Biegun adopts hardline “hard-or-nothing” approach on North Korea’s denuclearization

Posted on : 2019-03-13 17:47 KST Modified on : 2019-03-13 17:47 KST
Says US will not endorse Pyongyang’s incremental, step-by-step approach
US State Department Special Representative for North Korea Stephen Biegun (right) speaks at a nuclear policy conference hosted by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace at the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center in Washington
US State Department Special Representative for North Korea Stephen Biegun (right) speaks at a nuclear policy conference hosted by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace at the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center in Washington

US State Department Special Representative for North Korea Stephen Biegun, the top US envoy to the North Korea-US denuclearization talks, advocated a hardline approach toward the North that rules out incremental denuclearization. Though Biegun had been regarded as an enthusiastic advocate of dialogue, he has come around to the position held by “ultra-hawk” John Bolton, the White House’s National Security Advisor. Now that the US administration has aligned itself around the “all-or-nothing approach,” concerns are being raised about a prolongation of the deadlock that followed the failure of the second North Korea-US summit to reach a joint agreement.

“We are not going to do denuclearization incrementally,” Biegun said during a nuclear policy conference organized by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, DC, on Mar. 11. US President Donald Trump has made that point clear, Biegun said, and US officials are completely in line with that position.

Biegun said that the Trump administration has not shifted to a tougher position, but that its goal from the very beginning has been North Korea’s final and fully verified denuclearization. “We need a total solution,” he said.

These remarks – the first that Biegun has made on the record in a public setting since the North Korea-US summit in Hanoi – mean that the US has crystallized its position that no deal at all is better than a partial deal. Biegun’s remarks about a “total solution” refer to a deal in which the complete elimination of North Korea’s weapons of mass destruction (WMDs, its nuclear, biological and chemical weapons) is swapped for complete sanctions relief.

The moderator of the seminar – Helene Cooper, the New York Times’ Pentagon correspondent – suggested that the US had moved the goalposts by adding chemical and biological weapons to the negotiating table. In response, Biegun said that from his first day on the job, the efforts to bring lasting peace to the Korean Peninsula were linked to the elimination of all WMDs. In Biegun’s view, it doesn’t make sense to eliminate the threat of nuclear weapons while tolerating the existence of chemical and biological weapons. The US couldn’t accept the proposal of lifting sanctions in exchange for the partial denuclearization represented by the dismantling of the Yongbyon nuclear complex, he said, since that would mean pouring money into North Korea’s other WMDs. The implication is that even partial relief from sanctions can’t take place before the North’s complete denuclearization.

This led the moderator to press Biegun about which was correct – his remarks at Stanford University on Jan. 31 about the principle of simultaneous and parallel action or the remarks by a senior official in the State Department on Mar. 7 that nobody in the US administration supports a step-by-step approach.

Just like Trump and Bolton, Biegun left open the possibility of dialogue. “Diplomacy is still very much alive,” he said, adding that the door to diplomacy is open but that the gap between North Korea and the US is still too wide to bridge. At the same time, Biegun said that, if the US and North worked together, they could “achieve their goals within a year.”

Some argue that this all-or-nothing approach isn’t realistic. “If we don’t move off this position, we have nowhere to go. [. . .] There’s no zone of agreement if we insist on [North Korea’s] complete surrender up front,” Vipin Narang, a nuclear expert at MIT, was quoted as saying by the news website Vox.

“It’s a formula for continued deadlock,” said Joshua Pollack, a senior research associate at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies.

By Hwang Joon-bum, Washington correspondent, Lee Je-hun, senior staff writer, and Kim Ji-eun, staff reporter

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