Korean Peninsula

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Tuesday 5th September 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Collins of Highbury (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for repeating the Statement. I join the Government in unreservedly condemning North Korea for the flagrant breaches of international law. I also welcome the Statement’s careful and judicious tone. This crisis can be resolved only through co-ordinated international action, through the de-escalation of tensions and ultimately through negotiations. As I said earlier, this crisis requires statesmanship not brinksmanship. There can be no military solution to this dispute, and we must guard against the reckless actions or rhetoric from either side which take us in that direction. The reality is that the only sane options in this situation are properly enforcing the new sanctions regime and restarting the six-party talks to seek new and lasting settlement.

In her earlier contribution today the noble Baroness referred to sanctions being a success, which I assume she meant in terms of their implementation. However, according to the United Nations committee responsible for monitoring sanctions on North Korea, just 95 UN member states have submitted their implementation reports on sanctions contained in Resolution 2270, which was adopted in March 2016. Just 80 member states have submitted implementation reports for the sanctions set out in Resolution 2321, adopted in November. How, therefore, do the Government propose to ensure that any new sanctions are implemented quickly and effectively?

The noble Lord, Lord Hague, considered in a press article today whether the strategic goal would eventually shift from preventing North Korea achieving nuclear capability to accepting that that capability exists and seeking in some form to contain it. Can the Minister say whether the Foreign Office has planned and made contingencies for this scenario?

For the US to turn its back on diplomacy at this stage is simply irresponsible, and as its closest ally we must be prepared to say so. While these Benches welcome the Statement today, the real test is what comes next. As I urged the noble Baroness this afternoon, we should join our European allies in building a stronger case for diplomacy and sanctions. I urge the Government to help steer a course towards the only options that work: dialogue, diplomacy and peace.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I will start by taking off from where the noble Lord, Lord Collins, ended. There are references here to standing alongside our allies, to our commitment to international co-operation and to working through the UN Security Council. It mentions three of the other four permanent members of the UN Security Council; France is clearly absent. There is no reference to consultation with our European partners in the entire Statement, and there was no reference to continuing foreign policy co-operation in the earlier Statement on European negotiations. Does this mean that we have in effect already withdrawn from European foreign policy co-operation and that we regard regaining our global status as leaving our European network of co-operation behind? If so, that is deeply unfortunate. It suggests that we are playing at regaining global status and that, broadly stated, we do not understand who our allies are.

I have never been to North Korea, but I have spent time in Seoul and I am conscious of how delicate the border is and how easy it would be to destabilise that region further. There is now a real danger that this situation could begin to slip out of control. We have seen missiles fired over Japan and the drills that that required—the sort of threats from North Korea that are escalating. Clearly, therefore, we have to work with others, including our European allies—but of course, first and foremost, with China and Russia as the two powers that have the most influence over North Korea—to persuade the North Koreans that there is some advantage in lowering their posture and that the threats which they see as being made to them, which of course help to legitimise their regime, are not as acute as they tell their public they are. Multilateral negotiation has to be the way forward. That means working as closely as we can with China, and we should not deceive ourselves that Britain alone has influence on China; it has to be with all the other permanent members, with our European partners and with other leading states around the world.

[Baroness Goldie]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lords, Lord Collins and Lord Wallace, for their contributions. Their tone was extremely helpful; these measured and reflective thoughts are a constructive contribution to our discussions.

On the points raised by the noble Lord, Lord Collins, I think the first was the important issue of the number of member states complying with the sanctions imposed by the United Nations. That is an important point, because the effectiveness of the sanctions depends on the ability of the member states to apply them and make them bite. He listed the figure of 95 member states that currently comply with them. That is encouraging and positive; obviously, we would like to see that figure increase. Not every United Nations member state has the civil service capability that the larger powers, such as the United Kingdom, may have. The United Kingdom is prepared to provide advice to other UN member states—particularly, perhaps, to some of the African Commonwealth states—to help them to prepare to implement the sanctions and to understand what technical preparations may be necessary to do that.

The noble Lord, Lord Collins, also raised the issue of containment. The difficulty with containment is that it inevitably implies that we first concede that North Korea has a nuclear capability, and we would then have to deal with that by working through a deterrence strategy. The worry is that North Korea is so unpredictable that deterrence norms may not necessarily work as well as they might with other nuclear powers. Certainly, given its track record with other weapons, the apprehension is that there would clearly be a major proliferation risk. That is why it is felt that the strategy currently being embarked upon by the United Kingdom and global partners—which, as I say, is predicated on the forum of the United Nations—is the correct and effective strategy to pursue.

The noble Lord, Lord Collins, raised an interesting issue on foreign policy and whether the United Kingdom is now pursuing some kind of non-EU, but with everyone else, foreign policy. That is not the case. It is clearly evident that there is a close relationship at United Nations level, on the Security Council, of which France is of course a member. The United Kingdom works closely with our United Nations partners, both those on the Security Council and other member states. It is interesting to see just what unanimity of purpose there is, as is manifest by what we have been hearing from the member states of the UN, and in particular, as was made clear in the Statement, by the denunciation of North Korea’s position by both China and Russia. It is obvious that this is a global threat presented by North Korea, and it has to be responded to by a global partnership. That is what the United Kingdom is fully signed up to and what it has been trying to co-operate with, and in some cases to lead, at United Nations level. We need to work with others; the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, made that point, and I entirely agree—this is not a time for people doing their own thing. We have North Korea doing its own thing, and there is an urgent need to respond in a collective international manner to that. The final point the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, made was on the need for a multilateral approach; again, I think that it is absolutely right that that is what we must do.

The noble Lord, Lord Collins, was slightly dismissive of my description of the effect of the sanctions earlier on. However, I go back to the evidence, and as the Statement reminded all of us, the sanctions are now biting on over $1 billion-worth of North Korea’s exports, which amounts to one-third of its total exports. That is a significant tourniquet, as I said earlier, on its export trade, which affects its revenue streams to fund this nuclear programme. I also referred earlier to the remarks of the United Kingdom Permanent Representative, Matthew Rycroft. He also made the point in his comments yesterday to the United Nations Security Council that the measures already applied against commodity exports in the financial sector are making it harder and harder for Pyongyang to acquire the hard currency necessary to fund its programmes. I have no doubt whatever that the grip of these sanctions, both those already in place and those that may be contemplated, will have a real effect upon North Korea. The rationale behind that is clear: if we can turn off the money supply that is funding this dangerous and apparently uncontrolled programme, we will go a long way towards addressing the issue.