Sino-ROK-US Triangular Relations and North Korea: Strategic Choices Beyond the Nuclear Crisis

Diplomatic maneuvering in response to the North Korean nuclear crisis has presented the United States, South Korea, and China each with strategic dilemmas that go beyond the issue of how to address the prospect of a nuclear North Korea. In response to the immediate question of how to denuclearize the Korean peninsula, a complicated triangular relationship between China, South Korea, and the United States has emerged that reflects longer-term strategic anxieties about the future of a revamped security order in Northeast Asia following the resolution of the North Korean nuclear crisis.

Increasingly, these three countries perceive that how the crisis is resolved, and the policies that each member of the triangle is likely to pursue as steps toward resolving the crisis, may influence their relative positions and regional influence after the immediate issue of North Korea's denuclearization--or North Korea's future--has been resolved. Strategic anxieties about the future of Northeast Asia may be emerging as an obstacle that is as serious as apparent North Korean intransigence in explaining the lack of progress in diplomatic efforts thus far. Based on interviews with foreign policy analysts representing each actor in the triangle, the presentation will attempt to explain how each country in the triangle perceives its respective foreign policy choices and how those choices might influence the interests of its neighbors in Northeast Asia.

Scott Snyder is a Pantech Fellow at Stanford University's Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center during 2005-2006 and is concurrently a senior associate in the International Relations program of The Asia Foundation and Pacific Forum CSIS. He spent four years in Seoul as Korea Representative of The Asia Foundation during 2000-2004. Previously, he has served as a program officer in the Research and Studies Program of the U.S. Institute of Peace, and as acting director of The Asia Society's Contemporary Affairs Program. Past publications include Paved With Good Intentions: The NGO Experience in North Korea (2003), (co-editor with L. Gordon Flake) and Negotiating on the Edge: North Korean Negotiating Behavior (1999). Mr. Snyder received his B.A. from Rice University