David Miliband

Foreign Secretary

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Friday 27 June, 2008

North Korea: Sanctions Working?

The declaration from the Government of North Korea on its nuclear programme is significant, and the multilateral process led by the US and regional players ("Six Party Talks") deserves enthusiastic support. We can only hope this means that one of the most closed regimes in the world may be concluding that its nuclear programme's not worth the candle. There is a mass of work to be done on the verification of denuclearisation - no one is naive about the regime - but the diplomatic track, however slow, has shown itself powerful. People sometimes say we always reach for sanctions but they never work (South Africa in the 1980, sometimes admitted as an exception); here is one example where the pressure may be telling. Sitting in Japan - where children were abducted by North Korea agents in the 1960's - the slow and tortuous process of engagement looks like a delicate piece of bomb disposal. And today there is hope that it may be working.

Posted at 15:40 27 June 2008 by David Miliband  |  Comments[2]

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You wrote that North Korea's "nuclear programme's not worth the candle", then why has great Britain got nuclear weapons? And maybe North Korea chased after nuclear weapons because of the threats that America and the West posed to the rest of the world

Posted by Robert on June 29, 2008 at 11:29 AM BST #

Since most of us educated westerners are analytical, we tend to think that a rational policy of carrots and sticks will encourage good behaviours and discourage bad behaviours from malfeasant regimes. Such responses only follow if the leadership of those regimes act in their own self-interest. It is not clear to me that the leadership of the DPRK always act in their own self-interest. This is a regime, after all, which has placed bombs on airliners carrying Cabinet Ministers from the ROK South Korea, kidnaps citizens from other countries as you note, and is actively starving and enslaving its own citizens. I would hope that the FCO also has a team doing scenario planning and policy preparation on the assumption that the DPRK leadership may be clinically insane, and for example launches a missile attack against Japan.

Posted by Peter on June 29, 2008 at 01:50 PM BST #

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