Dear New York Times: This is why your North Korea reporting stinks

I often say that the New York Times consistently has the worst North Korea coverage of any major U.S. newspaper. Next time someone asks me why that is, I suppose I’ll point them to this story by Jane Perlez, Choe Sang-hun and Motoko Rich, which could be the exemplar of everything that’s wrong with it in a single hyperlink. It was forwarded to me by an experienced journalist who writes for another major newspaper, and who probably wouldn’t want me to mention his name here. Here’s the headline:

Trump’s Muted Tone on North Korea Gives Hope for Nuclear Talks

I can’t get through the first sentence without finding a misleading claim.

For 16 years, the United States has publicly refused to engage in direct talks with North Korea, arguing that doing so would reward it for bad behavior. [NYT]

Does the Times have access to Google and a calculator? How can three members of its crack reporting team not know about George W. Bush’s ill-fated 2007 agreed framework or Barack Obama’s even more ill-fated 2012 Leap Day deal? Are ten and five still less than sixteen? (Update: A reader reminds me that I forgot Bush’s 2005 Joint Statement. Also ill-fated.)

These certainly weren’t the first examples of North Korea making agreements and reneging on them, so the Obama administration decided, sensibly enough, that it wasn’t going to negotiate with Pyongyang and offer it valuable concessions as long as North Korea continued to insist it would never denuclearize, and even wrote that into its constitution. To offer concessions under those circumstances would have risked a bipartisan congressional overthrow of its North Korea policy (something that eventually happened anyway).

But to “negotiate” is one thing; to “talk” is another, and for eight years, Obama sent a long stream of envoys to Pyongyang, New York, and everywhere in between to talk to North Korea, to see if a negotiation was even possible. As I wrote recently:

In the last eight years alone, President Obama sent former President Clinton and Stephen Bosworth to Pyongyang in 2009, sent Joseph DeTrani twice in 2012, and sent James Clapper in 2014. In 2011, Bosworth met North Korean diplomat Kim Gye-gwan in New York. Next came the Leap Day 2012 freeze agreement, similar to what engagement advocates call for today, and which Pyongyang reneged on shortly after signing it. Obama tried to send Ambassador Robert King to Pyongyang in 2013, but North Korea canceled the visit at the last moment. There were various Track 2 meetings between former U.S. officials and North Korean diplomats as recently as last year. In the weeks leading up to the first 2016 nuclear test, U.S. and North Korean diplomats discussed the parameters of a peace treaty negotiation, but Pyongyang insisted that its nuclear program would not be on the agenda. As recently as last June, U.S. diplomat Sung Kim met North Korean diplomat Choe Son Hui in Beijing. Mind you, this is just what’s available in the open sources.

All of these talks were “public” enough that the Times reported most of them. That’s a good set-up to debunk another demonstrably false statement in the story:

Such talks seemed politically impossible under President Barack Obama, who favored sanctions as the prime safeguard against the North’s nuclear ambitions. There is a growing sense in the region that Mr. Obama’s approach to the North failed.

As regular readers know, and unlike these New York Times reporters, I’ve actually read most of (and written some of) our North Korea sanctions. I’ve published legal analyses of what the sanctions were and weren’t. As a matter of law, the U.S. had stronger sanctions against Belarus and Zimbabwe until at least 2015, or 2016 at the latest. As a matter of fact, Obama never implemented strong or effective sanctions against North Korea, because he wasn’t willing to use secondary sanctions against China, which has consistently violated U.N. sanctions (a fact the Times selectively omits, despite the fact that U.N. reports and Justice Department filings prove it). (Update: Just about the entire U.S. Congress agreed that Obama’s sanctions against North Korea were weak, and voted to impose legislative sanctions.)

What follows is an unsupported, thinly veiled, unlabeled opinion piece that infers from — from a relative absence of inflammatory tweets, I guess? — that Donald Trump might be ready to seek talks with Kim Jong-un. The laundered opinions that Trump should negotiate with Kim Jong-un (about what?) come by way of a Chinese Foreign Ministry mouthpiece, assorted South Korean leftist ideologues, and “Chinese analysts” whose jobs depend on their adherence to the party line.