Russia could play a meaningful role in reining in North Korea should it gain economic leverage by constructing a gas pipeline connecting the two Koreas, said Kent Calder, a U.S. scholar and former government advisor.

Calder, the director of the Reischauer Center for East Asian Studies of Johns Hopkins University, noted that for any anti-Pyongyang sanctions to be effective, there should be an economic relationship with the impoverished state.

“There is another factor that hasn’t been looked at quite enough, which is namely encouraging Russians to put greater pressure on the North as well, because historically Pyongyang has always tried to play Russia against China,” he told The Korea Herald on the sidelines of a forum hosted this week by the Asan Institute for Policy Studies.

“The unfortunate thing about sanctions arrangements is … they are best when there is some sort of existing economic relationship and the big problem now in trying to use those (sanctions) is that there isn’t much economic relationship.”

The international community has recently toughened sanctions against the North for its nuclear and missile tests. But without China, the North’s only major patron, withholding its economic aid to its unruly ally, the sanctions would have little impact on the North, observers have argued.

A gas pipeline connecting Russia and the two Koreas would offer some revenue to Pyongyang while Russia could create economic leverage to help pressure the North to stop its provocative behavior, Calder pointed out.

In 2008, then-South Korean President Lee Myung-bak and his Russian counterpart Dmitry Medvedev agreed to push for a project to construct a gas pipeline to export to the South 7.5 million tons of gas per year for three decades from 2017. But there has been little progress over the envisioned project amid deteriorating inter-Korean relations.

“If there is a gas pipeline operating across North Korea into the South, it could fuel power plants (in the North), it could fuel related industries and provide revenue in terms of transit fees,” he said.

“If North Koreans don’t make very important concessions, the pipeline, if it were constructed correctly, should be something that could be turned on and off and would not just allow the North to unilaterally manipulate the situation.”

But given the current provocative behavior, Pyongyang should not be appeased at the moment, he added.

Regarding the fledgling leadership in Pyongyang, his personal observation was that it was not “fully institutionalized yet.”

“There have been some purges and shifts in the military leadership to try to stabilize Kim Jong-un’s position. I would say it is probably still vulnerable. So that is part of the problem, that he has to legitimate himself with some belligerent actions,” he said.

Touching on Japan’s rightward political shift which has angered South Korea and China, he attributed it partially to the apparent absence of the “healthy, middle-of-the-road opposition.”

“The shifting character of Japanese opposition is quite crucial. And in that connection, the failure of the Democratic Party of Japan government from 2009 to 2012, particularly (former Prime Minister Yukio) Hatoyama, they collapsed in the last election. I think in the upper election, they may well do even worse,” he said.

“So the opposition is increasingly becoming a conservative opposition. I think this is pushing it up to the right. It is a tragedy the DPJ government was not more successful, and then I don’t believe you would see such a nationalist tendency in Japanese politics.”

As for a multilateral peace process for peace on the Korean Peninsula and in Northeast Asia that President Park Geun-hye seeks to forge, Calder said an incremental process that begins with bilateral contacts rather than a “grand gesture” would be more effective.

During her election campaign late last year, she proposed pursuing a regional peace process similar to the Helsinki process ― a European peace initiative that provided the momentum to encourage an enduring peace in a divided Europe during the Cold War.

“A big conference involves so many people and so many personalities who don’t know each other. I think we need to get to know each other bilaterally and then to hold a multilateral conference a bit later on,” he said.

“We can have common textbooks, common historical analyses by academics, and those kinds of things would help (for regional peace). Hopefully we won’t have a grand gesture.”

Regarding constraints that could face a regional peace process, he pointed to a lack of regional economic interdependence and the transitional period each country is going through with its leadership change.

“Economic interdependence usually creates constituency. The question is ... is there constituency for peace? I don’t think it is clear whether there is constituency for peace broadly. On some bilateral relationships, I think there is,” he said.

“(During the transitional period) all these leaders suddenly changed and that is a particularly difficult time. The grassroots groups are particularly strong and national leaders are particularly weak in that period of transition.”

By Song Sang-ho (sshluck@heraldcorp.com)