October 03, 2017
The Uses and Misuses of Historical Analogy for North Korea
Amid a steady fusillade of ever more capable rockets from North Korea, and an escalating volley of threats and insults flying between Washington and Pyongyang, the crisis in Northeast Asia shows no sign of slackening. On the contrary, as North Korea’s drive for a nuclear-armed ballistic missile accelerates, Washington is racing to innovate creative new sanctions to strangle the Hermit Kingdom’s economy, and to develop unconventional military options that could stymie Kim Jong Un’s weapons programs without provoking a cataclysm.
But Pyongyang’s worsening provocations have also set off another kind of intellectual arms race among foreign-policy thinkers: the search for the perfect historical analogy that can pierce the fog surrounding the present crisis.
For Harvard professor Graham Allison, the North Korean affair represents a Cuban Missile Crisis in slow motion. Scholar Robert Litwak agrees—but also invokes 1914 Europe and the tinderbox that sparked a world war. Former UN Ambassador John Bolton argues that the right comparison for Kim’s behavior is to Nazi naval threats in 1941, while according to The Atlantic’s Peter Beinart, Washington should look to Ronald Reagan’s diplomacy with Mikhail Gorbachev as a model for persuading Xi Jinping to help America against Pyongyang. Other observers have sought lessons about the North Korean crisis from Stalin and Mao’s development of nuclear weapons, while for still others the better analogue is the U.S. push under the Obama administration to curtail Iran’s nuclear activities—and the solution, an Iranian-style nuclear deal.
Read the full op-ed in The Atlantic.
More from CNAS
-
The Financing of WMD Proliferation (JCE TEST)
Reports
The proliferation of weapons of mass destruction is a critical threat facing the international community. Numerous United Nations Security Council Resolutions (UNSCRs) place b...
By Jonathan Brewer
-
Amb. Nuland on N. Korea: The U.S. 'needs to get back into real diplomacy'
Video
Amb. Victoria Nuland, CEO of the Center for a New American Security and former Assistant Secretary of State, joins Ali Velshi to discuss reports that North Korea is moving ahe...
By Victoria Nuland
-
How to Tell When North Korea Starts to Denuclearize
Commentary
On Monday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo returned from what he described as “productive” conversations with North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Un. Although details are still emer...
By Eric Brewer & Jung H. Pak
-
Pyongyang Declaration: Bringing peace to the Koreas beyond symbolism
Commentary
Symbolism and atmospherics are often just as important as literal deliverables in Korean culture. This symbolic approach is not necessarily understandable to Western minds acc...
By Duyeon Kim
