Iron Glove, Velvet Fist
The Washington Post reports that Chris Hill, laying the groundwork for his testimony before the House International Relations Committee today, is stressing the importance of full disclosure by the North Koreans:
With the fragile framework of a nuclear agreement in hand, President Bush’s envoys now plan to push North Korea to begin disclosing the extent and locations of its secret development programs right away to test the sincerity of Pyongyang’s commitment to give up its pursuit of atomic weapons.
As they plot their next step after the surprise deal reached during the six-nation talks in Beijing last month, Bush and his advisers want to translate the pact’s ambiguous language into a more concrete set of obligations, senior officials said. By pressing for tangible actions by Pyongyang, though, the officials acknowledge that they could aggravate the often-prickly North Koreans and jeopardize the precarious accord.
Yes, North Korea is often upset at the idea that it must keep its agreements and deal in good faith.
“The first step is to declare what they have. And we hope the declaration is complete,” Assistant Secretary of State Christopher R. Hill, the chief U.S. negotiator, said yesterday at the Foreign Press Center. “It’s very important that it’s complete, because we do have to overcome a lot of mistrust.”
This next part made me shake my head in dismay and pity. Lisa Murkowski has pretty much ruled out all reasonable options other than nepotism as the reason she was selected for the ballot for the U.S. Senate:
“If we go into it with the attitude of ‘Okay, we’ve got a deal, now here are the terms of how we move forward’ and push it . . . I think it may be a bit too much,” said Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee on East Asia. “We need to remember how tenuous this agreement really is.”
Spoken like a chronic light-weight. Just when, Lisa, are we going to get to the part where we expect North Korea to deal in good faith? Any particular reason to have this “tenuous” agreement if actual compliance is too much to ask? Go back to daddy’s law firm, Lisa.
As far as the administration itself–specifically the readings of its latest spinal exam–it’s mostly bad news. The mildly good news is that the Bush administration is sticking to the must-have of a North Korea admission and full disclosure on HEU, which North Korea will never do:
The Bush administration plans to press North Korea to prove its commitment to the agreement by publicly acknowledging the existence of its uranium enrichment program and to eventually produce a full declaration of all of its nuclear weapons and programs, officials said. Eventually, a timeline of reciprocal steps would be developed, but probably not in November.
But then they said this:
“It is not our intention that we — that is, the collective ‘we’, the international community — would go into the DPRK and begin a sort of Easter egg hunt for weapons and for programs,” Hill said, using the initials for the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, North Korea’s formal name. “We expect the DPRK as part of its voluntary commitments to cooperate with us.”
You could read that in one or both of two ways. One is that we expect North Korea to tell us where things are up front so that we don’t have to hunt around. But you could also read that as us giving up the right to hunt around. I’d find that profoundly significant and disturbing, because it means we’re giving up on the expectation of transparency. That is a disaster, not just for disarmament, but ultimately for food aid and human rights as well. If North Korea gets to remain a closed a secret society–and this is where human rights and food aid monitoring could have been key tests of sincerity–they will continue to have secrets, and we’ll continue to worry and guess. It means that a key defector can emerge with key information, and we won’t be able to follow it up rapidly. It means this agreement gets us nowhere. To me, pressure for human rights won’t really come at a diplomatic level; it will come from the exposure of the horrors inside North Korea, which brings us back to the transparency we’re now willing to yield. And it renders this statement, as squishy as it already is, much less meaningful:
The administration, another official added, also wants to “lay the groundwork for a broadening of the discussion” beyond nuclear weapons to issues such as missiles, conventional arms, human rights and a peace accord formally ending the Korean War of the 1950s. But another official added that the U.S. side will be careful not to allow such issues to endanger the nuclear deal. “You can’t lose the focus on the proximate issue,” he said.
We even seem to be willing to skirt the terms of the NPT to concede to North Korea’s position on LWRs:
The U.S. side does not want to bog down in a discussion of a future light-water reactor but will emphasize that South Korea could begin construction immediately on a power plant to provide electricity to North Korea, with the final energy delivery contingent upon Pyongyang following through on dismantling its weapons.
I’m hit by the depressing realization that Bush has opted for a “Clinton heavy” policy instead of anything in line with my Boltonesque expectations. I should have figured that when they kicked John Bolton upstairs to the United Nations, a place that is to relevance what black holes are to mass.
The Chosun Ilbo also covered the story, in much less detail, noting that Hill has been in regular contact with the North Koreans. Once again, Bush’s refusal to engage in bilateral talks evaporated after the passage of the election, plus a “decent interval.” I was actually more interested in some reported comments on the issue of food aid:
Asked about Pyongyang’s refusal of further food aid from the international community and quasi-expulsion of UN World Food Program staff, Hill said Washington’s conclusion was that North Korea still needs food aid. He said the U.S. was not going to tell the South Koreans how monitoring should be conducted but added, “U.S. food aid is implemented with money from U.S. taxpayers, so it is our obligation to report back to the people on whether or not the food is being satisfactorily distributed.”
By green-lighting the South Korean policy, we may well be dooming any concerted international effort to monitor food aid and get food to the truly hungry. I’m not sure how much depressing news I can stand in a single week. The administration seems to have lost touch with its soul.