Ambassador Lilley on Fox News
Heard him on Fox News Sunday a few minute ago. Major points he made:
- There is no military option; North Korea could destroy half of Seoul with “conventional” weapons (I agree that invasion is not an option, and that strikes might not be worth the risk that they’d trigger war. I continue to believe that a naval blockade is an option, although it’s probably not our first choice. The best military option is to arm the people of North Korea to fight back).
- Amb. Lilley presented the first coherent defense of our multilateral strategy I have yet heard. The South Koreans and Chinese have been sitting back and “playing dog in the manger” while we were expected to be “Santa Claus” to North Korea. North Korea is completely dependent upon outside aid, and thus, North Korea has “no chance” if its neighbors agree on a common strategy.
- The way to pressure North Korea is to go after what Lilley calls North Korea’s “Achilles Heel,” its economy (he’s absolutely right there–we shouldn’t be confronting North Korea’s military strengths; we should be exploiting its economic weakness–and that goes double for North Korea’s political weakness). He wants to keep this “low-key.” Specifically, Amb. Lilley says we should cut off aid, energy, cash, and trade. Amb. Lilley also mentioned that Japan will impose severe de facto sanctions on North Korea on March 1st by insisting that all foreign ships entering its waters have insurance, and that this will severely damage the North Korean economy (here, I guess my bleeding heart shows–I do believe in cutting off trade and aid to the North Korean government, but I don’t believe in starving the innocent; I believe in giving the North Korean people all the food aid we can give them and have even proposed a UAV air bridge to the hungry despite the flagrant violation of North Korean airspace that this would entail).
- North Korea has had nukes for as long as ten years. They privately told us they had them two years ago. This isn’t really news (here, Amb. Lilley is absolutely right, except for those who would prefer to pretend that North Korea doesn’t have them–but fear not, they can always insist, without any support, that it’s all a bluff).
- North Korea’s motivation for these declarations is “blackmail.
- North Korea wants to have it both ways; it wants to maintain a repressive and inefficient system, threaten its neighbors, and expect us to pay for it.
Ultimately, however, Amb. Lilley’s comments reveal that he’s really thinking from a “hawk engagement” perspective, rather than getting rid of the North Korean regime. Here, I think any temporary diplomatic fix misses the root cause of the crisis, which is the fact that a repressive regime needs to threaten its neighbors to focus attention on an external enemy. North Korea’s elite needs power to protect its privilege, repression to protect its power, an external enemy to justify its repression, and aggressive behavior to keep its external enemies.
As long as a privileged, oppressive oligarchy runs North Korea, North Korea will be a source of one international crisis after another.
UPDATE: Charles Krauthammer thinks the six-nation talks are waste of time. He thinks the only way to get North Korea to agree to anything is if China pressures them. He also said–and I agree here–that China doesn’t want regime change.
Krauthammer didn’t seem to have thought through the whole problem, however. Does he think that North Korea would keep its agreements? Would they ever accept the kind of verification we’d have to demand? Don’t the North Korean people deserve better than to be cut out of any Faustian bargain? For that last reason alone, the breakdown of talks is good news. It might focus us on the common root causes of all of the North Korean crises, rather than the minutiae of managing just one of them.