US and North Korea Each Use Rodman for Their Own Ends

Rational individuals will agree that retired NBA star Dennis Rodman’s most recent visit to North Korea has become the highlight of that state’s public diplomacy toward the U.S., since the event has raised eyebrows and set tongues wagging all over the world. Regardless of whether the trip is more spectacle than substance, the U.S. basketball star’s exchanges with North Korea are worthy of approbation.

It is precisely because of this that the U.S. government gave Rodman and other retired players the green light. North Korea is still a rogue state under U.S. law; U.S. citizens who privately maintain contact with enemy states are subject to punishment, all the more so in the case of such a high-profile sympathizer. However, the U.S. government has not yet taken disciplinary action against Rodman since the NBA retiree’s return from his last excursion. This indicates that he has received either express permission or tacit consent from Washington, much like former U.S. Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, as well as former Secretary of Energy Bill Richardson, who all visited North Korea with special government authorization.

Rodman’s forays to North Korea might be his own unique style of self-aggrandizement, or perhaps they are motivated by some other personal philosophy. As for the U.S. government, points will inevitably be lost by simply turning a blind eye to a retired basketball star, traveling to a hostile state, laden with the gift of adulation for its leader. But Washington’s lack of any outward moves to stymie Rodman’s Pyongyang holiday is in itself a gesture of goodwill, one which cannot fail to be understood. This is a situation in which the pros simply outweigh the cons. Despite the fact that not every trip will necessarily result in substantive gains, the U.S. stands to lose very little by allowing them and is accordingly content to allow events to unfold. It needs more channels by which to maintain contact with North Korea and must act through official and nonofficial means in tandem, a fact wholly independent of actual positive feeling toward the peninsular state. Contact alone may not provide solutions to the problems between the two nations, but the lack of it can easily cause those problems to multiply.

Rodman’s most recent visit to North Korea has drawn criticism from some within the U.S., as they believe that the country is an “unusual region” and that “North Korean nuclear weapons threaten the security of the international community,” contending that Rodman should not stick additional feathers in the North Korean winter ushanka. These opinions may not lack merit, but an outright rejection of contact with North Korea will only make it more isolated and “unusual.” The international community widely opposes nuclear weapons development in North Korea, but it similarly opposes the possession of a superfluous amount of nuclear weapons by the U.S. or any other nation, as well as the application of the nuclear deterrent as a threat to other nations. However, the vast majority of nations, including Iran and Syria, still must maintain contact with the U.S. and will not simply sever diplomatic relations with Washington over its continued development of nuclear weapons.

Still, it is impractical to hold excessively high hopes for Rodman’s usefulness. The fading Rodman is but a common man and does not necessarily espouse the grandiose idealism or possess the strategic clairvoyance required to improve U.S.-North Korea relations with only the power of his one-man press. He is more likely a tool being used simultaneously by both the North Korean and U.S. governments; North Korea to burnish its own reputation, and the U.S. to keep its options open for contacting the reclusive state. But until North Korea is truly willing to open up and make good on its promise to give up nuclear weapons, its reputation within the U.S. will see no more than minor improvement, and any additional social calls that Rodman makes to North Korea will ultimately be of little import. North Korea will not abandon its nuclear weapons program before obtaining another reliable guarantor of security. In the eyes of the realist North Korea, there is not yet a substitute for the nuclear deterrent in today’s world, a view on security that is shared by the U.S. The karmic logic at work within efforts to improve U.S.-North Korea relations is certainly not something that Rodman’s “basketball diplomacy” can reverse.

There may be some who hope that Rodman’s brand of diplomacy can prove the equal of the “pingpong diplomacy” of 43 years past, but this is similarly unrealistic. At that time, the U.S. and China faced a mutual security threat from a third party, and both states held a strategic aspiration to foster relations. Presently, however, there is no such strategic backdrop between the U.S. and North Korea. Instead, in the three core fields of security traditionally underscored by the U.S. — that is, systemic security, economic security and national security — North Korea’s socialist system and nuclear weapons development both run directly counter to U.S. interests in an outlook made bleaker by the lack of economic ties between the two countries. This is a structural conflict that will take far more than a Rodman alley-oop to unravel.

The author is a professor at Fudan University.