Parliament and North Korea: politics, process & national security decisions
There is an emerging convention that the UK government will call a parliamentary vote before committing the UK to military action overseas. We have, for example, seen parliamentary votes in recent years on military action in Libya, Syria and Iraq. But parliament can also play an important role during earlier phases of crises by holding the government to account for, and exploring ways of improving, how it develops its policies.
For example, some recent parliamentary questions have tried to elicit greater clarity about the UK government’s policy towards the on-going nuclear crisis on the Korean peninsula. Some questions, like one of a series posed by the Labour Shadow Foreign Secretary, Emily Thornberry MP, have focused on what the government thinks is required of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK, or ‘North Korea’) to demonstrate progress towards multilateral talks about its nuclear programme.
Others, such as a recent question from the House of Commons Defence Select Committee Chair, Conservative MP Dr Julian Lewis, have clarified that the government doesn’t consider itself legally obliged (either as a party to the armistice that ended the Korean War in 1953, or due to another international agreement or UN Security Council resolution) to provide military assistance to the Republic of Korea in the event of renewed hostilities between it and the DPRK.
These questions highlight the positive role that parliament can play in helping to clarify the government’s thinking and improve the transparency of national security decision-making, which is a welcome function in any democratic state. Parliamentary committees can also perform lengthier and more in-depth scrutiny of policies and processes — although two such committees, the Intelligence and Security Committee and the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy have still not been constituted since the June 2017 general election.
At the same time as recognising the role that parliament can play, it is important to acknowledge that there is a balance to be struck between democratic accountability and diplomatic discretion: governments will sometimes need time and space to form and execute policies, especially those that require confidential discussions with the governments of other states.
Whilst discretion is a necessary part of effective policy implementation, decision-making should be as open as possible, not only to ensure accountability but also to improve the quality of the process through which decisions are made. Open decision-making doesn’t guarantee successful decisions, especially in situations of uncertainty and imperfect information, but closed processes are much more likely to fall victim to pathologies like ‘group think’ and failure to give due weight to scenarios and perspectives that are not promoted actively within the privileged circle of political decision-makers.
This is true not only of national security decision-making, but the process used to make decisions on other public and private sector issues: a chief executive’s instinctive preference isn’t necessarily the best or most effective option and the loudest voices don’t necessarily emanate from the wisest heads — you need a good process to search for and evaluate the best available options. The UK’s National Security Council (NSC) should aim to mitigate the shortcomings of small-group decision-making in the national security context. The National Security Adviser, Mark Sedwill, should employ a structured, ‘multiple advocacy’ process to ensure that alternative views are afforded due consideration by ministers. To do so, he should foster a well-balanced, sufficiently diverse range of intellectual and bureaucratic resources to provide the breadth and depth of relevant information necessary for the prime minister and other NSC members to deliberate and decide. This may involve re-configuring Sedwill’s team — the National Security Secretariat — but also where necessary bringing outsiders into the NSC’s deliberative process. There is a clear role for parliamentary committees here: a select committee should review the NSC’s decision processes, to assess the quality of flows of information and advice.
In addition to exploring how the NSC structures its flow of information and its deliberative process, parliament should also raise awareness of the risks of policies that the government might be considering, e.g. contributing (whether militarily or otherwise) to a preventive strike by the US on DPRK nuclear and missile sites.
The government will be wary of providing full and informative answers to such questions, but the process of being made publicly to answer them is a healthy discipline, as well as a marker for the kinds of answers it will need to provide to parliament should it ultimately decide to request a vote on the matter. Given the public statements of senior US administration officials, if the US government decides that coercive diplomacy has failed to constrain North Korea’s nuclear and ballistic missile programme, then it may seriously consider executing preventive military action. At such a juncture, the UK government would need to decide whether or not it would support this.
Whilst every national security decision is different, there would be parallels between such a choice and that faced in the run up to the 2003 Iraq invasion. For example, one of the major topics for debate at the NSC in this scenario would likely be the question of the UK’s ‘special relationship’ with the US and what implications this had for the decision about whether or how best to offer UK support. This was reportedly the case for Tony Blair prior to and in the years following the 2003 Iraq invasion.
The July 2016 Iraq Inquiry report (also known as the ‘Chilcot report’, after the inquiry’s chairman, Sir John Chilcot) warned us about the risk of unsatisfactory decision-making processes and insufficiently challenged assumptions about what is and isn’t in the British national interest. Extensive reflection on the quality and openness of executive deliberative processes is a recondite activity, but in the case of national security it has profound, life-or-death implications. Parliament has an important role to play in ensuring that, in future, these decisions — and the processes for making them — are of the highest possible quality.
This post was written by Dr Joe Devanny, Ridgeway’s programme director for security. You can find him on Twitter @josephdevanny.
