North Korean Dominance in Diplomatic Game over Nukes, and Brinkmanship
Links to the article :
New York Times – Progress Is Cited on New Reactor in North Korea
New York Times – North Korea Perfects Its Diplomatic Game: Brinkmanship
Recent news article release in New York Times revealed new progress on North Korean nuclear reactor. North Korea, while having promised in February that it would suspend missile test and uranium enrichment, had resumed long range rocket testing purportedly to launch a satellite but actually to show their missile attack capability. The broken promise further led to significant progress in the construction of new nuclear reactor in the country. The news article mainly expressed its concern over continuing potential threat that follows from repeated rocket launching and construction of new reactor, questioning international effort to put a stop to further development of North Korean actions. With international community not having been very successful until now in putting a finisher to North Korean action, North Korea continues to play its dominant strategy, brinkmanship, at the mastery level in its diplomatic nuclear game.
In international politics, North Korea is known to be the most extreme and unpredictable entity. The diplomatic strategy by North Korea is best described by the term “brinkmanship,” where a player makes a move that will result in extremely negative payoff for all players in the game. While international community is always trying to put pressure on North Korea, North Korea has always been successful in developing brinkmanship into a dominant strategy in the game, turning the payoff of international community’s side into a negative one while turning their own into a positive one. Usually by conducting nuclear test, rocket test launch or threatening withdrawal from international multi-party talks, North Korea has always extracted its payoff, the international aid, from all other players at the end, putting other players in uncomfortable position where they have no other choice but to suffer negative payoff by supplying North Korea with aids without successfully guaranteeing no more brinkmanship.
This diplomatic two-player game has more complexity in its background as opposed to theoretical two player game we learned in class, where both players are assumed to know reasonably well about each other’s choice and have no interlinked interests. In the past years, North Korea has revealed its weapon grade plutonium/uranium facility and underground tested the nukes, signaling the possession of the nuclear weapon along with its missile ability to the world and earning leverage in the diplomatic game at the same time. With most of its people already starving to death and economy at terrible state, North Korea has thoroughly deviated from caring its people and demonstrated its concentration of national resources in military power, consequently making the threat more credible. North Korea has very little to lose. Its payoff in either case of getting into a critical international sanction and conflict or continuing to starve is equally negative. North Korea is already in critical state with not much variation of payoff between the two choices; it is ready to face any worst payoff if it cannot get what it wants from the international community for its own survival.
In contrast, repeated launch of rockets and development of nuclear facility has much deficit and loss to offer to international community’s payoff. Hostile gesture of North Korea always tends to threaten international power balance, and the international players are always worried since such action has high chance of escalating into an uncontrollable situation even with a slightest mistake in the response. Therefore the international community is under great pressure to cease the highly unpredictable North Korean threat to secure their own payoff (global peace, national security, balance of power etc). Moreover, international community is additionally burdened with well-being of North Korean civilians so that further economic downfall does not force North Korea over the edge to use its final resort, nukes, since it will mean the crash of everyone’s payoff into the extreme negative. Because the international community is well aware of these potentials, the game usually ends with international community choosing the less negative payoff under North Korean dominant strategy. The payoff extracted from international community is the aid that North Korea wants, purportedly for civilians but used covertly for further military empowerment in reality once it gets to North Korean government’s hand. This vicious cycle has been continuing over the last few decades, and brinkmanship has settled down as a main strategy for North Korea in international politics as it was proven to be the dominant strategy in North Korea’s perspective in broad perspective of their survival.
The North Korean nuclear crisis is an interesting case that shows complex factors that determine the dominant strategy and the extent and variation of payoff for all players when modelled as a simple two player game. In this game, North Korea has little to lose and possesses a dominant strategy of playing brinkmanship with its nuclear capability that enforces negative payoff on the international player’s side. In contrast, international players are only left with choices that would best alleviate the situation to avoid the worst case scenario, thus to minimize the deficit in their payoff. Having been able to associate here the key factors in North Korean nuclear game with payoff relationship and dominant strategy as learned in class, it will be interesting to observe how attempt to disarm North Korea is developed in the future.