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William Potter, director of the Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies and Phillip Saunders, director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies, argue that given the current war in Iraq, North Korean efforts to potentially escalate the crisis carry a high risk of misperception and unintended consequences. The potential for major miscalculations by both the United States and the DPRK is compounded by lack of agreement in Washington about what the United States seeks from North Korea and what it should be prepared to pay. The administration’s failure to draw “red lines” about proscribed behavior means that North Korea can only guess what actions might prompt a forceful U.S. response.

In this essay, Kimberly Ann Elliott, Research Fellow at the Institute for International Economics in Washington, D.C. outlines the strategy and potential efficacy of economic sanctions on North Korea. Consequently, Elliott concludes, multilateral cooperation and negotiation are critical to peacefully resolving the current nuclear crisis on the Korean peninsula. While North Korea’s closest neighbors are again resisting the sanctions option, if economic sanctions were part of a carrots and stick strategy to negotiate a resolution to the crisis, they might choose to cooperate-especially if the principal alternatives are continued instability or a military strike.

The following is text of a speech given on March 20, 2003 by Desaix Anderson at the Croft Institute of International Studies University of Mississippi Oxford. Anderson asserts that success through bi-lateral negotiations between the United States and North Korea was attainable last fall and might still be attainable if our diplomacy were flexible and deft. But time has become very short and it may already be too late. We may now be faced with only two options: catastrophic war or a nuclear-armed North Korea. Desaix Anderson served for thirty-five year as a Foreign Service Officer, U.S. State Department, working in and on Asian issues, was Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia and the Pacific (1989-92) and executive director of the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization (KEDO) for over three years until April 2001. He currently writes on Asian issues and paints in New York City.