Historical Myopia
Senators Hillary Clinton and Carl Levin have an op-ed about North Korea’s nuclear program in today’s Washington Post. It is an unremarkable document in its failure to offer any new or novel suggestions for solving the seemingly insoluble problems that confront us now. As an attack on the Bush administration’s (lack of a) North Korean policy, it sets itself up for easy success. As a defense of Clinton-era policies that helped to make matters infinitely worse, it is remarkable for its obliviousness to history littered with lessons about how not to do diplomacy with dictators.
It’s been a year since the United States and its negotiating partners sat down with North Korea to discuss the elimination of North Korea’s nuclear weapons program.
Yes, nothing new there. And why might that be? The piece then goes on to relate the evidence of North Korea’s recent expansion of its nuclear program–to which I offer no argument–and ends with this:
If so, this could mean that North Korea has many times the number of nuclear weapons it did before the Bush administration took office.
Parsed for your deception. It would, of course, be more accurate to say that when the first President Bush took office, North Korea was not a nuclear power, and that then when second President Bush took office, it was. During the eight intervening years, one of the co-authors of this piece exercised an unprecedented degree of influence over presidential policies. Senator Clinton can argue that North Korea’s possession of eight nukes versus three, two, or one has put new constraints on our diplomatic and military options there. But the Dread Fact that eviscerated our list of viable options arrived when North Korea acquired its first atomic weapon. President Clinton occupied the Oval Office at the last moment when we had the power to prevent that or force the surrender of its components. Instead of confronting the threat forcefully, Clinton stepped back from the challenge and engaged in a long charade of feckless diplomacy, carried out with the full knowledge that North Korea was not complying with its agreements, and knowing that the agreements themselves were unverifiable. And Sens. Levin and Clinton have the chutzpah to say–
Thus, while the administration wrangled internally about whether to negotiate seriously with North Korea, Pyongyang was using the time to break out as a nuclear power.
There isn’t much question that internal disagreements have hobbled this administration, and that its policy has been indecisive and, thus far, ineffective. But there is a difference between doing nothing and making matters much worse. That is what would happen if we were to “negotiate seriously” in the way Sens. Clinton and Levin intend. They are proposing much more of what we did between 1993 and 2001: more incentives, more high-level diplomatic visits, more bribes, and few expectations of progress on compliance, verification, conventional disarmament, or human rights. It’s a well-worn formula. And it was during the Clinton years–and not since–that North Korea broke out as a nuclear power. Here is a timeline of just what the Clinton Administration did while North Korea built its nuclear arsenal, courtesy of the Arms Control Association and the Nuclear Threat Institute. Then, as now, the facts speak for themselves. It’s a long but worthwhile read.
Indeed, in February the North Koreans declared that they have a “nuclear weapons arsenal.” This is something we should be in a hurry to reverse. Why is it that a war to address a nuclear weapons program that we now know had been dismantled can be pursued with great urgency by this administration while diplomacy to eliminate a growing arsenal in North Korea is carried on in an almost lackadaisical fashion, captive to pride and preconditions?
In the 4 [sic] years since the inspectors [left Iraq after Saddam blocked their work in 1999] , intelligence reports show that Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical and biological weapons stock, his missile delivery capability, and his nuclear program. He has also given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including al-Qaida members . . . . It is clear . . . that if left unchecked, Saddam Hussein will continue to increase his capability to wage biological and chemical warfare and will keep trying to develop nuclear weapons.At the outset, it must be noted that whatever differences there may be among us, the one thing which we can all agree upon is Saddam Hussein is a tyrant and a threat to the peace and stability of the Middle East. He has used weapons of mass destruction against his own people and against Iran. He has launched invasions of Iran and Kuwait. For the last 11 years, he has defied the will of the entire world, as expressed in United Nations security resolutions, by refusing to destroy his weapons of mass destruction and prohibited ballistic missiles.
Sen. Carl Levin, Oct. 4, 2002
148 Cong. Rec. S9933-05,
2002 WL 31232419
North Korea has apparently used the past five years to become a nuclear weapons
state.
It doesn’t matter who is at the table as long as we and the North Koreans are there, and as long as both sides negotiate with seriousness and urgency. The administration must inject both into the process.
All the “seriousness and urgency” in Jamaica Bay won’t mean a whit if the North Koreans don’t reciprocate. That’s the penultimate lesson of the 1990s, a period during which the United States possessed an absolute monopoly on seriousness and urgency through eight years of talks and compromises that gave North Korea all the time it needed to transform itself from a non-nuclear state into a nuclear one.
North Korea will never share our “seriousness and urgency” until it fears the consquences of failing to reach a verifiable agreement to competely and permanently dismantle its nuclear programs. It fears no consequences because neither the Clinton Administration nor the current one has given North Korea cause to fear any. None have suggested, for example, that we may intend to challenge the stability of the North Korean regime through the provision of food, medicine, training, and weapons to anti-government forces. Neither China nor South Korea would cooperate with such a plan, but that need not prove fatal. North Korea has two long, rough coastlines. Its navy is small, and ours is not. The Sea of Japan is adjacent to North Korea’s most discontented regions. Neither North Korea nor any other regional power could challenge our naval dominance of those waters. You will see nothing in this op-ed piece–or in Bush administration policy pronouncements, either–to add the missing ingredient of credible deterrence to our anguished pleading.
The piece then goes on to demand that we try a series of measures–refraining from “name-calling” sending even more senior diplomats to Pyongyang–that the United States and others have tried without success. To believe that treating Kim Jong Il as if he holds all the cards elevates hope over experience and seeks to reason Kim Jong Il out of the very tactics for which we’ve so generously rewarded him before. Only then, the authors argue, will our Asian negotiating partners know that diplomacy has been exhausted. But if well over a decade of talks, bribes, sweet talk, inducements, investments, negotiations–all followed by North Korean cheating, defiance, threats, and opacity–have not worked, it is difficult to believe that appetites of South Korea and China for more silly talks are exhaustable.
Now for the best part:
The administration should take a page from its aborted diplomacy toward Iraq. Just as we did with Iraq, we should negotiate with the Europeans, Asians and others to set international — read United Nations — deadlines for solving the crisis. The North Koreans have said they regard a U.N. sanctions resolution as tantamount to war, and Security Council members such as China are not likely to support sanctions unless there is a failure of diplomacy that the international community views as entirely North Korea’s fault. Just as we worked with our allies to set deadlines for U.N. inspections in Iraq, we should seek a deadline for the next meeting with North Korea and another one for a final diplomatic agreement.
They’re kidding, right? They’re actually saying that going back to the United Nations for another fourteen disregarded resolutions–another toothless decade of cheat-and-retreat–should be our model for success? In fact, isn’t that really Kim Jong-Il’s model for success, just as it enriched Saddam at the expense of his expendable subjects? The particular ridiculousness of involving Europe in the talks is a real jaw-dropper, given Europe’s irrelevance to North Korea and its demonstrated spinelessness in the context of Iran and elsewhere. While we’re at it, we can invite Iran to join in the talks, too. They do appear to have significant trade relations with the North.
There is a precedent for this. According to former defense secretary William J. Perry (in a 1999 book) it was the threat of U.N. sanctions that led to negotiations concluding in the Agreed Framework, which froze the North Korean plutonium-based nuclear program for nine years.
Yet more parsing. The Agreed Framework was not strictly an agreement to freeze North Korea’s plutonium program. The text of the Agreed Framework states that “[b]oth sides will work together for peace and security on a nuclear-free Korean peninsula,” and “[b]oth sides will work together to strengthen the international nuclear non proliferation regime.” North Korea also “reaffirmed the importance of attaining the objectives contained in the August 12, 1994 Agreed Statement between the U.S. and DPRK and upholding the principles of the June 11, 1993 Joint Statement of the U.S. and the DPRK to achieve peace and ssecruity on a nuclear-free Korean peninsula.”
As we now know, the North was secretly running a uranium program in direct violation of the agreement, and eventually admitted it when confronted with the evidence. Long before Madeleine Albright’s infamous dance with / toast of Kim Jong-Il, the North was cheating, but President Clinton, despite knowing, kept sending the fuel shipments anyway:
”We are quite concerned about some of the news,” the president said as he wrapped up a visit to Tokyo and flew here Friday for a two-day stay. ”There are some disturbing signs there.” North Korea rebuffed U.S. appeals to inspect an underground site suspected of being used to construct nuclear missiles, demanding $300 million simply for the right to look. Clinton said the conditions were ”completely unacceptable.”
By 1999, the CIA was telling us that North Korea might already have been able to range Alaska with its missiles. The administration was back to pleading with the North Koreans to comply with the agreements they’d already made and to allow U.S. inspectors into suspicious sites such as the underground complex at Kumchang-ni.
I’m not sure whether Ms. Clinton will admit that the North was indeed cheating or try to seek shelter in the sheer vagueness of the Agreed Framework. Either way, the Clinton approach allowed North Korea to become a nuclear power (the Bush policy has done nothing to make matters better). Either way, Ms. Clinton has to distort the Agreed Framework’s terms to credibly disavow its failure under her husband’s watch. Thus from the smoldering ruins, a siren (belatedly) sounds:
Time is running out. Either the North Koreans will conduct a test (and transfer nuclear material, technology or weapons to our enemies) or the administration will finally act, using carrot and stick, to stop the clock and bring this crisis to a peaceful end before it’s too late.
Ladies and gentlemen, introducing the hawkish new Democratic foreign policy–presented by two United States senators who are apparently operating under the belief that North Korea hasn’t already tranferred nuclear material to our enemies. The Hillary Clinton plan for North Korea: a lot like the Bill Clinton plan for North Korea, now with more Hans Blix!
You could be forgiven for thinking that we wouldn’t be in this mess if only Warren Christopher were still alive.