy plan being prepared by former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who is all but certain to be the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate, the US would treat the North Korean nuclear issue as a top foreign policy priority and apply much more pressure and tougher sanctions than it does now in order to force North Korea to negotiate. Since Clinton is likely to ask China to put even more pressure on North Korea than it currently does, it is conceivable that US relations with China and North Korea could bring turbulence to the Korean Peninsula under a Clinton presidency.

On May 16, Jake Sullivan, the chief foreign policy advisor for Hillary’s campaign, described Hillary’s plan for North Korean policy during an address to the Asia Society in New York on May 16, Bloomberg View reported on May 17.

Considering that Sullivan served as Clinton’s chief of staff while she was Secretary of State and that he worked behind the scenes on the secret nuclear talks with Iran starting in 2012, his speech on May 17 can be regarded as the Clinton campaign’s first public disclosure of her North Korean policy.

“This is a paramount security challenge of the United States. It will have to be right at the top of the agenda for the next president to deal with,” Sullivan said, referring to the North Korean nuclear issue during his speech. “It’s hard for me to underscore how important it is that we place urgency behind this.”

“This has to be one of the first and most important pieces of business in the first summit between the next president and Xi Jinping,” he went on to say.

Given that the North Korean nuclear issue has been put on the back burner in the name of “strategic patience” during the administration of US President Barack Obama, making it a top priority is not wholly negative.

But Sullivan said that the only way to force North Korea to negotiate is by “drastically” increasing pressure on it, and he said that the international sanctions that were applied to Iran could serve as a basic model.

The Iranian model refers to a pressure strategy that applies sanctions that are so tough that they completely sever a given country’s contact with the outside world, ultimately leaving it with no choice but to seek terms. This is the approach that was used with Iran, which reached a nuclear deal with the US last year.

But some believe that the Iranian model would likely accomplish little in North Korea, which has virtually no economic interaction with the international community (except for China). There are also fears that such an approach could even raise tensions on the Korean Peninsula and increase security and nuclear threats.

Similar comments were made in a recent speech by Wendy Sherman, former US Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, who is deeply involved with foreign policy for the Clinton campaign. In the speech, Sherman called for the North Korean issue to be made a top priority while arguing that sanctions “would need to be so severe that the regime would believe they could trigger a near-term collapse or a coup."

Sullivan also mentioned a clause about secondary boycott that was included in a bill passed by Congress in February in order to put more pressure on North Korea, Bloomberg View reported. Secondary boycotts are designed to punish companies or individuals in other countries who do business with North Korea, but practically speaking, they target China, the country that does the most business with North Korea. Since the Chinese government has strongly resisted secondary boycotts, for the US to push ahead with them would have considerable consequences for its relations with China.

Clinton is well-known for being a foreign policy hawk. When Barack Obama said during the Democratic primary in the 2008 presidential election that he was willing to meet with the leaders of enemy countries including not only North Korea but also Cuba, Iran and Syria without any conditions, Clinton attacked him for being too soft.

By Yi Yong-in, Washington correspondent

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