Mindy Kotler, director and founder of the Japan Information Access Project in Washington, DC, asserts that the Bush administration must examine its three fundamental assumptions of North Korea: 1) Kim Jong Il is a gangster and not a legitimate head of state; 2) North Korea is a client state of the People’s Republic of China; and 3) North Korea’s neighbors are not concerned with another Asian nuclear power. By failing to analyze these assumptions, the Bush administration has hindered a creative response to North Korea’s nuclear program.

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.