Why the United States' coercive diplomacy against North Korea failed

Coercive diplomacy, applied as a strategy, is constituted by diplomatic negotiations combined with threats of, or the actual use of limited military force, as a way of backing the negotiations. The purpose of this paper is to (1) examine if the United States' attempts from January 2001 until October 2006, to persuade North Korea to disarm and reverse its nuclear weapon programmes, was a case of coercive diplomacy. But I also, and more importantly, set out to (2) find explanations to why the U.S. failed in its effort to get North Korea to comply with this demand, during the same period of time. I will carry out these aims through a case study guided by the theoretical framework of coercive diplomacy. I argue that the United States' strategy to get North Korea into compliance indeed was a case of coercive diplomacy. And that the US failed due to the lack of fulfilment of the core conditions that favour a successful implementation of coercive diplomacy