THE UNITED STATES' NATIONAL SELF-EXTENSION AND MULTILATERALISM IN WORLD POLITICS

A CASE OF ASIA-PACIFIC, 2001-2020

Abstract

No country has exploited the utility of nuclear weapons as the U.S. does, it has threatened countries with nuclear attack on over a dozen occasions, between 1970 and 2010 (six were targeted at North Korea). Her policy in the Asia-Pacific consists of getting Pyongyang to commit to denuclearization through arms interdictions and sanctions. While, North Korean sees nuclear arsenal as a means of reducing the likelihood of the U.S. unilateral efforts to bring it down by force. However, the multilateral regime, internationally recognised and empowered for denuclearization is the IAEA. Therefore, the U.S. actions of forcing North Korea to give up its nuclear programme amounted to a deliberate and blatant relegation of the legal frameworks of the IAEA. This study uses the qualitative method, where secondary data are used. Content analysis was use to analyse data collect. It has the objective to investigate why the United States government's security strategy on North Korean nuclear programme failed to elicit multilateral interventions on denuclearization of the Korean peninsula between 2001 and 2020. The paper concludes that the United States government's security strategy of  frustrating the emergence of a hegemon with a nuclear capability in the Asia-Pacific undermined multilateral intervention on denuclearization of the Korean peninsula between 2001 and 2020. The paper recommends that safeguards system of the IAEA should be strengthened to address the structural, institutional and operational weaknesses, which account for the relegation of the multilateral institutional frameworks on denuclearization, by great powers.