Security Council grapples with sanctions on North Korea
Updated
The five permanent members of the UN Security Council are grappling with a final resolution to expand sanctions against Pyongyang, over its nuclear weapons programme.
The US Ambassador to the world body, Susan Rice, said negotiations have been intense but productive, although no agreement had been reached. It's understood that China and Russia are unconvinced harsher sanctions are the way to get North Korea to abandon its nuclear programme.
Presenter: Sen Lam
Speaker: Peter Hayes, Executive Director of the Nautilus Institute in San Francisco
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HAYES: What's been talked about is tighter sanctions on some of the financial and trading entities or companies that the DPRK operates in places like Macau and China and around the world, that's number one. I think there's probably implicit closer tracking of North Korean travel abroad, so that the various parties know where North Koreans are operating at any point in time, greater sharing of information is implied by the sanctions, that's not part of the sanctions per se.
LAM: What about this proposal to inspect suspicious North Korean air and sea cargo? I mean apart from the practicalities, do you think it has a potential to also ignite hostilities and therefore, (it's) a fairly dangerous proposal?
HAYES: What they have really been pushing for is for China to tighten its inspection of containers and aircraft that fly through Chinese territory or over Chinese territory and no doubt, the Chinese can do that. The real problem here is that the most valuable nuclear material from a proliferation perspective is not a missile, particularly a missile that is unreliable and has three times been tested and it has not worked. The real problem is nuclear weapons material, fissile material, which can be broken up into small amounts and moved in diplomatic pouches if necessary and data and designs, and particularly test datas is very valuable. And these are items that really cannot be interdicted physically. It's not just possible, and not only would you have to track every single North Korean travelling around the planet and in and out of North Korea, you'd also have to track any potential customers around the planet wherever they might intersect with those North Koreans and, or going in and out of North Korea.
LAM: Given that China and Russia are quite reticent in coming on board, even to word this resolution, have they come up with any kind of alternative suggestions?
HAYES: The Russians are particularly reluctant. I mean China has put out some harsh statements from the North Korean perspective, but clearly is not going to support harsh sanctions. Because It is not in the Chinese interest to squeeze the North Koreans hard enough that they collapse, that would just bring the United States to their border which would be a nightmare for the Chinese. And it would also have North Korea collapse in the lap of South Korea, which they rely for their substantial portion of the foreign direct investment in China's economy, so they are not about to collapse North Korea under any circumstance.
Russia's concerns are interesting. Russia has put out statements saying that they believe basically the North Koreans have been naughty and it's not helpful in the current world situation or in terms of regional security, but that it's also an issue of the United States not having dealt with what they called "the justified security concerns" of the North Koreans. In other words, after 55 years or 58 years of cold war between the United States and North Korea, the Russians are holding the United States accountable for the current impasse, as well as the North Koreans, and that is not a complete misreading of history, however we regard the last few weeks of shenanigans. They just don't believe the United States is being realistic and China has also been very clear that the actual issues that have to be resolved are between Pyongyang and Washington, and that's something that Washington will actually have to respond to because China can't actually settle that conflict anymore than the Russians can.
It really comes back to, Does Obama have a policy or does he have an attitude? At the moment, you would have to say the White House has an attitude, but it doesn't actually have a coherent policy. The United States needs to actually negotiate the issues that matter to the North Koreans rather than just shrugging them off and the North Koreans will continue to stalk the Americans with nuclear weapons until the United States changes some of its hostile policies towards North Korea. In the big picture, it's the United States that actually has the upper hand and it needs to actually come to grips with those issues.
What the North Koreans want I think it's pretty clear and they have been saying it for a long time - they would like to be treated as having co-equal status with the other powers in the region in terms of having a nuclear fuel cycle and if the United States will not deal with them, then they will deal with the United States as a co-equal nuclear weapons power and they would like to actually if anything be a security partner of the United States, rather than adversary. If you look at their strategic situation, in the long haul, they would like to have some relationship with the United States, in order to balance against the external pressure that they feel from China, Russia and Japan.
