Does North Korea really want peace?

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un at the 4th Conference of the Workers' Party of Korea in April 2012. Photo: AP

For example, Anwar Sadat's severance of a quasi-alliance with the Soviet Union to turn to the West and appease Israel; or Deng Xiaoping's "reform and opening up" policy, which rejected Maoism, created China's three-decade miracle of spectacular growth.

However, there is no sign that North Korean leader Kim Jong-un is following these models. This means that Kim Jong-un has not made a strategic decision to completely change himself and his country, and therefore there is no hope of negotiating with North Korea.

Without real change from Mr. Kim, there is no hope for peace in North Korea, no prospect of the complete, verifiable, and irreversible destruction (CVID) of Pyongyang’s weapons of mass destruction, and few real benefits in opening up the U.S. economy.

Kim Jong-un cannot follow the path of Sadat or Deng Xiaoping without concluding that the North Korean regime is in a strategic stalemate.

The inter-Korean summit at the truce village of Panmunjom on April 27. Photo: Getty

Deng Xiaoping soberly considered the damage Mao Zedong had done to the economic development of China's regional neighbors. He was concerned about the threat of a hostile Soviet Union and considered the need for Washington's protection.

Based on these circumstances, American negotiators believed that Deng Xiaoping would make a strategic change, and they were right. Deng Xiaoping initiated the opening up, which can be considered one of the greatest changes of the 20th century.

More importantly for Kim Jong-un's regime, Deng Xiaoping and his successors have been able to hold on to power despite the "Western civilisational pollution" - as the Chinese Communist Party now calls it - that has poisoned China.

Meanwhile, Kim Jong-un and his predecessors have done their job well by playing the major powers off against each other. And that is bad news for CVID.

A genuine commitment to peaceful and voluntary denuclearization will require a commensurate process of “reform and opening up.” Only the benefits of opening up to the world and the transformative power of global engagement can outweigh the benefits of nuclear power.

The full transparency that denuclearization requires could also expose the Kim family's many crimes, labor camps and mass murders.

Kim Jong-un can only agree to open up if he is willing to abandon his crimes against his own people, and abandon what has long been a fundamental feature of North Korea's leadership, the complete enslavement of its people.

Do we know whether Kim Jong-un will make radical changes? First, he will make it clear to his own people and to South Korea that the North Korean border ends at the 38th parallel, and that South Korea exists as a separate country.

Second, he would withdraw North Korea's offensive weapons and stop threatening Seoul.

Third, he will change the tone of North Korean state propaganda about the US as a hostile empire that aims to keep the Korean Peninsula divided for their own purposes.

Instead, Kim Jong-un will list the times the US has provided Pyongyang with a security umbrella and publicly accept the US commitment to North Korea's economic growth.

In addition, Kim Jong-un will also fire his current negotiators, who have threatened the US Vice President.

Fourth, he will close the gulags, because he knows that America will never strategically partner with the world's worst human rights violators.

Isn’t that ridiculous? These are the steps that real peacemakers take. Only such moves could pave the way for peace for the North Korean people. But all of them are very unlikely.

To be sure, there are approaches Kim Jong-un could use if he wanted to change course: he could tell the North Korean people that the American enemy has changed, that he needs the United States to prevent Chinese invasion, that the North Korean people's struggle is for a better life for their children.

However, US negotiators have seen no signs that Kim Jong-un is changing such propaganda policies.

Kim Jong-un is a master at manipulating Western opinion in the Western press. He has done so with great effect since the Winter Olympics in South Korea. But what really matters is what Kim Jong-un is doing in North Korea and saying in Korean./.