Citation

Roehrig T. Pacific Focus 2009; 24(1): 85-106.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2009, John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1111/j.1976-5118.2009.01018.x

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

On 11 October 2008, the Bush administration removed North Korea from the State Department's list of states that sponsor terrorism. Pyongyang had been on the list since 1988 and was placed there after the November 1987 bombing of Korean Airlines flight 858 over the Andaman Sea. Though North Korea went on the list for terrorist actions, its removal became part of the Six-Party process to convince Pyongyang to forgo its nuclear weapons ambitions. This article will explore these issues and examine the leverage the terrorism list had on North Korean behavior, how the USA chose to utilize that leverage, and North Korea's response to US efforts. This article argues that the intertwining of the terrorism list with denuclearization gave the USA leverage in the Six-Party Talks but there were limits to what this leverage could gain. Moreover, the links to the denuclearization process also generated leverage for North Korea that it exercised, creating a more complex and crosscutting mix of costs and incentives that was more difficult for Washington to control.