Korean Peninsula
Debate between Lord Wallace of Saltaire and Lord Collins of Highbury
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.