Sometimes passivity can be made a virtue. Countries that do not have the resources (military, economic, political) at their disposal to effectively react to the actions of other states that do not correspond to their interests, do not undertake any initiative, and decide to rely on the role of the time factor. They assume that time will work to their advantage. It is not only small and weak countries that do this. Often in today’s era, big powers must also sometimes decide to remain passive.
Patience can become a veil for ordinary procrastination. In politics, it involves postponing necessary, but not necessarily pleasant, decisions to the last minute. In foreign policy, delay is an inherent factor that should be taken into account when assessing decision-making processes, even in authoritarian states. All the art of diplomacy is based on building time buffers. Even a for a big power the factor of the unforeseen consequences of one’s own decisions cannot be eliminated, which requires several times to measure something well before it is cut.
And the lack of good ideas for action condemns the state to programmatic passivity. A clinical example is the foreign policy under the PiS rule. It was a policy of nourishing offenses against the behaviour of others, knocking and stamping in public, extinguishing fires in relations with other countries, caused by PiS unfortunate steps in domestic politics. And it covered a conceptual void. Even when Polish hands were given instruments to show initiative, such as the chairmanship of the OSCE or even the Visegrad Group, the authorities of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs were unable to show anything original.
In world politics, the most sublime of the known doctrines of passivity seems to be the so-called the doctrine of strategic patience. It was promoted by the Barack Obama administration and was supposed to justify the withholding of initiatives to act against North Korea.
In the early 1990s, and especially after Kim Jong-Il came to power in the DPRK in 1994, work on nuclear weapons and missiles for carrying them was accelerated. In 1993, missiles capable of striking Japan were tested. The Bill Clinton administration adopted a tactic of appeasing the regime based on a truly generous offer. The package negotiated by Jimmy Carter provided for the lifting of sanctions, aid in the construction of a nuclear reactor for peaceful purposes and the supply of crude oil worth billions in aid. In return, the Koreans were to stop the development of missile technology and shut down the nuclear research center in Jongbjon. However, the agreement turned out to be difficult to implement, because the Americans did not want to trust Kim. As a result, the sanctions were not lifted, the Koreans secretly restarted the nuclear program in 1998. The agreement was buried.
The carrot tactic didn’t work. So it was decided to use the stick tactic. George W. Bush included the DPRK in its “Axis of Evil” constellation and tightened the chains of sanctions. And North Korea exited the NPT and detonated the nuclear bomb in 2006. Even in 2005, attempts were made to save the situation by agreeing on the format of the six-party talks and trying to compensate for the suspension of the Korean food aid program. The stick tactic failed as well.
So Obama decided to wait Kim out. Someone had advised him that the DPRK regime was so ineffective that it must inevitably collapse. The regime’s catabolism turned out to be highly slowed down. From the beginning of the DPRK’s existence, it was known that the Kims regime could collapse only if Beijing refused to help it. And for Beijing, the existence of the DPRK is a guarantee that US influence in the region will be reduced, and the US will be entangled in the local nuclear dispute. The DPRK is a political and military buffer for China. And yes, without Chinese help, no matter how discreet but existential (food), the regime would have imploded a long time ago.
Obama’s strategic patience did not help much. Kim Jong Un continued the nuclear program, modernized warheads, expanded the range of missiles, provoked. And all these years I have been wondering about the passivity of the European Union in the face of the Korean challenge. It is as if the problem had merely a bilateral US-North Korean dimension, or a regional one at best. In 2015, I tried to inspire the leadership of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to propose an initiative to appoint an EU special representative for the Korean Peninsula. At that time, we still had specialists with knowledge unavailable to other EU countries. Later, they were sidelined by PiS administrators of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
To this day, the European Union remains merely an observer of events, an extra on the stage of big politics. It was not included in the six-party format. It does not show any other significant initiative. And yet it voices a vocation to be a global actor.
President Trump showed symptoms of bipolar disorder in his policy towards the DPRK. On the one hand, he threatened with a massive attack of fury, on the other, he made Kim the honor of meeting at the summit and that it was not once. The summit in 2018 could still generate optimism, but the Hanoi summit in 2019 could not give anything more. The idiolatrical regime treated nuclear weapons as the only guarantee of its existence.
There was no way but to come back to “strategic patience”.
The term is catchy. Even if analysts agree that such a policy sanctions the status quo rather than generates positive changes. Even if patience becomes a synonym for helplessness. Even if patience turns off active diplomacy and entrusts the creation of the future to cynical real politicians. It turned out that attempts were made to transfer the “strategic patience” even to the policy of the West towards Putin’s Russia. In some Western capitals, the ineffectiveness of sanctions, isolating Russia, was shown, accepting, however, that the tactic of its co-opting into the structures of cooperation with the West has also failed. So some people (which we wrote about a week ago) wanted to appease Putin, but others advised to just wait him out. Russian aggression against Ukraine in 2022 closed the mouths of preachers of the passive policy towards Russia.
In international politics, space should always be left for diplomatic efforts. From today’s perspective there will always be in retrospect a moment in relations with the DPRK and in relations with Russia in which the role of diplomacy was underestimated. Russia has shifted today to the position of an international pariah increasingly comparable to that of the DPRK. The information that Kim is ready to send a hundred thousand army to help Russia to fight in Ukraine symbolizes the community of the collapse of both pariahs.
Diplomacy is considered the art of patience. Impulsiveness, spontaneity, haste, and emotional explosiveness conflict with the rules of diplomatic behavior. Many times in my career I have witnessed or even participated directly in bilateral and multilateral negotiations, when emotions were booming. However, the participants always did not completely lose control over their emotions, even when the voice was raised, aggressive rhetoric was used. Only once have I witnessed all norms of behaviour being exceeded. In 2001, negotiating work was underway in Nairobi on a final document of an important world meeting (a special session of the UN General Assembly on human habitats) to be held in New York. Negotiations dragged on until late at night every day. For me, there was nothing new about it, because night negotiations were normal in European diplomacy. But it turned out that the risk of self-control in some of my friends was bursting under the pressure of emotions and fatigue. After an exchange of polemical comments at three o’clock in the morning, two negotiators (and both representing European countries) pounced on each other with their fists. There was mutual exchange of blows, in front of dozens of delegates, including those representing developing countries. And they were blows delivered by people of respectable level (one of the participants of the incident was in the managerial rank). There was no coincidence in this, but the negotiations sped up considerably from the next day.
