North Korea, Iran and the Challenge to International Order

A Comparative Perspective

Patrick McEachern, Jaclyn O’Brien McEachern, Jaclyn O'Brien McEachern

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351587136
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Korean History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book examines and compares the political situations in North Korea and Iran, and the contemporary security challenges posed by their illicit nuclear aspirations.

While government officials, including a series of American presidents, strategic policy documents and outside analysts have repeatedly noted that North Korea and Iran occupy a similar challenge, the commonality has largely been left unexplored. This book argues that North Korea and Iran are uniquely common in the world today in their illicit nuclear aspirations in violation of their legal commitments made under the Non-Proliferation Treaty. The work evaluates alternative arguments, some of which sustain that the two states should be grouped together based on other metrics, such as nuclear powers that sponsor terrorist organizations or nuclear states that violate human rights, and find alternative explanations do not hold up to empirical scrutiny. Drawing on newly declassified documents and Iranian and North Korean sources, the book provides a comprehensive and comparative assessment of the two states' social, historical, economic, and domestic political structures and situation to make these determinations. Furthermore, it reviews the nuclear issue stemming from Iran and North Korea and the efforts to constrain these programs. The book concludes with specific policy recommendations that apply diplomatic lessons learned from dealing with Iran to North Korea and vice versa.

This book will be of interest to students of nuclear proliferation, international security, foreign policy and International Relations.

1 Illicit nuclear aspirants

North Korea and Iran occupy a special place in U.S. strategic thinking. American presidents and U.S. strategic national security documents have overwhelmingly referred to North Korea and Iran in tandem in the past fifteen years as presenting a similar type of challenge to international security. The two states are explicitly hostile to the United States and have maintained long-standing efforts to develop nuclear weapons and their means of delivery despite occasional negotiated breaks. North Korea and Iran have cooperated on sensitive military projects, most notably with respect to ballistic missiles that can carry weapons of mass destruction. Both have poor human rights records, contribute to regional instability and have occupied one of the few spaces on the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism. North Korea and Iran are the only major states in the world without some form of diplomatic relations with the United States or some U.S. diplomatic presence on their soil. The lack of a diplomatic presence shows the thinness of the relationship and paucity of government-to-government interaction with the United States, among other nations, and underlines a similarly thin economic and people-to-people relationship. Diplomatic engagement for all parties is fraught with domestic political challenges. International actors, including the United Nations Security Council and national governments, have employed a similar set of tools, including sanctions, military deterrence, and bilateral and multilateral dialogue, to attempt to address these problems.¹ Intuitive to many but not to all, there is something that connects these two countries as similar.

It is not common for medium-sized states in different regions to be considered in tandem, and the nature of this Iran–North Korea grouping has never been clearly defined. Instead, scholars and government officials alike have resorted to labels, calling states that generally might be grouped together as “rogue,” “outlaw,” “pariah,” and “outlier” states. Slightly varied groupings have taken the names “Axis of Evil,” “outposts of tyranny” or the analytically nondescriptive “states of concern.”² All names suffer from imprecision and, in some cases, duplicate usage that poses further challenges to identifying a group of states.³

Political and policy considerations help shape the labels applied to these states to achieve the desired connotation, but a robust effort to clearly define what makes this grouping relevant helps create a productive and structured comparison. The comparative social sciences tend to focus on structure: Do a group of states maintain a similar set of political, economic, or social institutions? Foreign policy analyses tend to be less methodologically formal and focus more on research questions related to political agency: Do these states make particular foreign or domestic policy choices that merit grouping them together? Defining the common attributes of these states allows one to analyze with greater objectivity the success or failure of specific policy options directed at one or the other country.

The core argument of this book is that North Korea and Iran are Illicit Nuclear Aspirants – a unique set of states that have signed onto the landmark Non-Proliferation Treaty, which serves as the bedrock of the international norm on nonproliferation, and then violated those commitments. We demonstrate that competing ideas that the two states should be grouped together on different metrics – such as support for international terrorism, fomenting regional instability, and egregious human rights records – do not hold up to empirical scrutiny. We take an integrated comparative perspective throughout the book, including a comparative assessment of the two countries’ historical trajectories; domestic, economic, and ideological orientation; foreign and security policies; human rights records; and illicit nuclear activity.

We leverage that in-depth comparison to show where lessons learned from diplomacy with Iran can be applied to North Korea and vice versa – as well as to identify where conditions do not support applying similar approaches. Contemporary questions like whether financial sanctions imposed on Iran would be successful if imposed on North Korea, or whether the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action with Iran has wider lessons for North Korea, are examples of the policy relevance of this study that are considered in greater detail in the concluding chapter. This book provides both an empirically tested theory of what justifies grouping together Iran and North Korea, as well as specific foreign policy lessons derived from that comparison.

North Korea and Iran in U.S. strategic thinking

American presidents, their administrations’ Defense and State Departments, and even nonpartisan national intelligence assessments have consistently recognized North Korea and Iran as presenting a common type of threat to the United States, its allies, and the broader international security environment. Although administrations may define the Iranian and North Korean threat with terminology that has different connotations and pursue distinct policy approaches, there has been general agreement within U.S. administrations that these emerging nuclear threats are a major and somehow similar national security concern. This section demonstrates that the superpower categorizes North Korea and Iran as vaguely similar threats, but this literature lacks a theoretically cohesive and empirically grounded explanation for grouping these two states together, which this book seeks to correct.

American presidents have prioritized North Korea and Iran as similar national security concerns. A government can always issue more statements or lengthen published reports. However, there is no greater scarcity in an administration than the president’s time, and issues that find their way into important and effectively time-limited major addresses are likely administration priorities. The annual State of the Union address is the U.S. president’s opportunity to showcase domestic and foreign policy priorities. North Korea and Iran are fairly small states that normally would not come to mind as topping the agenda of the leader of the most powerful country in the world. They are separated by ideology, culture, and geography, yet they have come to represent a singular type of challenge to U.S. national interests as articulated by conservative and progressive American leaders alike.

Since the end of the Cold War, an American president first referenced North Korea in the annual address in 1994, when President Bill Clinton noted the pending U.S.-DPRK Agreed Framework. Clinton raised the same issue in the State of the Union in the following two years and again in 1999. In all instances, he noted concerns about North Korea’s nuclear weapons programs, but he never referred to Iran in the same context as North Korea in his first seven State of the Union addresses. The first combination of these two challenges in this context came in Clinton’s final State of the Union address. Whereas senior administration officials considered this comparison in various forms much earlier in the administration, including National Security Advisor Tony Lake’s more general article in Foreign Affairs in 1994,⁴ it took more than a decade after the end of the Cold War for this idea that North Korea and Iran pose a similar type of threat to international order to start to take substantial form in this high-level pronouncement. We will see later that this generally tracks with the threat perception articulated in other strategic U.S. government documents and that the comparison transcended party affiliation and branch of government in the United States.

President George W. Bush mentioned North Korea and Iran together in the same context in all of his State of the Union addresses except his last one and the 2005 address that more substantially focused on both cases independently. Near the end of his administration, Bush focused more on Iran independently in this speech, augmenting the combined concerns about nuclear development in the two states. Importantly, the Iranian issue diversified beyond the nuclear issue in presidential rhetoric as Iran’s relation to stability in Iraq and regional security, terrorism, and democracy and human rights promotion received increased focus.

Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump followed the precedent of their predecessors and did not mention either foreign policy challenge in their first Joint Address to Congress that had a more domestic focus, but Obama continued his predecessors’ reference to the two states in half of his addresses. He also gave a separate nod to Iran four times as nuclear diplomacy with Iran progressed but the North Korean nuclear issue languished. We do not wish to overemphasize this admittedly crude proxy for quantifying a president’s focus, but the broad point remains that U.S. administrations of all political stripes in the 21st century have tended to view and articulate North Korea and Iran as a common type of problem for U.S. interests.

Beyond the top political level, the United States’ defense, diplomatic, and intelligence agencies, regardless of the occupant of the White House, has consistently and publicly identified North Korea and Iran as presenting a similar challenge to both U.S. national security and international peace and stability. The Defense Department’s 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review noted North Korea and Iran pose destabilizing risks to their respective regions and pursue nuclear weapons in contravention of their international commitments.⁵ The previous version of the same strategic planning document four years earlier similarly noted, “North Korea and Iran, as part of their defiance of international norms, are actively testing and fielding new ballistic missile systems … I [U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates] remain concerned about the nuclear ambitions and confrontational postures of Iran and North Korea.” It adds that the Defense Department is pursuing a common policy response with nonproliferation and counterproliferation efforts, including enhancing nuclear forensics to improve the country’s confidence in identifying the source of nuclear materials to enhance deterrence.⁶ The 2015 National Military Strategy likewise paralleled the two threats,⁷ and, although the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff announced the 2017 National Military Strategy would be classified, they also publicly acknowledged that both North Korea and Iran would still be included in the prioritized threats.⁸

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Table 1.1 References to North Korea and Iran in the State of the Union Address

Year	Single Reference to North Korea	Single Reference to Iran	Combined Reference to North Korea and Iran
1989	No	No	No
1990	No	No	No
1991	No	No	No
1992	No	No	No
1993	No	No	No
1994	Yes	No	No
1995	Yes	No	No
1996	Yes	No	No
1997	Yes	No	No
1998	No	No	No
1999	Yes	No	No
2000	No	No	Yes
2001	No	No	No
2002	No	No	Yes
2003	No	No	Yes
2004	No	No	Yes
2005	Yes	Yes	No
2006	No	Yes	Yes

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Illicit nuclear aspirants
• 2 A comparative history
• 3 Domestic politics, economy, and ideology
• 4 Foreign and security policy and human rights
• 5 Nonproliferation
• 6 Conclusions and policy implications
• Index