I concluded that his demand really was “Assure my security against a foreign invasion.” Therefore, the counterdemand had to relate to assuring us that his nuclear threat became moot in exchange for our ensuring his political survival. This meant turning attention away from just threatening Kim to finding a way to make his interests and the international community’s interests compatible. Thinking through his interests as well as the interests of others, it becomes clear that any successful compromise requires that the international community be assured that as long as it does nothing to jeopardize Kim’s political survival, he will do nothing to jeopardize peace on the Korean peninsula or beyond.
In practical terms this meant that the United States directly, or through third parties, needed to guarantee, and I mean really guarantee, not to invade North Korea. The United States also needed to guarantee a sufficient flow of money—we will call it foreign aid—so that Kim Jong Il’s key domestic backers would be assured of receiving substantial personal, private rewards from him. These rewards include money that could go to their secret bank accounts in return for their political loyalty to him. In return for his assured security and for a steady flow of money, the North Korean regime needed to provide a verifiable means of ensuring that its nuclear weapons program stopped. Assurances of his security would most likely come in two forms: formal, explicit Chinese guarantees to defend North Korea, and public American promises not to attack it. Making these guarantees public is critical, because secret assurances are just cheap talk. They are easily violated without imposing political costs on the guarantor who reneges. As for the assurance of a steady flow of money, we are probably talking about as much as $1 billion per year for as long as Kim Jong Il’s regime survives. That may sound like a lot, but think about how much was spent every day in Iraq for years on end, and at what additional price in American, allied, and Iraqi lives, and you’ll see that $1 billion a year is small potatoes.
There is plenty about such a deal that is distasteful. Bankrolling such a horrible human being is no happy task. It would be ever so much more satisfying if we could just persuade him to do the right thing, but then Kim Jong Il wouldn’t be Kim Jong Il if that were feasible. Exactly because he is so horrible, it is important to figure out how to keep him from unleashing a nuclear war in a fit of pique or fear or resignation that he is through anyway and so has nothing to lose. Remember, my task was to find what would work. The desirability of making it work is what we elect leaders to decide.
I want to emphasize here that I have said “a verifiable means of ensuring that its nuclear weapons program stopped.” I have not suggested that North Korea’s nuclear weapons program and enrichment facilities be eliminated (positions 80 and above on the issue scale in figure 4.1) or dismantled. This is of fundamental strategic importance in making an agreement credible from both sides—so let me explain what I had in mind.
In the event that the United States or the other participants in negotiations with North Korea insisted on dismantling that country’s nuclear capabilities, I believe agreement would have been impossible or would prove short-lived, leading to inevitable cheating. Dismemberment of North Korea’s nuclear capabilities as an approach overlooks the essence of Kim Jong Il’s interests. It fails to put ourselves, as any good strategic thinker must do, in his shoes, looking at the world from his (perhaps elevated) perspective.
If he dismantled his nuclear capabilities, he would no longer have a credible threat of restarting his weapons program quickly in the event the international community—especially the United States—reneged on its promises. In such an environment we can be confident that the international community would renege, and, anticipating that, he would never allow his weapons program to be dismantled. After all, once his nuclear threat was completely dismantled, hardly anyone would have any remaining reason to follow through on payments to him, payments that help him keep domestic as well as foreign rivals under control. The international community would have even weaker reasons to leave him in power. They would rather replace him with someone more amenable to their wishes once his threat to use nuclear weapons to defend his regime was no longer meaningful. Remember, game theory takes a dim view of human nature, and that includes our nature as well as his. However high-minded we think we are, we would have scant incentive to continue to pay Kim Jong Il to behave well once his ability to behave really badly was eliminated.
Thus, as long as his nuclear program is stopped, disabled, placed in mothballs, with inspectors on site at all times, and not dismantled, he has the ability to restart it if the United States or others renege on payments or security guarantees. Conversely, as long as the United States and others do not renege on payments and security guarantees, he has no incentive to throw out the inspectors and restart his nuclear program. It will have achieved its purpose of giving him a life preserver. His likelihood of extracting a higher price in the future by throwing out the inspectors must be balanced against the realization that if he proves untrustworthy there are alternative solutions to the problems he represents—alternatives he wants to avoid. These alternatives, of course, would need to be and could be acted on (and here is where U.S. interests in acting and South Korean interests in avoiding the possible consequences of such action differ enormously) before he recommissioned his nuclear capability.
So we can see that money and security guarantees for disabling, but not dismantling, Kim Jong Il’s nuclear program create a self-enforcing mechanism. Neither side would have an incentive to renege on its part of the bargain. It is a deal that reinforces each side’s interests. It is the deal that was struck and that, with minor tweaking and continuous jockeying for position, is likely to succeed.
So that is how simple it is to negotiate a nuclear arms agreement! Just find experts, collect the necessary information, use the computer to discover the impediments to the desired outcome, and work out how to neutralize the impact of those impediments by finding actions that serve the interests of the rival parties. With the help of the computer, we were able to see that neither George Bush nor Kim Jong Il was going to budge on his own. Since they were the two decision makers with the authority to say no to any deal, we had to find a way to overcome their intransigence. To do so, we used the computer model to test the likely effects of alternative degrees of American concessions to evaluate their likely influence on Kim Jong Il’s approach to the negotiations. We found that security guarantees, especially a mix of assurances from the United States (not to attack) and from China (to defend North Korea if necessary), coupled with significant economic assistance (approaching $1 billion or so per year) to North Korea, would induce Kim to mothball his nuclear capability and allow continuous on-site inspections and securing of his nuclear facilities. Thus, we saw that we could move him into the range of 60 to 65 on the issue scale, and that George Bush could accept this compromise as well, and—poof!—using the me-first principles of game theory we examined in Chapters 2 and 3, we saw the path to a settlement that could indeed be both predicted and engineered.