Comprehensive Security and Multilateral Cooperation in Northeast Asia Overcoming North Korea’s Nuclear Breakout

This essay argues that US policies toward the DPRK must be reformulated, and that the United States has many options to choose from in developing new geo-strategic framework for US security policy in Northeast Asia. These may have more traction with the problem presented by the DPRK than those employed since 1992. We argue that the United States is the only power able and potentially willing to exercise leadership to reshape the regional strategic environment in ways that require all local leaders to recalibrate their own calculi. In our view, it is time for states in the region to create institutional arrangements to manage the use of nuclear threat in inter-state relations. We outline an array of possible approaches, especially multilateral ones, for creating a new strategic framework in which to realize an enduring peace and to ensure the security of all states in the region - even that of the DPRK should it manage to survive its own domestic downward spiral and long run malaise.