This is a companion to our Prisoner’s Dilemma Everywhere series.
Bill Clinton just returned from North Korea with the two American journalists who were being held there. Kim Jong-il got his face time with Bill and the U.S. got two citizens back without sanctions or a war. Win-win as we say in business schools?
No, says John Bolton, former Ambassador to the U.N. The previous stand-off was doing no-one any good. Obviously it was bad for the U.S. but it was also bad for North Korea. Possible sanctions might have made it hard for the goodies the elite loves to make it into North Korea. So, the Clinton-Jong-il meeting dominates the previous situation. But Bolton has an even better situation in mind: Jong-il simply hands over the journalists without us even giving him a face-saving meeting. We threaten them with something (war? sanctions?) and this is enough to give them the incentive to cooperate without us having to give up anything at all. Some might argue we are pretty close to this equilibrium as a “threat of sanctions plus Clinton visit” amounts to gain for very little pain?
Whatever the empirical judgements are, the theory is clear – Bolton sees the game as Chicken:
Cheap Talk 
4 comments
Comments feed for this article
August 5, 2009 at 5:54 pm
Alex
I’m going to assume that Bolton’s comments are politically motivated and that given his vast experience at the highest levels of the State Department, he has to know something about credible threats.
Simply threatening to go to war with North Korea if they don’t give us back the hostages isn’t a credible threat. A war is too costly even if it doesn’t involve ground troops because Kim Jong-Il has second strike weapons capable of doing serious damage to Seoul and Tokyo. Not to mention the 35,000 US troops stationed in Korea whose lives would be at risk if any such conflict were to occur. Kim Jong-Il knows that we’re not going to war with him and that any war threats aren’t really credible. That’s why even the Bush Administration run by the hawkish neocons like Bolton weren’t even making serious threats of war against North Korea.
Sanctions aren’t particularly effective either. North Korea has one of the most closed economies in the world. Cutting off their supply of yachts isn’t going to change their foreign policy.
This may be a game of chicken but Bolton should know that in chicken if your opponent isn’t extremely risk averse you need to do something like remove the steering wheel from your car to make your threat of not swerving credible. I don’t see Bolton giving any suggestions as to how we can do this with North Korea. And frankly I don’t think anybody has thought of a way to do this given that Clinton, Bush, and Obama have all had similar North Korea policies with the major differences being over bilateral vs multilateral talks and how much we’re willing to pay for disarmament. But when you’re out of power it’s always easy to criticize the person in power for not getting results.
August 5, 2009 at 5:54 pm
el chief
Bolton is an evil fuck
August 6, 2009 at 12:56 am
Nathan
I think Bolton thinks every international isdue is a game of chicken. The man is very dangerous.
August 6, 2009 at 3:55 pm
Thomas Schelling on John Bolton « Cheap Talk
[…] | by sandeep Well, only indirectly but here is my thinking: one comment by Nathan in response to my post yesterday suggested that John Bolton thinks every international interaction is the game of Chicken, not just […]