Conflict Diagnosis in the News—North Korea’s Nuclear Missile Launch

There are so many conflicting battles occurring in the world today that it is hard to keep up with all of them. Whether it deals with local, state or even national, conflict exists everywhere, it’s a part of everyone’s daily life. The resolutions are not always clear and it depends on whether a formal form of mediation is used as to whether or not the public will hear of the resolution that came to pass from the conflict. North Korea has been issuing near-daily threats against the United States and South Korea, and sometimes at United States forces in the Pacific. The North has given several warnings about carrying out pre-emptive nuclear strikes against the United States, which many analysts believe to be doubtful on the North’s end to hit U.S. mainland, but it could however, hit South Korea or Japan and American forces that are there. The expected reason behind these threats towards the United States is explained in The New York Times; because the United States led the successful push for sanctions at the United Nations to punish North Korea for its nuclear test in February, its third. The North also often ratchets up its political speech during joint United States-South Korea military exercises, which it portrays as a threat. One of those exercises is continuing (2013).
The sole question remains as to why these conflicts are arising from North Korea, and it is probably the same reason the United States and South Korea aided them in the past with concessions. Since then, Pyongyang has reneged on those promises after receiving aid. There have been several accusations made as to why the North is engaging in these threats of nuclear missile use; (1) Multiple analysts certainly believe that North Korea is in need again of aid and other concessions, (2) it has been suggested that the North just wants to be recognized on the same level as Pakistan, a nuclear state (3) The North genuinely fears an attack from the United States or South Korea and view these warnings given as a deterrence to their actions (4) and the North Korean government recognizing a perceived threat from abroad is one of their favorite tools used to ensure internal cohesion for an impoverished country that has experienced immense privation, to include devastating famine and continuous pervasive hunger (The New York Times, 2013). From these accusations, it is plausible to say that there may be some definite perceptual distortion occurring on the North’s end due to previous interactions and events. “Unfortunately, perceptual distortion is a natural side effect of being in a conflict and a major force preventing effective conflict resolution. It blinds disputants and their advocates from reality and prevents them from selecting optimal strategies and processes for resolving conflict” (Coltri, pp. 16, 2010). According to social and organizational psychologist Morton Deutsch, conflict can be seen by people as either cooperative or competitive. Therefore, conflict escalation can lead to that perceptual error in which North Korea has evidently decided to compete. Deutsch was able to summarize that the process of conflict escalation creates four predictable distortions of perception which are: * An overemphasis on the contrient elements of the relationship * An exaggerated belief in the dissimilarity and moral deficiency of the other disputant * An unwarranted blaming of the other disputant for impasses and other impediments to resolving the conflict * An underestimate of the likely effectiveness of cooperative processes in resolving or managing the conflict (Coltri, pp. 22, 2010).
It is unfortunate that much conflict has continued to arise with the North since 2006 when they set off their first nuclear missile launch. The most recent one, and largest of the three, took place in February two months after the North launched a rocket that put its first satellite into orbit. The United States and its allies said that the rocket launching was a cover for North Korea to develop intercontinental ballistic missiles that could reach North America. The United Nations Security Council condemned the launching as a violation of resolutions that barred the North from testing technology used for ballistic missiles, and adopted tightened sanctions against the country (The New York Times, 2013). This article provides a nuclear tests and detonations photograph of North Korea’s launches and how they have progressed each time: (2013).
From the launch in 2009, the Obama administration adopted a policy of “strategic patience” in which direct negotiations or any offers to aiding Pyongyang would be withheld unless the North Korea leadership agreed to show “positive, constructive behavior” and a willingness to negotiate over the dismantling of its nuclear weapons program (The New York Times, 2013). It is clear that the openness and projected effort to come to terms with North Korea has been set in place over the last several years, but this agreement has not much impacted Kim Jong-il and his son on their nuclear development program. The reason behind all this stirred conflict is largely impart to the United States placing sanctions on North Korea that have severely squeezed but not crippled their economy. In March of this year, “the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reported that more than a fourth of all North Korean children are stunted from chronic malnutrition, and that two-thirds of the country’s 24 million people struggle to find food from day to day” (The New York Times, 2013).
A simple resolution and agreement could be settled on with North Korea and this famine would end if they would consider their interests, values and needs. As of right now four sanctions have been put in place with North Korea since 2006 by the United Nations Security Council penalizing them for their nuclear program, and this doesn’t include the strict economic sanctions the United States has placed on them as well. With the U.S. being at a technical state of war with North Korea, the best solution to this situation could result from much needed negotiations and/or positional bargaining. Positional bargaining is a kind of negotiation characterized by the trading of initially extreme and successively more moderate demands and counter-demands, until, ideally, a compromise results (Coltri, pp. 27, 2010). There are typically two principal goals considered in this type of bargaining which are; pinpointing the negotiator’s bottom line and making the other believe that one’s reservation price is more extreme than it really is. Though every bargaining tactic holds its negative consequences, it seems quite necessary that the position North Korea is in and the sanctions placed upon them…supersede any thought to ignore the underlying concerns of mass starvation and more. In this situation, positional bargaining could have a positive effect, but as a back-up plan for the United States using a more inclusive way to consider goals and concerns could open greater opportunities for collaboration, cooperation and optimization. “Keeping the focus on underlying interests, values, and needs while discouraging any emphasis on stating positions and demands avoids the disadvantages of positional bargaining and creates an opportunity to reach better outcomes” (Coltri, pp. 28, 2010).
North Korea could potentially come to terms with their deep needs, being the basic human needs (essential needs to healthy human existence that are not subject to compromise), as the driving force underlying all other motivations. It is an imperative moment in history that these six-party talks (China, Japan, Russia, South Korea and the United States) negotiate, collaborate and rejoin forces with North Korea in order to avoid larger and possibly permanent damage done to other surrounding countries. “After its third nuclear test in February, North Korea declared that it would never join talks on giving up its nuclear weapons until the entire world became weapons-free” (The New York Times, 2013). The North can only go so long on these threats and implications to start war due to the simple basic human needs. If the United Nations Security Council and the United States continue to hinder their abilities, people in North Korea will begin to perish and detonating nuclear missiles on U.S. soil and other’s will not benefit North Korea when retaliation is thrown back.

References
Coltri, L. (2010). Alternative dispute resolution a conflict diagnosis approach (2nd ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall.
The New York Times. (2013). Asia Pacific. In Focus: North Korea’s Nuclear Threats.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/04/12/world/asia/north-korea-questions.html?_r=1&