Grand Bargain Versus Incremental Approach to Disarm North Korea

Tensions over the North Korean nuclear crisis have grown so serious that the risks of a major military conflict breaking out soon are all too real. Facing a possible nuclear conflict, both North Korea and the United States say they prefer a negotiated solution, but isit possible to reach a major quid pro quo, in which North Korea would commit to abandoning its nuclear weapons in return for normalized relations, security guarantees, and sanctions relief from the United States and other key international players?

On Thursday Nov. 9, when President Trump and his team visited Beijing's Great Hall of the People, Chief of Staff John Kelly and a U.S. Secret Service agent skirmished with Chinese security officials over the nuclear football.

The senior U.S. diplomat for Asia, Susan Thornton, said on Thursday she understood the Trump administration had no strategy for a so-called bloody nose strike on North Korea, but Pyongyang would be forced to give up its nuclear weapons “one way or another.”  President Donald Trump’s administration says it prefers a diplomatic solution to the crisis over North Korea’s development of nuclear missiles capable of hitting the United States.

European officials are intensifying their efforts to save the Iranian nuclear deal, opening a new channel to press Tehran to curtail its military involvement in neighboring conflicts just as tensions spiral throughout the Middle East. European diplomats sat down with a senior Iranian official over the weekend on the sidelines of a major security conference in Munich.

If anyone had any doubt left, a panel discussion today at the Munich Security Conference showcased with brutal clarity that the United States and Russia have very little common ground for a rapprochement on nuclear weapons — or much else, for that matter. Seated on a podium here at the stately Bayerischer Hof hotel, John Sullivan, the U.S. deputy secretary of state, found himself treading familiar waters with Sergey Kislyak, the former Russian ambassador in Washington and now first deputy chairman of the committee on foreign affairs in the parliament’s upper chamber.

The dominant narrative about Russia’s nuclear weapons in Western strategic literature since the beginning of the century has been something like this: Russia’s doctrine of ‘escalate-to-de-escalate’ and its large-scale military exercises show that Moscow is getting ready to use low-yield, theatre nuclear weapons to stop NATO from defeating Russia’s forces, or to coerce the Atlantic Alliance and end a conflict on terms favourable to Russia.