Page 236 - Trilateral Korea Japan U.S. Cooperation

volume (and with many useful recommendations as to how to
do so) will help insure this continues to be the case well into
the future.

Dissuading Beijing means persuading Beijing that a
peacefully unified, democratic, and denuclearized Korean
Peninsula, even if still aligned with the United States and
Japan under a revitalized trilateral partnership, would pose
less of a threat to China or to regional peace and stability, than
an increasingly aggressive and assertive nuclear armed North
Korea does today. As former South Korean President and
Nobel Laureate Kim Dae-Jung once told me, a unified Korean
Peninsula would seek to simultaneously maintain good and
stable relations with its three giant neighbors – China, Japan,
and Russia – but could only do this by maintaining a security
relationship with the United States, as the “outside balancer.”
Otherwise, it would likely be forced to choose among the
three, to the detriment of the other two, and this would create
even greater instability.

Such a “win-win” solution just requires Beijing to commit to
being what former George W. Bush administration official
Bob Zoellick called a “responsible stakeholder,” a country
that recognizes and respects the rule of law and the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights that it has sworn to uphold. It
is our collective hope that books such as this will help Beijing
see that it’s in its own national interests, and in the interests of
global peace and security, to join South Korea, Japan, and the
United States in pressuring Pyongyang to abide by existing,
legally-binding United Nations Security Council Resolutions
and Human Rights Declarations, rather than undermining

236 Section III : South Korea-Japan-U.S. Cooperation: How to Deter Pyongyang and Dissuade Beijing