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North Korean Vice Foreign Minister Choe Son-hui holds a press conference with foreign diplomats in Pyongyang on Mar. 15. (AP/Yonhap News)

After North Korean Vice Foreign Minister Choe Son-hui said that US President Donald Trump had expressed a positive attitude about sanctions relief on the condition of a snapback clause, which would reinstate sanctions if North Korea doesn’t follow through on its agreement, during his summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in Hanoi, there is growing interest about whether this idea could lead to a breakthrough in the North Korea-US denuclearization talks.

“The question of the strictness of the snapback provisions will be a very important agenda item in future negotiations between North Korea and the US,” predicted Kim Yeon-cheol, the nominee for Unification Minister, during a confirmation hearing on Mar. 26.

Snapbacks are a measure that’s frequently employed to enforce implementation of agreements in trade negotiations in which economic interests are at stake. By specifying the possibility of retaliation in the event that an agreement isn’t implemented, they guarantee that implementation continues. A snapback agreement was specified in the automobile section of the South Korea-US Free Trade Agreement that took effect in March 2012, and this snapback was regarded as one of the agreement’s main toxic clauses along with its allowance of investor-state dispute settlement.

The snapback was also applied in the Iran nuclear agreement that was signed in Vienna, Austria, in July 2015. The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) that was concluded by the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (the US, China, Russia, the UK and France), Germany and Iran specified that sanctions would be reinstated if Iran violated its agreement. In exchange for the step-by-step lifting of UN sanctions, Iran promised not to continue its nuclear development program.

North Korea indicates willingness to accept snapback agreement

The design of the snapback was not charitable to Iran. If even one of the countries on a joint committee that included not only the signatories to the agreement but also the EU raised questions about maintaining sanctions relief, the question would immediately be referred the UN Security Council. None of the members of the joint committee were allowed to exercise a veto. The UN Security Council could only vote on whether sanctions relief would continue, which was aimed at preventing states opposed to reinstating sanctions from exercising a veto. And if a vote wasn’t held within 30 days, the sanctions would be automatically reinstated.

North Korea is obviously aware of these circumstances. The fact that Choe nevertheless revealed that there was a discussion of lifting sanctions through a snapback at the Hanoi summit suggests that the North could accept such an arrangement. “This was a major move for North Korea. The mention of a snapback both shows the North’s commitment to denuclearization and simultaneously reveals how desperately it wants sanctions to be eased,” said Koo Kab-woo, professor at the University of North Korean Studies.

Choe argued that Trump was receptive to the snapback idea but that US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and White House National Security Advisor John Bolton had created an impediment. This suggests that there are conflicting judgments inside the US about the snapback.

For the snapback to be useful to the US, elaborate calculations will be needed to lower the activation threshold as much as possible. Furthermore, the current sanctions regime on North Korea is a complex mixture of international sanctions by the UN and independent sanctions by the US. “If North Korea and the US discuss a snapback, it will open up a new and complicated debate about the sequence of denuclearization measures and sanctions relief and the methods and procedures for determining whether the North has violated its agreement,” said an official at South Korea’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

“It’s unlikely that a snapback could be a safety mechanism for an agreement when there’s still insufficient trust between North Korea and the US. The crux of the denuclearization negotiations is still the question of what the North is going to do with its nuclear weapons,” said Cho Sung-ryul, former senior research fellow for the Institute for National Security Strategy.

By Yoo Kang-moon, senior staff writer, and Noh Ji-won, staff reporter

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