Joe Biden and North Korea Policy (Updated)

“The biggest threat to the US is, right now, North Korea.”  — Joe Biden, South Carolina Primary Democratic Debate, 2007

“I’m not the guy.”  — Joe Biden, Aug. 19, 2008

The Bigger Picture  

It is notable that today I find rare probative value in what Kos says.  His first reaction was  far from  enthusiastic,  and that’s  still way more favorable than, “It’s clear his career has dragged on one election cycle too many.”  One Talk Left blogger says, “The only people I’ve seen doing back flips over the Biden affair are Joe Biden and John McCain;” another is slightly less negative; a third says, “What a disappointing choice,” and links to video of B.B. King playing “The Thrill Is Gone.”  The Angry Left  has little use for Biden, and the feeling is mutual. 

Biden’s main constituency is probably in the foreign policy establishment and  the center-left.  A subconstituency of the latter is the Hillary Bitter-Enders, whose significance may be overstated by the media, but who sound miffed that Hillary wasn’t even  vetted for the job,  and moreso for the unfortunate (but probably coincidental)  timing of Obama’s text message announcement.  It’s hard to see his selection generating much excitement.  Biden is intelligent, but a bit too conscious of it, and  prone to  saying jarringly dumb things.

I can’t picture McCain doing back flips — not without laughing, anyway  — but I’m guessing that he’s relishing  the television debut of campaign commercials that play this video over and over:

(But what if McCain picks Romney? Yes, sharp objects are flashed, but I’m not seeing any single sound bite that’s quite that devastating).   

National  Review’s  Jonah Goldberg,who admits to having “something of a weak spot for Biden,” had the funniest reaction:

The man loves his voice so much, you’d expect him to be following it around in a grey Buick, in defiance of [a] restraining order, as it walks home from school.  He seems to think his teeth are some kind of hypnotic punctuation marks which can momentarily disorient the listener and absolve him from any of Western civilization’s usual imperatives to stop talking.  Listening to him speechify is like playing an intellectual game of whack-a-mole where every now and then the fuzzy head of a good point pops up from the tundra but before you can pin it down, he starts talking about how he went to the store and saw a squirrel on the way and it was brown which brings to mind Brown V. Board of Ed which most people don’t understand because [TEETH FLASH] he taught Brown in his law school course and [TEETH FLASH] Mr. Chairman I’m going to get right to it and besides these aren’t the droids you’re looking for.. [The Corner]

The Smaller Picture  

Biden  has generally favored a policy of (wait for it) more blackmail economic incentives for North Korea to disarm.

The selection of Biden would  probably signal the elevation of long-time Biden aide Frank Januzzi should Obama be elected.  The fact that Chris Nelson likes Januzzi  ought to be  a conclusive  reason not to like him, although Januzzi is too mild of manner to really despise, either.  The record shows Januzzi to be a faithful believer in the idea  that North Korea would change if we’d only understand it better. 

In 2001, Januzzi tried without success to arrange a visit to Pyongyang by his boss.   In 2004, Januzzi joined strident appeaser Siegfried Hecker as part of a congressional delegation to Yongbyon and Pyongyang:

“We visited several facilities at Yongbyon,” said Frank Januzzi, an aide to Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., the ranking minority member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “We went to North Korea with the goal of trying to deepen mutual understanding and made some progress toward that goal,” Januzzi said in a telephone interview.  [USA Today, Barbara Slavin]

“We had a good visit,” said Frank Januzzi, another member of  the delegation and an aide to Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware,  the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Januzzi  said they also discussed with the North Koreans issues that included  the nuclear facilities, human rights and economic reforms.  [L.A. Times, Barbara Demick]

On human rights, however, Biden raised objections to some provisions of  the North Korean Human Rights Act that succeeded in watering the bill down before it went to the full Senate for a vote (none of the reports specify which provisions).  Even then, an unnamed Biden staffer had to be subjected to intense  lobbying  by the National Association of Evangelicals before the bill was able to get  a vote.   

There isn’t much question that Biden considers human rights issues a severable secondary priority, and sees the scale and gravity of North Korea’s atrocities as no worse than those committed by “other bad guys  … around the world [who]  sure don’t treat their people real nicely.”  In a 2005 hearing, Biden questioned Chris Hill and Joe DiTrani  about why human rights should get in a way of a deal that would give the North Koreans security guarantees, and possibly fully normalized relations with the United States in exchange for their plutonium:

BIDEN: …I’m really confused by why it’s not just simple enough to not negotiate but just sit down and say, “Here’s the deal. This is it. These are the outlines of it, for real. And we’re willing to live with you bad guys.”

Unless you’re not. If you’re not, you’re living with other bad guys other places around the world. In China, there’s not all good guys. Other places, you’re living with guys not as bad but sure don’t treat their people real nicely.

And that’s what confuses me and confuses, I think, a lot of other people.

So in the few minutes I have left, let me ask these two questions. Are you willing to live with the bad guys if you have a verifiable agreement that they have given up, not their prison camps, not their maltreatment of their folks, not their legal system, not those — if they’re willing to give up nuclear weapons, nuclear capacity to build weapons and a capacity to throw those weapons on missiles?  [link]

My googling revealed no substance of any  comments by Januzzi on human rights, although I vaguely recall Januzzi’s comments from an October 2003 panel I attended, at which Januzzi revealed an ambivalence about pressing the issue lest our comments cause regime officials to become defensive about it.   That more or less reflects the general ambivalance Biden has shown on this issue.   Biden probably has no idea of the actual gravity of the situation or the fundamental linkage between the issues:  the worthlessness of dealing with those who refuse all demands for transparency and demonstrate no interest in preserving human life.

Januzzi, who appears surgically affixed to liberal Republican counterpart Keith Luse,  reported after a 2003 trip that he saw more signs of market activity in Pyongyang, although we now know that the regime was then reasserting state control over the bottom-up survival capitalism of the Great Famine years.

Update: I see the Chosun Ilbo is licking up my table scraps again. How adorable.

But as I suggested in the comments below, Biden appears to have brought Obama more sag than bounce: check out Rasmussen and Gallup. No, coincidence isn’t causation, but aside from Biden’s selection, the Democratic convention is the big story, and I can’t see why that would be hurting Obama … unless the common demoninator for both is the defection of pissed-off Hillarites. Biden comes across as pompous, but he’s much less detestable than John Kerry. Frankly, this year, I actually like both presidential candidates, and that’s a first.