Isolate or Integrate?

In President Obama’s Statement on North Korea, he said,

“Such provocations will only serve to deepen North Korea’s isolation.  It will not find international acceptance unless it abandons its pursuit of weapons of mass destruction and their means of delivery.”

I’ve been thinking about that quote all week (ever since I edited it out of Monday’s post).  One of the great ironies of U.S. foreign policy is that we use the carrot of integration and the stick of isolation. When a country does something wrong, we limit their access to international financial markets, we sanction them, we cut off official visits, and we otherwise try to make them feel like a global pariah. When people do what we like, we give them aid, we support trade, and we increase our interactions with that state.

This is ironic, because openness generally is the one thing we should be providing to these states. Bringing people into the global village is the only way to get them to play nice (as it were). Let’s look at the Soviet Union. What caused it to fail? Glasnost and perestroika. When combined with massive economic spending forced by Reagan, openness brought down one of the most powerful empires the world has ever known. 

U.S. foreign policy largely believes these “rogue states” want to integrate—and is mistaken.  I would wager that North Korea (and several other repressive regimes) are actually seeking isolation, at least from the West.  North Korea has, through years of sanctions, managed to limit the U.S. course of action greatly.  There’s simply not much more we can do short of violence.  (Other countries can still do things, but that’s another whole post.)  North Korea is used to our normal sticks, so it no longer functions, meaning the only tools we’ve had over the past fifteen years are carrots, hence the constant cycle of be bad, get bribe to quit, repeat.  Let’s look at a few other examples.

Iran is a country that we’ve long isolated. We have sanctioned them in every way we can. It doesn’t work. In fact, by sanctioning them and isolating them, we’ve allowed Ahmajenidad (doing what we don’t want) to gain legitimacy by rallying around the flag.

Cuba is the oldest example of a country we’ve closed off. I’ve spoken previously about it. When Bill Clinton took some actions to open Cuba, the Castro regime shot down the Brothers to the Rescue planes, contributing to hard-liners’ legitimacy and increased sanctions. It’s pretty clear that Castro wanted to remain isolated, because in isolation you can do what you want.

Many would say that China is an exception to this policy. They’d be wrong. While China remains undemocratic domestically, on the international scene, the openness has brought great pressure on them to behave responsibly. While they’re certainly not going to agree with us on everything (and like the Europeans are going to be content to let the U.S. pay both the economic and the societal costs of being the bad guy), their actions are in line with an independent global actor who has some interest in the status quo.

Tagged as: Cuba, Iran, non-proliferation, North Korea