This Framework Is Not Agreed

This was a week of disturbing signs that the Bush Administration was going into the next hastily-arranged round of disarmament talks with North Korea prepared to make ill-advised compromises. Today was a day the administration tried to reassure those of us who wondered whether it was about to do another Agreed Framework.

South Korea has already promised the down-payoff of massive energy assistance. Past events suggest that this is probably just part of a mystery gift bag whose precise value and medium of exchange are the only real mysteries, but whose purpose was rather obvious. The Chosun Ilbo had reported that the United States was prepared to drop its demand that North Korea (again) confess to its secret program to build nuclear weapons with highly enriched uranium. North Korea asked for another wee concession: an end to efforts to “bring down the system.” We may question what this would have meant to us, but to Pyongyang, it would almost certainly have meant an end to government-funded broadcasts into North Korea–a concession it demanded and got from South Korea–and the stillbirth of any U.S. support for a democratic North Korean opposition or government in exile.

Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice spent much of today trying to ease the fears of others who appear to have shared my reaction to these events. First, as the Joongang Ilbo reports, Rice repeated her sensible caution that Pyongyang’s mere appearance at the talks is not, by itself, progress:

Ms. Rice said the return by the North to negotiations, scheduled for the week of July 25 in Beijing, is “a very good step but only a first step.”
. . . .

In Beijing, Ms. Rice stressed that despite Pyongyang’s willingness to return to negotiations, progress needed to be made. Calling North Korea’s announcement that it hopes to reach an agreement in the nuclear negotiations “quite interesting” she said, “The key here is: Is the North prepared to dismantle its nuclear programs? We are about to find out.”

Next, she attacked the reports of a U.S. climbdown on North Korea’s uranium program.

[Rice] was answering a question on reports by some news agencies that the U.S. would let the [uranium] issue be after North Korea agreed to stop calling for mutual disarmament talks. Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill, who was standing nearby, apparently had to ask a Korean official whether there had really been such reports. “That’s how groundless the report was,” a Foreign Ministry official said.

The issue could be make-or-break for the next round of six-party talks, since North Korea denies it has such a program. Seoul’s position is that there is no clear evidence of it, but since the suspicions are there, it agrees with the U.S. that verification is necessary.

If the certainty of that denial gives some sense of ease, the administration’s distancing of itself from Seoul’s plans for a payoff to Kim Jong Il were less reassuring.

Rice also called an “important proposal” Seoul made to Pyongyang centered on massive energy aid “useful” and “creative.” “It can be clear to anyone who looks at photographs of what North Korea looks like at night that they have energy needs,” she added.

The latter being some of that “softer diplomatic line” some suggest we’ve been pushing, to avoid hurting Kim Jong Il’s feelings, you know. The New York Times has a quote from “a senior administration official.”

The United States, which had been cool to the proposal until now, plans to examine it with the possible intention of incorporating it into an offer the United States made in six-party talks last year, a senior administration official said.

Here’s to bad behavior and its rewards.

Knowing what we know now, can there be much doubt that Anti-Unification Minister Chung Dong-Young’s main purpose in visiting Washington recently was to brief U.S. officials on the terms of the plan? Can there be much question that in Chung’s talks in Pyongyang the week before, this payola was an inducement to get North Korea to show up? The U.S. government is essentially admitting that it’s receptive to a vicarious payoff through Seoul. That pleases me as a taxpayer, but less so as a Korea watcher. On the other hand, reports the Times, the electricity won’t hit the wires until 2008. If North Korea is experiencing some form of economic shock, it probably can’t wait three years.

The Times also reports that Japan is threatening the festive mood by doing what governments should do–representing the safety and welfare of their citizens. You can’t blame Japan for this bit of intransigence:

During a news conference with Ms. Rice in Tokyo earlier Tuesday, Nobutaka Machimura, the Japanese foreign minister, said “the abduction issue” should be raised “in the six-party talks.” That has long been Japan’s position, but with all attention focused on persuading the North Koreans to return to the talks, the request to add an unrelated issue to the negotiations got little attention until now.

A tougher question is human rights. We will know soon whether I’m right about the raising of human rights being just the thing it took to scare the North Koreans back to the peace table in earnest (or whether it was more a matter of Chung’s payoffs, which is also plausible). We will know because the North’s negotiating position will give away which demands are must-haves and which ones it’s prepared to expend in the give-and-take of negotiation. Rice didn’t give me that much reassurance, something that only the mentioning of specifics or demands for real transparency would have done:

Asked about the issue at the same news conference, Ms. Rice said “several issues have to be resolved” during the talks, “including human rights issues.” She added, “We have always supported Japan’s desire to see this resolved.”

Still, she said, “I do think everyone realizes that whatever else is on the table, the real issue” is North Korea’s nuclear weapons program.

I’m aware that I’m a member of some kind of lunatic fringe for insisting on the insertion of the human rights issue into what more sensible diplomats see as a fragile nuclear disarmament negotiations. I’m also aware that it’s just unrealistic to expect North Korea to transform itself into The Netherlands overnight. At the risk of boring regular readers (and for the benefit of many new readers this week, thank you), I will restate where the sensible person’s confluence between nukes and human rights lies: transparency.

North Korea is a country that’s riddled with subterranean slave-built laboratories, gulags where WMDs are tested on prisoners and their children, and closed areas whose military secrets apparently justify the exclusion of food aid for thousands, perhaps millions, of starving people. With North Korea’s track record on keeping its international agreements, are we really going to settle for a deal that lets the regime keep huge areas of its country secret and off-limits to inspectors? Or would demanding an inspection and food needs assessment of North Korea’s gulags perhaps be a good way to test North Korea’s good faith, without expecting it to initially reveal all of its state secrets?

A bold proposal to be sure. I know just the man to bring it up.