UMD Theses and Dissertations
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Item The Domestic Politics of Implementation: A Case Study of U.S. Denuclearization Agreements with North Korea(2018) Aoki, Naoko; Destler, I.M.; Gallagher, Nancy W; Public Policy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The United States has employed a wide range of foreign policy tools to try to stop North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, including two cooperative agreements that ultimately failed to produce the desired outcome. The breakdown of the 1994 Agreed Framework and the Six Party Talks process in the 2000s has led many to conclude that North Korea’s nuclear weapons program cannot be constrained through cooperation. According to this view, Pyongyang violated its previous commitments once it received economic and political benefits and it will do so again in any future negotiations. The underlying assumption is that Washington was fully implementing its own commitments until Pyongyang broke the deal. Is this true, or did U.S. domestic politics complicate the implementation of the agreements? This dissertation explores this question through a four-part case study using three analytical lenses: a rational actor model, an institutional interests model, and an individual mindset model. It finds that the United States retreated from full cooperation with North Korea not just because of Pyongyang’s actions, but also due to domestic political considerations. Washington reduced its level of cooperation when tolerance for concessions weakened in the domestic system, sometimes because of institutional interests and sometimes due to political maneuvers by individuals who favored stronger coercive measures and more concessions from North Korea. The study shows that domestic politics impacts not only the negotiation and ratification of international cooperation agreements, but also their implementation. The findings also suggest it is incorrect to assume that past engagement efforts did not succeed solely due to North Korean actions. Whether a more fully implemented engagement policy would have led to North Korea’s denuclearization is beyond the scope of this study, but it indicates U.S. policy was not applied consistently to North Korea. Any future engagement strategy should aim at a more consistent approach for it to produce the desired results.Item States' Responding Behavior in Conflict: Asymmetric Response and Strategic Conflict Avoidance(2016) Koh, Ho Youn; Kastner, Scott; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)State responses to external threats and aggression are studied with focus on two different rationales: (1) to make credible deterrent threats to avoid being exploited, and (2) to minimize the risk of escalation to unwanted war. Given external aggression, the target state's responding behavior has three possibilities: concession (under-response), reciprocation, and escalation. This study focuses on the first two possibilities and investigates how the strategic nature of crisis interaction can explain the intentional choice of concession or avoidance of retaliation. I build a two-level bargaining model that accounts for the domestic bargaining situation between the leader and the challenger for each state. The model's equilibrium shows that the responding behavior is determined not only by inter-state level variables (e.g. balance of power between two states, or cost of war that each state is supposed to pay), but also the domestic variables of both states. Next, the strategic interaction is rationally explained by the model: as the responding state believes that the initiating state has strong domestic challenges and, hence, the aggression is believed to be initiated for domestic political purposes (a rally-around-the-flag effect), the response tends to decrease. The concession is also predicted if the target state leader has strong bargaining power against her domestic challengers \emph{and} she believes that the initiating leader suffers from weak domestic standing. To test the model's prediction, I conduct a lab experiment and case studies. The experimental result shows that under an incentivized bargaining situation, individual actors are observed to react to hostile action as the model predicts: if the opponent is believed to suffer from internally driven difficulties, the subject will not punish hostile behavior of the other player as severely as she would without such a belief. The experiment also provides supporting evidence for the choice of concession: when the player finds herself in a favorable situation while the other has disadvantages, the player is more likely to make concessions in the controlled dictator game. Two cases are examined to discuss how the model can explain the choice of either reciprocation or concession. From personal interviews and fieldwork in South Korea, I find that South Korea's reciprocating behavior during the 2010 Yeonpyeong Island incident is explained by a combination of `low domestic power of initiating leader (Kim Jong-il)' and `low domestic power of responding leader (Lee Myung-bak).' On the other hand, the case of EC-121 is understood as a non-response or concession outcome. Declassified documents show that Nixon and his key advisors interpreted the attack as a result of North Korea's domestic political instabilities (low domestic power of initiating leader) and that Nixon did not have difficulties at domestic politics during the first few months of his presidency (high domestic power of responding leader).Item Ten Years of Dealing with Kim Jong Il: Can Negotiations Ensure Conflict Resolution?(2006-08-07) Grzelczyk, Virginie; Schreurs, Miranda; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study investigates the tumultuous negotiation relationship between the Democratic People's Republic of Korea and the United States, from Kim Jong Il's accession to power in 1994 to the historic but short-lived September 19, 2005 agreement. The purpose of this work is to gain understanding regarding North Korea's negotiation strategies, in order to bring contributions to the literature on negotiation, rogue states, and Northeast Asia. The literature lacks a clear understanding of how North Korea has been operating since 1994, at which time Kim Il Sung passed away and power was assumed by his son, Kim Jong Il. Gaining a clear understanding of what has happened under the Kim Jong Il Administration leads to the construction of a comprehensive analysis of all the different bilateral and multilateral negotiation episodes that have occurred between the United States and North Korea from 1994 to 2005. Those episodes range from such diverse issues as two weeks of bilateral talks to free an American pilot who crashed by accident on North Korea territory in December 1994 to years of nuclear talks). This research is qualitative in nature and based on archival and media resources, as well as interviews conducted with those who served under several different administrations in the United States and in Korea, Japan, and China, as well as scholars, politicians and negotiators. The study concludes that there is a distinctive North Korean negotiation strategy, but that this strategy is increasing in complexity and is highly dependent on the United States' position in the world. North Korea is also revealed as a strategic, non-random player that will only rarely compromise on its red line.