The international community has become accustomed to purely relying on "sticks" to force North Korea to abandon its nuclear program. The question is: Why will North Korea comply if it does not receive any "carrots" in return? From North Korea's perspective, the outside demand for its de-nuclearization is completely unacceptable and unfair. North Korea has proved resilient enough to resist sanction after sanction. It is time that the international community changed its approach now.

How should the Trump administration approach Pyongyang diplomatically? Given a widespread, rigid view among U.S. policymakers that the Kim regime is nothing more than an “evil deceiver” and the tendency of those policymakers to automatically equate talking to North Korea with a reward, setting up a low-profile back channel with North Korean negotiators should be prioritized first. 

Aside from reunification of the Korean peninsula, if denuclearization in North Korea is to be the central goal, how can one possibly achieve it? What could bring the North Korean regime to its knees and to the negotiating table? [...] for the ears of one pivotal or sitting on the panel of speakers if things continue as they are. That audience, of course, is the 24 million North Korean citizens still in the country.

Korea plans to seek strategic cooperation with relevant countries including the United States and China as a means of paving a way toward unification as well as to denuclearize North Korea, the foreign ministry announced, Monday.