Dems’ N. Korea Platform Collapses Under the Weight of History and Logic
You’d think that with a cast of 300 foreign policy advisors on Obama’s team alone, the Democrats could find one who has some idea of who Roh Moo Hyun was, what he stood for, and what he would not stand against. The Democrats have rolled out their 2008 platform. Party platforms aren’t widely regarded for being repositories of substance. They’re better known dispensing crumbs to interest groups. When those interests conflict, they get resolved in the great unseen food chain of American politics. You can already see those conflicts in this platform, and you’d be foolish not to view its gauzy promises at least as skeptically as anything the Bush Administration might say.
Still, the platform isn’t without reason for encouragement:
“We will stand up for oppressed people from Cuba to North Korea and from Burma to Zimbabwe and Sudan,” it reads, making it clear the party considers North Korea an authoritarian country that suppresses the human rights. [Chosun Ilbo]
If you look at the original document, the next sentence then talks up the importance of upholding international labor standards. Labor standards matter when you understand that North Korea — a Tier III country for human trafficking –wants to export merchandise to the United States, and isn’t far from being able to do that in quantity through a stealth FTA. North Koreans have little choice in their employment, can’t form or join unions, and might be risking their lives to demand better wages or working conditions. That means many or most of those goods would be made under conditions that fail both international labor standards and U.S. law, and which may well be tantamount to slavery. So far, so good.
It’s too bad there’s so much more here to justify skepticism. Elsewhere in the platform, it becomes obvious that the platform’s authors haven’t the faintest idea of what’s been happening in Korea for the last twenty years:
In a section titled “Denuclearize North Korea,” the draft says, “We support the belated diplomatic effort to secure a verifiable end to North Korea’s nuclear weapons program and to fully account for and secure any fissile material or weapons North Korea has produced to date.” The party favors “direct diplomacy” with Pyongyang and wants to continue the six-party nuclear talks.
There are times when you just want to scream, “THEY’RE NOT DISARMING!,” not for Chris Hill, not for Condi Rice, not for Jack Pritchard, … and not even for Madeleine Albright, and regardless of how many tables you sit at, or what shape they are.
No coherent policy can promise to disarm North Korea unless it accounts for the obvious fact that North Korea has no intention of disarming and answers this question: and if they refuse? Even if you choose to selectively disbelieve what the North Koreans have repeatedly said about maintaining their “nuclear deterrent” despite their agreements to the contrary, you can’t just wish away the conclusive verdict of two decades of diplomacy. It will take more than talks and less than war to get this done.
If all we’re willing to do is talk, we’re limited to bad options and worse ones. Ironically, the Democratic platform follows George Bush down the worse of the two, a path of manifest failure. One thing you have to say for George W. Bush — he certainly has made a persuasive case for the folly of bilateral negotiations. Through his eloquent and persuasive elocution? No, by demonstrating it in action. Since what the Dem platform calls Bush’s “belated” shift to bilateral talks, “progress” has meant all that it possibly could in the absence of effective pressure: Kim Jong Il baits-and-switches us, then baits us again, into a long, drawn-out series of unilateral concessions. It’s enough to make you miss the long, grinding deadlock of the six-party talks. In fact, Bush’s bilateral diplomacy got us exactly where he forecast it would … in his first 2004 debate with John Kerry:
BUSH: Again, I can’t tell you how big a mistake I think that is, to have bilateral talks with North Korea. It’s precisely what Kim Jong Il wants. It will cause the six-party talks to evaporate. It will mean that China no longer is involved in convincing, along with us, for Kim Jong Il to get rid of his weapons. It’s a big mistake to do that.
We must have China’s leverage on Kim Jong Il, besides ourselves. And if you enter bilateral talks, they’ll be happy to walk away from the table. I don’t think that’ll work. []
All of that is true, and more. For all of the administration’s excessive faith in a malicious China, North Korea has yet again managed to divide us against other governments we should be cooperating with, and we’re now negotiating against ourselves in a race to give unilateral concessions. Anyone with enough judgment to govern this country should be able to see how much success this strategy has never had — whether managed by Republicans or Democrats.
It would also be naive in the extreme to think that the same people who support such a generous approach to negotiations would keep human rights on the table when the North Koreans make dropping the subject the price of showing up to hear us out outbid ourselves. We need look no further than how their presidential candidate’s position has shifted during the campaign, or whom the North Korean would rather negotiate with. And here’s where you can see that foreshadowed:
The South Korea-U.S. alliance gets a relatively brief mention in a section titled “Renewing American Leadership.” “We are committed to U.S. engagement in Asia. This begins with maintaining strong relationships with allies like Japan, Australia, South Korea, Thailand and the Philippines,” it says. President George W. Bush comes in for a drubbing here. “Too often, in recent years, we have sent the opposite signal to our international partners,” it says. “In Asia, we belittled South Korean efforts to improve relations with the North.” [Chosun Ilbo]
This is where the credibility of the Dems’ entire analysis falls apart.
The first of two main U.S. criticisms of South Korea’s “efforts” was of the billions of dollars in unconditional South Korean aid that probably funded North Korea’s nuclear program, certainly undermined pressure on it to disarm, and did little demonstrable good for the North Korean people (as President Roh knew very well). At the same time, South Korea’s own defense and economy were largely dependent on the United States, meaning that U.S. taxpayers indirectly funded Kim Jong Il’s acquisition of the bomb. Nothing the Dems say above suggests that they’ll reexamine our military welfare policy toward Seoul, which proves that they’ve missed the point that multilateralism won’t work unless someone leads. Indeed, Bush did not lead and deserves criticism for that — for putting too little pressure on Seoul to cease the unilateralist appeasement that undermined a multilateral disarmament initiative.
For part of its tenure, the Bush administration also criticized leftist presidents Kim Dae Jung and Roh Moo Hyun for their failure to mention of the atrocities in North Korea: abstaining from U.N. resolutions condemning them, shutting out and turning away refugees — even South Korea POW’s — who fled from them, and occasionally even denying that they were occurring.
You can’t credibly say that we’re going to talk about human rights while simultanously defending a policy of silence so rigid that it became a serious threat to freedom of speech in South Korea itself — see this, this, and this. The “efforts” Bush allegedly “belittled” made that entire nation complicit in some of the worst atrocities on Earth since the end of World War II. The Dems might as well have denounced the atrocities in Darfur and Zimbabwe in one breath, while criticizing the Bush administration for “belittling” China’s “engagement” of those murderous regimes in the other.
The woods are too mean for these babes.