What’s Still Missing from Obama’s North Korea Policy

Suddenly, editors at prominent liberal publications feel safe letting stories about North Korea’s atrocities see page one, and scholars at prominent liberal think tanks feel safe raising human rights.  The topic is no longer subsumed uncomfortably beneath the misbegotten hope that ignoring atrocities unequaled in these times would allow us to negotiate and verify the disarmament of a nation that remained blanketed in secrecy and terror.

(Proponents of this premise, which crowned us with the glory of Agreed Frameworks I and II, like to call themselves “realists,” without meaning to parody or be self-effacing. Ironically, self-described realists are awfully smug these days, despite the absence of any justification for this, given how badly they got North Korea wrong.)

Roberta Cohen of Brookings, and also of HRNK, writes in the Washington Post to call for human rights to go back on the negotiating agenda with North Korea:

The fear of raising human rights issues has been based largely on the belief that doing so would distract from efforts to disable North Korea’s nuclear weapons program. But past negotiations focused narrowly on nuclear weapons have not produced sustainable outcomes, and they are unlikely to do so in the future unless they are grounded in a broader and more solid framework. Discussions about access to North Korea and the freer movement of people, information and ideas across its borders are needed to reinforce nuclear verification and inspections. The nature of the North Korean regime has bearing on its conduct at home and abroad.  [Robert Cohen, WaPo]

And for all that is improved about Barack Obama’s response to North Korea, the absence of human rights in his negotiating agenda is a glaring shortcoming.  Several days ago, she expressed similar thoughts at the Huffington Post.
My answer to liberals is, first, “welcome,” though it’s hard to explain their absence from this cause and their sudden appearance (but not to the point of questioning its sincerity).  After all, it was left to a small band of conservatives to attack President Bush for betraying the North Korean people and Kim Jong Il’s other victims for the last several years.

My question for liberals who are legitimately concerned about human rights atrocities is what solution they propose.  I approach this question with considerable skepticism, having concluded some time ago that North Korea won’t be a just society without a more equal distribution of food, yes, but more fundamentally, small arms, ammunition, rocket propelled grenades, and command-detonated mines (and training in how and when to use them).  Ms. Cohen’s piece, remains opposed to collapsing this repellent regime and supporting the kind of gradualist appoach that has failed, and failed, and failed again.  But what power do we have to negotiate at all effectively unless the regime knows that we’re willing, as a consequence of its reflexive recalcitrance and cheating, to asphyxiate it of funds and empower its people to build a nation in which they do not rule?

Cohen makes some good suggestions for where to start with our demands for our negotiatiating a too-marginally and too-gradually less hellish North Korea.  Might I suggest that the human rights violation that is causing more suffering than any other is the regime’s discriminatory deprivation of food to large segments of its population?  I see no single immediate goal that would do more to serve the interests of America and of the people of North Korea than to insist on unrestricted transparency in the distribution of food aid.  Obtain that, and plant foreign-run feeding stations throughout North Korea, and the regime will lose three of the most important tools it needs to sustain itself as a hell on Earth and a danger to us:  xenophobia, secrecy, and the use of food as a weapon against those it deems expendable. Demand and get this, and the solution to every other problem we have with North Korea will follow.
Related:   Some more background on Bob King, the man Obama plans to make the new Special Envoy on human rights.  I’ll just follow that with a depressing anecdote:  a reader and friend recently forwarded me a transcript of a State Department daily press briefing in which the spokesman had no idea what the Special Envoy’s function was, or who Jay Lefkowitz was.  That speaks badly of both administrations.