As a multilateral Iran-JCPOA (Washington Insider Magazine) – apparently close to being signed once again, sooner than later, after years of issues first arising from Donald Trump’s decision to unilaterally withdraw the United States from the first iteration of this agreement, individuals and policymakers should have learned to some degree that well-structured agreements are better for the world than the alternatives. This is bearing itself on the international stage too, however, as the Russian invasion of Ukraine has drawn frustration and condemnation from across most of the world.
While Russia repositions itself in the hopes of maintaining the grip that they possess upon the eastern flank of Ukraine, that invaded nations continues to fight, resist and struggle against its would-be captor. While neo-nazis do exist in Ukraine to be sure, that is neither the subject of this piece, nor truly the subject of the Russian invasion either to be fair. Russia wishes to possess in some official or shadow capacity, for mostly nationalistic and faux-historical purposes, the Crimea, as well as what appears to be a border or buffer strip including the Donbas and the unrecognized Luhansk and Donetsk that exist with Russian support, yet that they can hold any of this in any long-term sense is still not absolutely clear at all either.
Work on this stil-simmering problem should have been more proactively attempted for in the years after the first recent incident in Ukraine in 2014. Those sanctions were poorly conceived and applied by the European Union and the United States under Barack Obama, and while the Minsk Agreements were likely the fruits of those first sanctions to some degree, there was no volition regarding the topic from that point forward.
While that administration and its successor did not, in various different ways, work on Russia or Europe to create a real pathway away from the same types of issues that created the circumstances for conflict in the first place, the world has seemingly overcome the hiccup of the Trump administration to come close to renewing the JCPOA, just years after it was ruined, which occurred just years after it was first created. The Iran deal has, to be sure, been an exercise in foreign policy disagreement that will go down historically for how publicly it has played out, and the instability it generated as a result; the world understands this is a positive innovation, while the Republican Party stands as ever, blocking the path to progress.
Yet volition for this deal, the Iran Nuclear Deal or JCPOA, has been able to sustain itself even in the down periods of its history – the 45th President’s administration, between the 44th and 46th Presidents. The nuclear element and the multilateral desire for American involvement must play equal parts for that volition surely; while the international community wished to believe that Russia simply wouldn’t try to handle Ukraine in the future, it could not refuse to acknowledge that – without a new multilateral JCPOA in place and agreed to by all involved parties – there could be no rest on efforts to create a viable, international path forward and accord for all; the future of the world in many ways depends upon it.
The lessons of the recent diplomatic struggles, trials and tribulations with both Iran and Russia – of our own making and of largely the makings of others – must educate and inform diplomats and policymakers better moving forward, and this includes not only those obvious candidates for multilateral diplomatic agreements and proverbial “thaws” like Cuba and Venezuela, but also a nation like the Hermit Kingdom of North Korea. While on the one hand, nations would like to minimize, isolate and sanction Kim-Jong Un and that nation indefinitely – as has already been the case, unsuccessfully I might add – they will, on the other hand – not go away as an issue or political force or threat either. They will, instead, continue to make efforts towards aims which might bring them closer towards the diplomatic leverage they seek for negotiating their way back into the international community of nation anyway, just like Iran has been able to do.
Iran is an easier theoretical and practical case to work through in many ways than is North Korea is to be sure, but the lessons learned from that ordeal, alongside that which we have and continue to learn regarding this Russian scenario, make coming to terms with the international and diplomatically practical realities, both of the present as well as of the future, more palatable for the more recalcitrant parties. The international community cannot sit upon their proverbial hands when other nations are in constant motion regarding some aim which, in one way or another ideally, would fulfill some practical, economic, historical or functional interest of that nation; that international community must act proactively to be sure, but not in the military sense exclusively, or even at all. The United States and the wider world at large must act with great diplomatic foresight and proactivity, and that begins with bridge building instead of regimes of diplomatic and/or economic isolation.
Now, North Korea isn’t Cuba or Venezuala, in that it is not a largely internationally disinterested nation, but it also isn’t as internationally influential as Iran, despite its attempts to be so, even as it works upon developing its own nuclear arsenal and leverage. It is always threatening and making great pronouncements, but, unlike Russia, it is not invading its neighbor, or seemingly anywhere else either anytime soon. If Russia did not have the economic or infrastructural capabilities before the massive multilateral sanction campaign was administered to it, it is safe to say that North Korea can not well afford any type of foreign policy predicated on invasion and conquest.
Yet North Korea, of course, says that it continues its nuclear program, continues to develop new rockets and more powerful means by which to move such weapons of mass destruction, and is sanctioned all the while. North Korea, in fact, has had sanctions levied against it for as long and as consistently – counting embargos dating back decades of course – as any nation upon the planet today. Previous bilateral and multilateral talks have failed across the prior decades, it is true, yet there is never a better moment to begin a new than right today. And while I personally usually use Cuba and Iran as the most consistent examples of the results of long-term sanctions, it must be clarified that North Korea, in one way or another, is actually the oldest still ongoing example we might use to demonstrate the effects of this foreign policy upon the domestic existences of others.
And it shows to be sure. While Cuba, Iran and Venezuala have all been damaged and disconnected by the sanction regimes placed upon them as yolks, North Korea is a truly broken and diminished society. The people that escape the Hermit Kingdom are often malnourished, sometimes riddled with parasites or readily curable illnesses or deficiencies. That they are in these conditions and yet often persevere to attempt to escape anyway demonstrates the spirit and resilience of humanity itself, to be sure. While the state must be held accountable for this of course, and while the Great Leader has three Maybach automobiles, and so few deny this, the “forever sanctions” used against North Korea must also be considered regarding the poverty and plight of that nation and its people.
Sanctions are barbarism disguised as diplomatic responsibility, have lasted far too long, and have succeeded in far too few positive innovations to be realistic foreign policy options for very much longer. They have, in ways as drastic if not more drastic than in Iran, Russia, Cuba, Venezuela, as battered and as deteriorated a society and economy as any nation in the world, and while North Korea is so often not taken seriously by other nations of the world, if the rest of the world waits long enough in disinterest, they will have to handle a very angry, very poorly mistreated nation with nuclear capabilities at JCPOA-esque meetings and negotiations.
That too, is likely the long term future of the multilateral relationship with Russia as well. While sanctions should and most likely will begin to lessen as Russia and Ukraine come to terms regarding a bilateral way forward for those two nations, the international community will surely have reservations beyond that particular goal or specific innovation. It will take a plan forward to redevelop trust between all the parties affected by this Russian invasion of Ukraine, especially so long as the current Russian President remains in charge of that nation, as it will regarding the other nations I’ve previously mentioned like Cuba and Venezuela. In that same spirit, North Korea should be engaged in serious, multilateral ways, both for the humanitarian reasons I’ve previously outlined, and before that polity develops leverage over negotiations in serious ways in the coming years; the worst harm remains in not trying with as much vigor as possible.
Of the many lessons learned from Iran and Russia, two must be that multilateral agreements work, when entered in good faith, for all involved parties better than nothingness, and that ignoring issues, tensions and peoples does not necessarily make those circumstances disappear either. Another, however, might be that the alternatives to mutuality now are oftentimes either mutuality from a worse position, or outright violence later on. Hence, the United States and its allies must reach out to the Hermit Kingdom and its allies when the opportunity presents itself as reasonable.
This does not condone the behaviour of a regime or an autocrat of course, for if diplomacy intimated as much, then nothing other than war could ever be accomplished; perhaps even, this false equivocation explains precisely why and how nations find themselves so often in conflict these days anyway. Yet carrying on, working towards creating better, more active and positive relationships with leaders you do not agree with, and creating better conditions for the humans that live within their nations, are worthwhile endeavors for leaders and nations without question.
For when the sanction regime is designed in the theoretician’s study, does not the intellectual aim for that sanction to bring the targeted nation to a place where it will look to find accords with the nation or nations it is at odds with? In other words, does not the sanction regime, through whatever roads and channels it pushes and coerces nations through, ultimately look to bring nations that are at odds with one another to the table for negotiations all the same?
Granted, the sanctions route is meant to disenfranchise a country from the bounty of the international diplomatic or economic communities to varying degrees before that time comes, but if the only actual difference between working on developing relationships with nations, regimes and leaders that are disagreeable with or without the use of sanctions – especially forever sanctions – is that in one scenario, a nation is, theoretically at least, made or positioned vis-a-vis sanctions to have to proverbially yell out “uncle,” and come to the bargaining table strictly upon the terms of one, openly superior party, then I do not see any actual great intrinsic difference, only an arbitrary qualification, tied to some, oftentimes imaginary, hypothesis or perception regarding how sanctions – in instances unlike that regarding Russia – create leverage, trust, and amicability by forced starvation, suffocation and indefinite isolation.
It would be better to entreaty with North Korea now and today, and to work on a multilateral path – if possible – to where their nation and people can live more openly and freely, and can contribute in positive ways to the international community of nations and all of those individuals nations that make it up right now, than to wait until North Korea is in a better position to dictate the terms of their own multilateral agreement that conservatives and reactionaries will hate and find problem with. It would be better both diplomatically as well as humanitarianly, and would be a major accomplishment for the President who is brave and determined enough to seriously pursue that course.
Better still, such a course charted and executed successfully would create a circumstance where further nuclear innovation becomes practically unnecessary for the sake of diplomatic leveraging. While the move will be nothing simple to execute, its reverberations would be great and vast, and the world would be a more stable and positive place by that effort alone.
The people of North Korea deserve as much to be sure, and the world needs to stop acting as if 70-year-old sanctions are going to bust this proverbial grape any day now. It is unreasonable. If a nation as decimated as North Korea is hasn’t burst now, well, then it is safe to say that it may already long ago have been turned into the national equivalent of a raisin; mutuality and progress must reign over isolation, decades-long regimes of targeted, weaponized destitution, whether it be in Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, eventually Russia once again and yes, even North Korea.