>> THE ADMIN...KELLY ET AL...
The Multilateral Mantra And North Korea
Peter Hayes, Nautilus Institute, February 20, 2004
Flying to Beijing for the second round of six-party talks on the North Korean nuclear issue, American diplomats are chanting a multilateral mantra "CVID CVID CVID" as if repeating it often enough will make it happen in North Korea.
CVID stands for Complete Verifiable Irreversible Disarmament. It is the formula that the State Department is bringing to the talks, saying that North Korea must commit to CVID and commence tangible dismantlement before the United States will outline its roadmap of reciprocal commitments to provide security and development assistance to North Korea.
On February 12, Administration officials confirmed that acceptable "tangible steps" might include a complete declaration by the DPRK of all nuclear activities, especially those related to enrichment activity, but would also have to include a dismantlement action that was not already part of the US-DPRK Agreed Framework before it collapsed in late 2002. Such a step might be to hand over separated plutonium to the United States or a designated third party. What officials insist is not on the table is a reciprocal up-front commitment to normalize political and economic relations with the DPRK if they should commit to CVID. "Payoffs" for North Korean capitulation, they say, come only after the DPRK commits to and implements CVID.
CVID is simply another way of stating that North Korea must fulfill its NPT and IAEA safeguards and non-nuclear obligations, as well as observe the 1992 inter-Korean Denuclearization Declaration. Given that the North has rejected this formula already and has stated its own conditions for returning to the non-nuclear fold, CVID is a non-starter in Pyongyang.
Conversely, CVID is an effective symbolic way of rejecting the past, both the Clintonian legacy of the Agreed Framework, and North Korea's nuclear machinations. But, putting it front-and-center as non-negotiable in these talks is like trying to drive down a high speed freeway while staring in one's rearview mirror the entire time. It's a recipe for catastrophic collision.
What then can US diplomats achieve in Beijing? At best, they hope to agree on holding future working level negotiations with the DPRK involving the six parties on a variety of issues, including the nuclear issue. If no working level talks are achieved, then we will know that the talks have failed completely and the nuclear stand-off in Korea will be complete-exactly what the hardliners in the Bush Administration predict and hope will occur. At worst, this could lead to a North Korean nuclear test and deployment, or some other ambush that the North Koreans dream up at the DMZ or elsewhere.
Why then are US diplomats engaging in faux-diplomacy, knowing that while they may not fail altogether in Beijing, they also cannot succeed in forcing the DPRK to capitulate on American terms to CVID?
The standard account is that the US government is grid-locked over how to handle the DPRK with pragmatic-engagement policy currents colliding with a hardline-regime change policy current. The result is an incoherent river of muddied waters.
However, this account underestimates the role that President Bush plays in formulating policy toward the North. Some attribute the current rigid negotiating stance to the Oval Office's desire to delay negotiations until after the November elections, partly because Bush is preoccupied with Iraq, and partly because it is better from an electoral angle to not be seen "dealing" with evil leaders unless they are dead or in prison, a tendency said to be reinforced by his personal worldview.
Yet another explanation is that Bush delegates authority to his seniors-as he reportedly did to Powell last summer on the North Korea issue at the same time that he told Rumsfeld to butt out--but fails to overrule challenges to this delegation during implementation. Put simply, Bush doesn't back his subordinates and is a weak president-a matter of his ruling style rather than ideology. Still others speculate that for all his post-911 security rhetoric, Bush simply doesn't comprehend how dangerous it is for the North Koreans to now have enough fissile material to make, test and even export nuclear weapons.
But American officials are crystal clear that the multilateral approach to North Korea comes from Bush himself; and that hardliners, especially VP Cheney, have intervened to block Powell from developing flexible negotiating policy options in the preparations for the Beijing talks after Bush put him in charge of dealing with North Korea.
Why Powell allows this to happen-as reportedly occurred in a crucial inter-agency meeting on December 19, 2003 when Cheney intervened personally to reverse the course set by State Department pragmatists in response to Chinese draft declaration at the pending talks-is anyone's guess. Some say he is waiting for the right time to fall on his sword and that the stakes are not yet high enough in the talks with the DPRK to take this ultimate step in confronting Bush.
For now, what this leadership failure means is that US diplomats are going into the Beijing talks with both hands tied behind their back.
This self-induced diplomatic disablement raises the broader question about the Administrations multilateral mantra. Are the Beijing talks actually multilateral negotiations at all? Or, are they just window-dressing for the unilateralist hardline wrapped up in diplomatic doubletalk?
One way to view the talks is through the realist lens of great power politics whereby states either ally with weaker parties to balance an aspiring hegemonic power or bandwagon with the most powerful state. Neither of these dynamics captures what is underway in Beijing. No-one is bandwagoning with tiny North Korea, with or without nuclear weapons. China, Russia, and South Korea do not perceive themselves to be threatened significantly by North Korea's nuclear weapons although they oppose such a capacity for other reasons. No-one is turning up in Beijing to bandwagon with the United States against the DPRK's nuclear threat, as it does not appear to be an important factor in the talks except possibly for Japan and bizarrely, distant Australia which is not even at the table.
At the talks, China, Russia and North Korea form one loose bloc of states that does not accept American hegemony and unilateral dominance of the region and world affairs. Conversely, the United States, Japan, and South Korea have coalesced into a tighter bloc of states insistent that the DPRK play by global rules. Backing this bloc are a rag-tag group of bit players on North Korea such as the EU and Australia who have signed up for the Proliferation Security Initiative. However, the talks themselves have exhibited fluid alignment and each party except for the host, China, has attempted to pick bones with North Korea over one or more issues of bilateral concern while uniformly declaring that the DPRK must remain non-nuclear.
In spite of the American hardline, therefore, the talks do not appear to reflect the exercise of raw power in pursuit of traditional realpolitik. Rather than an abuse or misuse of American power, from a realist perspective, the American stance is more like an abdication and refusal to exercise American power.
Another way to interpret the talks is as an evolving negotiation process in an effort to institutionalize a set of norms and procedures. Certainly this is an avowed hope of American diplomats at the talks although they have not settled on any particular strategy for building a regional security architecture that transcends the North Korea issue should a breakthrough occur.
But how serious is the American intention in this regard? Multilateral negotiations for arms control, trade, and environment over the last four decades, for example, have exhibited four general characteristics:
transactional difficulties arising from increasing the number of players from two to many states which have divergent interests at stake and a-symmetrical capabilities brought to bear on the problem;
the increasing role of non-state actors mobilized by international collective action problems;
a major role for international organizations in structuring the negotiating agenda and facilitating process-determined outcomes; and
the difficulty of sustaining preliminary commitments of states because multilateral negotiations tend to be protracted and outlast changes in leadership or staffing by states.
The six-party talks exhibit none of these characteristics except the first and cannot be regarded as a serious attempt to launch an inclusive security community in East Asia. American officials express hope that China may clarify its international interests as a new player on the global stage and step up to the plate in exerting decisive leverage on North Korea to comply with CVID. While China has indeed "come of age" in modern diplomacy in recent years, Beijing is more likely to view North Korea through the lens of traditional imperial diplomacy by exercising suzerainty aimed at avoiding wars on its borders[1] while keeping South Korea deeply invested in China's own economic transition and political stability. Not surprisingly, North Korea has refused to submit to this implied Chinese hegemony and has refused to accept the legitimacy of its convening role and its intermediary role for passing American "messages." These talks do not appear to be laying the foundation for a new regional security architecture in which all states are heavily vested.
Thus, the talks appear to reflect the triumph of ideology over pragmatism and to be driven by the White House's domestic concerns rather than any regional vision of negotiated d?tente with North Korea as a precursor to a security community. An authentic commitment to a negotiated solution requires much more time and dialogue than is available in transient diplomatic consultations that amount to muscular diplomacy and face saving meetings hosted by China.
Meanwhile, the Bush Administration is missing the main game in town: the vibrant North Korean economic recovery and the pressure points offered by participating in this irreversible transition. Over time, the leverage over its nuclear program afforded by exploiting North Korea's economic dilemmas will diminish as North Koreans bootstrap their economy and regional powers cut their own deals with the North.
North Korea will likely implement its own version of France's tous azimut or "aimed-in-all-directions" independent nuclear deterrent strategy. It will likely obtain sufficient resources to stabilize a low-level economy that supports the leadership's lifestyle and the system's stability. Regional states will adjust to this reality and the world will become that much more insecure with another nuclear weapons state in a volatile conflict zone involving American forces.
Of course, I pray that America's diplomats will wrestle the North Koreans to the ground in Beijing and that they will agree to CVID on US terms in a miraculous act of nuclear redemption. Unfortunately, hope is a poor basis for securing nuclear non-proliferation in Korea.
President Bush needs to focus on North Korea and take the steps necessary to engage them in any negotiating format-bilateral or multilateral. These are not hard to understand, just different from what he is comfortable with. They are:
Step 1: Establish a high-level North Korea policy czar with authority to act on behalf of the president, with direct access to him.
Step 2: Declare a detailed US-DPRK roadmap of bilateral obligations
Step 3: Initiate a regional security framework based on common security principles and issue a US-DPRK mutual security assurance
Step 4: Insist on Immediate DPRK Unilateral Plutonium Re-Freeze, Enrichment Freeze and Declaration, Intrusive Inspections, and Missile Export Moratorium as Precondition for Implementing the Roadmap
Step 5: Take the DPRK off the US terrorist list when they roll up their narco-criminal networks
Step 6: Put the ROK front-and-center of implementation of the roadmap
Step 7: Increase US-ROK military readiness, and negotiate conventional cooperative security agenda with DPRK
[1] Zhang Lidong and Pan Yihe, "The Traditional Chinese Thoughts Resources of International Organization Construction,", in Wang Yizhou, Construction Within Contradiction, Multiple Perspectives on the Relationship between China and International Organizations," China Development Publishing House, Beijing, 2003, p. 273.
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Ensuring a Korean Peninsula Free of Nuclear Weapons
James Kelly, Asst. Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs
Remarks to The Research Conference - North Korea: Towards a New International Engagement Framework, February 13, 2004.
Introduction
It is an honor and a pleasure to address the distinguished participants in the research conference on "North Korea: Towards a New International Framework." I thank the Korea Institute for International Economic Policy and the Korea Economic Institute for organizing it, and the American Enterprise Institute, the Chosun Ilbo, the Ford Foundation, and the Kookmin Bank for their support of the conference.
With a resumption of Six-Party Talks on ending North Korea's nuclear threat less than two weeks away, this conference is very timely. The United States, and the international community as a whole, can benefit from the wisdom of the scholars, analysts, and policymakers here today from the United States, the Republic of Korea, Japan, China, and Russia on the great and complicated challenge that North Korea poses to regional stability and the international nonproliferation regime.
For six decades, the threat of war on the Korean Peninsula has been one of the chief concerns of American foreign and security policy. While the Republic of Korea has, in recent decades, developed into a leading member of the international community, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea took a historic wrong turn from the very start of its existence. The result has been self-induced isolation resulting in insecurity for the regime and enormous suffering for the people of North Korea. In addition, the regime has become a source of global concern by its widely spread proliferation and illicit activities.
The net result is that the D.P.R.K. has fallen further and further behind the dynamic East Asian economy and the world. North Korea's best hope is to embrace the opportunity presented by the Six Party Talks and chart a new course. We and the other parties realize that moving away from isolation and estrangement toward openness and engagement will be a major undertaking and we are willing to help. Everyone knows that establishing the grounds for normalcy and peaceful co-existence will be difficult. However, we have no choice but to make every effort to try -- and that's why President Bush at the APEC meeting last October made clear our willingness to document multilateral assurances of security.
But, this process of transformation must begin with a fundamental decision inside the D.P.R.K. North Korea needs to make a strategic choice -- and make it clear to the world as Libya has done -- that it will abandon its nuclear weapons and programs in a complete, verifiable, and irreversible manner. Two days ago, President Bush -- in a most important speech -- called on other regimes to follow the example of Libya. As he put it, "Abandoning the pursuit of illegal weapons can lead to better relations with the United States, and other free nations. Continuing to seek those weapons will not bring security or international prestige, but only political isolation, economic hardship and other unwelcome consequences."
Moreover, as negotiator in our multilateral talks, I would offer that we also need a strong commitment to timely action. Given the history of broken and unsuccessful agreements with the D.P.R.K., we cannot afford to leave the hard work for the end of the implementation process.
North Korea's Nuclear Programs
North Korea nuclear ambitions go back at least to the 1970s and are deeply grounded in its policy of national independence. Several decades ago, a North Korean leadership fearful of its own people and of the challenge represented by the economically developing, democratized Korean republic to its south, set out on a path to acquire nuclear weapons. Over time, various justifications have been offered. But, whatever the regime's rationale, the United States believes that a decade or so ago North Korea probably managed to develop at least a couple nuclear weapons.
As we now see it, maintaining a nuclear arsenal apparently has become a core, not peripheral, element of North Korea's national defense strategy. Thus, the challenge of getting rid of nuclear weapons and capabilities, needs to be seen in the context of North Korea's willingness to dramatically alter its national strategy. With the changed environment of this new century, among the world's vibrant economies, there is such an opportunity for North Korea to seize.
A Partial "Solution"
Ten years ago, we believed we were on the road toward ending North Korea's nuclear weapons program, once and for all. In 1992, North Korea reached an agreement with South Korea to ensure a Korean Peninsula free of nuclear weapons, but North Korea almost immediately walked away from that arrangement. The U.S. stepped in and, with the U.S.-D.P.R.K. Agreed Framework of 1994, succeeded in freezing North Korea's known nuclear weapons program, a plutonium-based effort centered on a place called Yongbyon.
In exchange for North Korea's promises eventually to come clean about its nuclear past, dismantle its known facilities, and put its remaining nuclear activities under full IAEA safeguards, the United States organized under its leadership an international consortium -- the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization, or KEDO - to finance and supply the light water reactor project. The KEDO partners, primarily the Republic of Korea and Japan, have spent over $1.3 billion on the construction of two light water reactors. And the U.S provided North Korea with half a billion dollars worth of heavy fuel oil between 1994 and 2002, to replace the energy presumed to be foregone by the freeze of the North's nuclear program.
In the meantime, in response to a humanitarian crisis, the United States and many other countries came to the rescue of the North Korean people, who suffered a terrible famine in the mid-1990s due primarily to the leadership`s mismanagement of the economy. Between 1995 and 2003, the United States alone provided nearly 2,000,000 metric tons of food aid worth $654,000,000 to North Korea through the UN World Food Program. According to the World Food Program, the international community as a whole has provided an estimated average of 1.2 million metric tons of food aid each year to North Korea since 1999.
North Korea Pursues an HEU Program
In the summer of 2002, however, the United States discovered that North Korea had not kept its part of the bargain. We learned conclusively that it was pursuing a covert nuclear weapons program based not on plutonium but on uranium enrichment. This was a clear violation of North Korea's obligations to South Korea under the Joint Denuclearization Declaration of 1992 and to the international community under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and the D.P.R.K.'s Safeguards Agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency.
It was also a fundamental breach of the U.S.-D.P.R.K. Agreed Framework, which aimed to "achieve peace and security on a nuclear-free Korean peninsula." By the way, our negotiator of the Agreed Framework, Ambassador Robert Gallucci, left the North Koreans in no doubt that any uranium enrichment program would break the Agreed Framework. As he testified to Congress in December, 1994, the Agreed Framework requires the D.P.R.K. to implement the North-South Joint Declaration on the Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, which precludes any reprocessing or enrichment capability. "If there were ever any move to enrich," Ambassador Gallucci told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, "we would argue they were not in compliance with the Agreed Framework."
The matter was extremely serious. North Korea's goal appeared to be a plant that could produce enough weapons-grade uranium for two or more nuclear weapons per year when fully operational.
The President thus instructed me to lead an interagency U.S. team to Pyongyang in October 2002 to quietly inform the North Koreans that we knew about their secret nuclear arms program. I was to tell them that we had intended to propose bilateral negotiations on our entire range of concerns with North Korea, including missile proliferation, chemical and biological weapons, conventional forces, terrorism, and human rights. However, the North Koreans' violation of the Agreed Framework had put the nuclear issue again front and center. I was to call on North Korea to reverse its nuclear course, after which the United States would be prepared to consider bilateral negotiations on other matters.
The North Koreans Escalate
Surprisingly, the North Koreans acknowledged their uranium enrichment program to us and suggested that if we provided them with additional benefits, they would, at some point in the future, resolve our concerns about their nuclear programs -- how they would do so, they did not say. In other words, even though the North Koreans had violated the Agreed Framework, which had proven to be only a partial and thus unsatisfactory solution, they were proposing to us that we basically repeat the same formula. We weren't prepared to accept that. As Secretary Powell has said, we were not going to "buy the same horse" twice.
Instead of taking the opportunity we had afforded them to begin walking back their covert nuclear arms program, the North Koreans escalated the situation. In December 2002, they expelled IAEA inspectors and began to reactivate the 5 MW nuclear reactor at Yongbyon. In January, the D.P.R.K. announced its withdrawal from the NPT. And in October 2003, it declared it had finished reprocessing its 8,000-plus existing spent fuel rods. If that is indeed the case, it could have produced enough fissile material for an additional five or six nuclear weapons.
The North Korean Acknowledgement and Subsequent Denial
Let me digress here briefly to address the issue of the North Koreans' acknowledgement to me of their uranium enrichment program, because they later began to deny that they had done so, causing some confusion in the media.
The acknowledgement came over the entire course of a 40-minute-long meeting that my team and I had with North Korean First Vice Foreign Minister Kang Sok Ju, the number two man in the North Korean foreign ministry and said to be close to Kim Jong Il.
Kang's remarks were interpreted into English by his own interpreter, and his original Korean presentation was monitored by our side's experienced professional interpreter.
It was very clear to all members of my team that Kang was acknowledging the existence of a highly enriched uranium program and that North Korea was willing to negotiate about addressing our concerns about it if the United States first provided additional benefits to North Korea.
Thereafter, for nearly two months, even after we publicly stated that the North Koreans had acknowledged the uranium enrichment program to us, the D.P.R.K. did not deny the program or the acknowledgement. Instead, to the rest of the world, the D.P.R.K. essentially took an NCND position -- that is, to "neither confirm nor deny" the program. Only later, when it became clear that this was a major tactical error that was resulting in massive international criticism, did D.P.R.K. officials first begin to suggest that the United States had misunderstood its statements, and later still that the United States had lied about them. Only much later did the North Koreans actually begin to claim that they have no HEU program.
In any event, the key point in regard to this issue is that the steps taken by the United States subsequent to my mission to Pyongyang in October 2002 were in response not to the North Korean acknowledgement but to our knowledge, based on our own intelligence, of the North Korean uranium enrichment program. We are confident that our intelligence in this matter is well-founded. In fact, the recent confession of Pakistan's A.Q. Khan suggests that, if anything, the North Korean HEU program is of longer duration and more advanced than we had assessed.
U.S. Policy
So how are we to respond to this very serious situation in which North Korea has lifted the freeze on its plutonium-based nuclear arms program and is aggressively pursuing an enriched-uranium nuclear arms program?
The United States has adopted two basic principles for resolving this situation. First, we cannot accept anything less than the complete, verifiable, and irreversible dismantlement of the North's nuclear programs. Second, the diplomatic format for achieving that outcome must be a multiparty framework.
Complete, Verifiable and Irreversible Dismantlement
We insist on the complete, verifiable and irreversible dismantlement of all of North Korea's nuclear programs because we must not again allow a situation in which the North's dismantlement of its nuclear arms program is put off into the distant future, as it was under the Agreed Framework. That would permit North Korea, at any time, to resume its use of nuclear threats to blackmail the international community.
We will not be satisfied with a resolution that is not complete. North Korea must dismantle not only its plutonium program but also its uranium enrichment program and its existing nuclear weapons.
We will not be satisfied with a resolution that is not verifiable. In this regard, the burden is not on the international community but on North Korea to come clean. As the Libya cases illustrates, there are ways that North Korea can do this as a sovereign country. It is certainly in North Korea's interests, as it is in Libya's.
We will not be satisfied with a "reversible solution". This must be once and for all. North Korea's nuclear programs and facilities must be dismantled, and never reconstituted. Mechanisms can be found to do this that are reasonable. This will not be difficult to accomplish once North Korea has made a fundamental decision to abandon its nuclear programs.
The Advantages of a Multilateral Framework
To accomplish these ends, the United States has strongly supported a multilateral process. Some have criticized this, and urged that multilateral talks be replaced, or at least supplemented, by bilateral U.S.-D.P.R.K. negotiations on the nuclear issue. We don't intend to do that. Let me explain why.
First, and most important, the D.P.R.K.'s nuclear arms programs are not just a bilateral U.S.-North Korean issue. North Korea's pursuit of a nuclear arsenal is a serious threat to regional peace and security and a challenge to the global non-proliferation regime. The United States' bilateral effort to address the problem, resulting in the Agreed Framework of 1994, was less than successful. Other countries need to bring their interests, influence, and resources to bear, not only in persuading North Korea to end its nuclear arms program but to ensure that the program is never resumed and that broader conditions on the Korean Peninsula are conducive to lasting peace and security. I might add that South Korea and Japan have their own relations and problems with the D.P.R.K., and these are being addressed far more directly than was the case ten years ago.
Thus, in early 2003, the United States proposed multilateral talks to end North Korea's nuclear program. The P.R.C. made strenuous efforts with North Korea to realize such talks. The result was trilateral talks in Beijing in April, with participation by the P.R.C., North Korea, and the U.S., and Six-Party Talks in Beijing in August, which also included the Republic of Korea, Japan, and Russia.
The two rounds of multilateral talks in Beijing represented important first steps in achieving a fundamental solution of the North Korean nuclear problem. The North Koreans heard from all of the other parties present that a North Korean nuclear weapons capability is unacceptable and will not be tolerated. And the other parties heard first-hand North Korea's threats to expand its nuclear weapons program. This was very important, because, in the past, the North Koreans utilized the tactic of making such threats to the United States while denying them to others -- of taking a hardline position with us while telling others that it was the United States that was hardline.
But it isn't just the United States that the D.P.R.K. plays off against. During the decades of Sino-Soviet rivalry, North Korea became adept at playing one off against the other. With the end of the Cold War, North Korea has continued to focus on dealing bilaterally with all of its neighbors, playing them off against each other.
The six-party format helps to deny North Korea the opportunity to play its neighbors off, one against the other. The result is increased understanding and solidarity among the six-party participants about the nature and seriousness of the North Korean nuclear problem.
Preparing for Round Two of Six-Party Talks
As I noted, the second round of Six-Party Talks is less than two weeks away. We will meet in Beijing on February 25, and we expect that the round will result in further progress toward a permanent solution, even if the progress may not be readily apparent.
At the talks, as I have stressed, the aim of the United States will be the complete, verifiable, and irreversible dismantlement of North Korea's nuclear programs. That is our focus, but we are prepared to listen carefully and respond to all positions.
North Korea has said that its nuclear arms program is a defensive response to the hostility of the Bush Administration, and it has demanded, among other things, security assurances from the United States before it will, as it says, "consider resolving American concerns." I would note that the D.P.R.K.'s HEU program existed long before the Bush Administration was inaugurated. I would also note that President Bush stated as early as February 2002 that the United States has no intention of invading or attacking North Korea. Nevertheless, in an effort to move the process along, President Bush stated last October that the United States was willing to join other participants in the Six-Party Talks in providing security assurances to North Korea in the context of its complete, verifiable, and irreversible dismantlement of its nuclear program.
In preparing for the next round, we have consulted especially closely with our allies the Republic of Korea and Japan, both bilaterally and trilaterally. We have also had extensive bilateral consultations with both the P.R.C. and Russia.
President Bush is committed to a diplomatic solution and is convinced that multilateral talks are the appropriate diplomatic forum, for the reasons I have described. We are confident that the Six-Party Talks offer the best opportunity to persuade North Korea to end its nuclear arms program and thereby to open up brighter prospects for the entire region. That is not to say that we expect to resolve the nuclear problem in a matter of a few weeks or even a few months. It is a difficult issue and will take time. But we will take the time necessary to achieve a fundamental and permanent solution.
IAI and PSI to Continue on Their Merits
Meanwhile, the U.S. is currently working with many of North Korea's neighbors in East Asia to enhance law enforcement and judicial cooperation to address North Korea's illicit and criminal activities. North Korea is involved in activities such as counterfeiting, drug-running, and smuggling. We are also working towards implementing the President's Proliferation Security Initiative, a separate program to counter the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and missiles. While not directed at North Korea, North Korea is affected because it is the world's leading proliferator. These initiatives will be continued on their merits.
Conclusion
North Korea has an opportunity to change its path. As some Americans might put it there is a chance for redemption. The examples of Libya, Ukraine, South Africa and others demonstrate that there is real reason for hope that North Korea will eventually respond. States, even those with existing nuclear arms, can decide that abandoning nuclear weapons is in their interests. Presumably, the intention of the D.P.R.K. leadership in embracing nuclear weapons was to enhance the regime's security and status. Clearly, the effect has been the opposite. With continued international solidarity, there is good reason to believe that North Korea will eventually rethink its assumptions and reverse course. The Six-Party Talks offer North Korea a path toward international responsibility and increased well being for its people. The United States sincerely hopes that the D.P.R.K. will take the opportunity.
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Pyongyang's Tightrope-Walker
Marcus Noland
Institute for International Economics
Op-ed in the Far Eastern Economic Review
February 17, 2004
? Institute for International Economics.
North Koreans are justly proud of their acrobats who entertain visiting dignitaries. After hesitating for nearly a decade, the Dear Leader himself, Kim Jong Il, has begun edging unsteadily onto the high wire. The questions are whether he will fall, and if he does, will there be anyone to catch him?
Economic reforms are enabling an upsurge in small-scale economic activity while at the same time deepening social differentiation and creating a new class of urban poor. A "military-first" ideological campaign, emphasizing modernization, has been introduced to legitimate these changes and justify abandoning traditional socialist practices. As government officials are laid off and the military is elevated above the proletariat in the political pantheon, entrepreneurs and officers have replaced bureaucrats and cadres as preferred sons-in-law.
These changes may ultimately prove destabilizing, though the regime can draw upon considerable assets: two generations of political indoctrination without parallel, a monopoly on social organization and a massive apparatus for internal control. Yet even if Kim is able to use these tools to maintain his balance, the reform initiative is unlikely to come to fruition as long as the country remains a pariah, subject to diplomatic sanctions. Recent statistical modelling work suggests that economic performance, and, by extension, North Korea's external relations, have a critical impact on regime stability. It's hard to imagine Kim successfully traversing the rope if foreigners are shaking it.
The six-party talks, scheduled to restart later this month, on the North's nuclear programme are central in this regard. In the short term, Pyongyang's brinkmanship and American election-year timidity could reduce the talks to theatrical sound and fury, signifying nothing. But even if the participants behave like angels, there are ample grounds for scepticism. North Korea regards its nuclear deterrent as critical to its survival and is unlikely to negotiate it away easily. Even recent pro-engagement visitors to Pyongyang have labelled the North Korean "words for resources" stance as a nonstarter. And having been burned once, America is likely to insist on a very rigorous verification regime.
Countries that have surrendered nuclear weapons or eliminated nuclear-weapon development programmes usually have done so in the context of a broader political regime change, often involving a newly empowered democratic regime asserting control over its own military. Libya's recent decision to terminate its nuclear programme is interesting precisely because it deviates from this pattern, instead highlighting its fears of external pressure and the country's own effort to come in from the cold, resolve outstanding diplomatic issues and gain international acceptance. Regrettably, in reaction to Moamar Qaddafi's call for North Korea to emulate Libya, Pyongyang responded that, "This is the folly of imbeciles . . . To expect any 'change' from the DPRK stand is as foolish as expecting a shower from the clear sky."
Yet even if one doubts the prospects of eliminating the North's nuclear programme through negotiation, earnest and sincere American participation in the talks is a necessary precursor for stiffer measures further down the line.
Coercive diplomacy can work only if Kim is deprived of his safety net, and the Bush administration has made little headway with those who hold it. There is no consensus in South Korea about what to do with respect to the North, and unless the electorate shifts strongly towards the opposition in the upcoming national assembly elections, Seoul will try to catch Kim if he falls.
China is weary of Kim's stalling, but is as yet unwilling to drop the net. It fears a flood of North Korean refugees upsetting the ethnic politics of its border provinces and the possibility of American troops north of the 38th parallel in a unified Korea. To secure Chinese cooperation, America will have to offer assurances about the disposition of its troops and a credible system of permanent refugee resettlement to mollify China's political concerns. Proposed legislation making it easier for North Koreans to gain asylum in the United States is a start, but to convince Beijing, it will take money for temporary refugee resettlement camps, not just minor immigration-law changes. Unfortunately, the Bush administration at its outset regarded China as a strategic competitor and was unwilling to pursue such cooperation, and now with Iraq on its hands, lacks the political capital to do so.
So as Washington sways the rope, Seoul and Beijing look apprehensively skyward as a short, tubby man dances through the air.
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Making Sense of the Korean Crisis
An Interview with Gavan McCormack
by Gavan McCormack
February 15, 2004
JAPAN
(Gavan McCormack is author of the just released Target North Korea: Pushing North Korea to the Brink of Nuclear Catastrophe, New York, Nation Books (available at Amazon.com for $11.16). He has published widely on aspects of modern and contemporary East Asia and his books have also been translated into Japanese, Chinese and Korean. A research professor at the Australian National University, he is currently also a visiting professor at International Christian University in Tokyo. He was interviewed via email by Stephen R. Shalom and Mark Selden.)
1. Could you summarize political and economic conditions in North Korea today?
Till the 1980s, North Korea was one of the more industrialized countries in Asia. Thereafter it has been reduced to penury and near-collapse by a combination of circumstances, some the consequence of its own choices, others beyond its control.
With the end of "socialism" in the 1990s, both Russia and China shifted from "friendly" to commercial terms of trade, which meant skyrocketing prices for North Korea's energy imports, especially oil. The country's heavily chemical and machine intensive agriculture suffered a severe blow, on the eve of a succession of unprecedented climatic disasters -- the country became chronically unable to feed its people, and many starved. People were urged to adopt a two-meals-a day regimen, when for many even one became too much to hope for.According to the UN Humanitarian Coordinator for North Korea, four out of ten North Korean children are now stunted by malnutrition. In February 2004, the World Food Program, its reserves rapidly diminishing as donor countries lost interest in North Korea, had to cut off supplies for four million aged people, women, and children (more than one sixth of the population).
Blocked by the US and Japan from participation in such multinational institutions as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, denied diplomatic relations with the US and Japan, and subject to sanctions as a "terror-exporting" state, North Korea is also caught on the horns of the dilemma of desiring to engage much more comprehensively with the global economy and fearing that such engagement might undermine its political and security system. The biggest change is in the rapidly burgeoning web of ties that link North Korea across the DMZ to its erstwhile bitterest enemy, booming South Korea.
The hostilities of the Korean War that ended more than fifty years ago are still suspended only by a temporary "cease-fire" and the economy remains distorted by the priority to military preparation. In 1987, soon after North Korea commenced operation of a gas graphite nuclear reactor for power generation, it seems to have begun diverting the plutonium-containing reactor wastes to a weapons program designed to produce its own deterrent, thereby to neutralize the semi-permanent US threat and to bring the US to the negotiating table.
A US attack on its installations was narrowly averted in 1994. North Korea then came close to normalization of relations with the US under the Clinton administration, trading its nuclear weapon and missile programs for economic and diplomatic normalization. The advent of the Bush administration plunged all this back to the starting-line.
For much of its history, since its foundation in 1948, North Korea was a Marxist-Leninist, communist party dictatorship, but since the late 1990s under its "Dear Leader" Kim Jong Il (after the death of his father Kim Il Sung in 1994) it abandoned communist theory and embraced the principle of "Army-first-ism," with Kim Jong Il supreme military and political ruler. In place of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the military dictatorship today resembles an absolute monarchy and justifies itself on purely nationalist grounds. Kim Jong Il's control is far reaching. Few other rulers could say as confidently as he: "L'?~t, c'est moi." Political criticism, let alone opposition, is not tolerated, and huge efforts are devoted to controlling people's thoughts from childhood. Dissenters, and their families, most likely numbering somewhere well over 100,000, are confined in harsh camps (gulags) in remote or mountain areas.
Centralized economic controls were largely abandoned in 2002 in favor of the market. Foreign businesses are encouraged to set up in enclaves in the North, and South Korea in particular has responded positively. In the hope of unlocking the doors to normalization with Japan and a flow of Japanese aid and technology, North Korea in September 2002 apologized over the abduction of Japanese citizens in the late 1970s and early 1980s and over "spy-ship" intrusions into Japanese waters, but the Japanese response has been harsh and the overtures thus far fruitless.
No other country faces such a raft of unresolved problems from history. North Korea is a fossilized encapsulation of the 20th century: the legacies of colonialism, imperialist interventions, externally imposed division of the country, and incorporation in the Cold War, all remain unresolved. Economic failures, especially the inability of the regime to feed the people, have gradually sapped the regime's credibility. A steady flow of refugees crosses the river frontier into China, and even some key figures close to the leadership have fled. Nothing so serves to justify and sustain the continued harsh regimen of dictatorship as the confrontation with huge, hostile, external adversaries.
2. At one time North Korea's economy seemed to be growing faster than South Korea's. What's happened?
When the CIA studied the two economies in the late 1960s, it found North Korea out-performing South Korea in almost every particular. From 1979 to 1990, the UN's FAO was reporting North Korea as an agricultural miracle, the world's No 1 in terms of rice yield per hectare. Both reports were dubious, and the accomplishments, such as they were, soon dissolved. Now the GDP gap is between twenty and thirty to one in the South's favor, and North Korea's agriculture has collapsed.
The more industrialized region of the peninsula prior to the Korean War, in the decades that followed liberation from Japan and the foundation (in 1948) of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), the North achieved dramatic growth rates fueled by the nationalization of seized Japanese colonial assets, the adoption of a comprehensive land-reform program and of Soviet-style central planning, and substantial aid flows from Soviet, East European and Chinese sources. After the initial high growth of the 1940s to 1960s (with the exception of the drastic setbacks of the war between 1950 and 1953), however, North Korea entered upon a slow decline. Plant rotted or became obsolescent, resources were monopolized by the military, or used to shore up the cult of the leader, and in the 1990s the country was buffeted by the natural disasters of the 1990s, even as the confrontation with the United States sharpened.
The contradiction between the cult and the plan deepened. In effect, the frenzied excesses and arbitrary interventions of the cult slowly strangled the plan; with the succession of Kim Jong Il, flunkeys replaced technocrats. The long US embargo, blocking not only bilateral economic links but also World Bank and International Monetary Fund ties, stymied repeated efforts to break out of isolation.
No country has "de-industrialized" at such a rate and for so long now as North Korea. As a black hole of hopelessness at the heart of booming Northeast Asia, its position is increasingly anomalous.
3. What has been the significance of the fact that the North Korean leadership has passed from Kim Il Sung to Kim Jong Il.
Kim Jong Il (b. 1942) was groomed for succession long before his father Kim Il Sung (b. 1912) actually passed the reins to him. When Kim Il Sung died in 1994, Kim Jong Il was already in effect running the country.
Kim Il Sung had the prestige associated with his role as an anti-Japanese partisan or guerrilla, an anti-fascist fighter. The cult that was built around him rested ultimately on nationalist and internationalist credentials. For Kim Jong Il, however, legitimacy stemmed only from being his father's son. A huge effort had to be launched to legitimize his succession. At his hands, the cult of his father, Kim Il Sung, was intensified and extended to the entire family: continuation of the revolution could only be entrusted to the blood-line. The entire country was turned into a family monument, and grandiose projects in honor of the Leader and his family were given priority over productive purposes.
Kim Jong Il's dilemma is how to reform his country while somehow retaining power. The more he "reforms" and opens the country, however, the less credible his dynastic and feudal rule becomes.
4. In 1994, the Clinton administration reached an agreement with North Korea designed to resolve the nuclear controversy. What happened to that agreement?
Under the 1994 agreement known as the "Agreed Framework," North Korea was to freeze its graphite nuclear reactor program, and to hold its 8,000-odd rods of plutonium-containing waste from the reactors in specially constructed ponds, under sealed IAEA camera scrutiny, in return for two electricity-generating light-water reactors to be built by 2003, and an interim annual supply of 3.3 million barrels of oil. The United States and North Korea agreed to "move towards full normalization of political and economic relations" while the US was to provide "formal assurances to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea against the threat or use of nuclear weapons."
Wrangling over the site and getting the agreement of others to pay for it (South Korea 70 per cent, Japan about 20 per cent) took several years, by which time North Korea was in the depths of economic crisis and famine so severe that Washington believed the regime might not survive and therefore the reactor construction need not go ahead. As control of Congress passed to the Republicans, who had opposed the deal from the start and never took seriously its commitment to political and economic normalization, the Agreed Framework was sidelined and criticized as misguided Democratic appeasement that should never have been entered into and should not be honored. It took the launch (albeit unsuccessful in achieving orbit) of the Taepodong satellite in 1998 to restore a sense of urgency to the North Korea question. In 2000, visits were exchanged by Madeleine Albright and North Korea's Marshall Jo Myong Rok and the two countries came to the brink of normalization and to fulfillment of the Framework's commitments. A Clinton presidential visit was anticipated, but time ran out before it could be realized.
Under President Bush, North Korea was labeled a "terror state" and evil, its leader the particular object of presidential hatred. The present crisis was initiated in October 2002 by US Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly's claim that North Korea had admitted to a secret program of uranium enrichment. Allegation and denial brought the Framework to collapse. What actually was said to Kelly, and whether he understood it correctly or not, remains controversial. Pyongyang denies any admission. China, Russia and South Korea doubt that North Korea has the kind of program it is supposed to have admitted. It is hard to imagine any possible motive for North Korea to have said what Kelly alleges was said.
From 2003, the uranium enrichment story was complicated by the admissions stemming from Abdul Qadeer Khan, the founder of Pakistan's nuclear program, to the provision of nuclear technology, including centrifuges, to Libya, Iran, North Korea and other countries in the 1990s. This breach of the non-proliferation regime is precisely what Washington says it most fears North Korea might commit. Committed by a US ally, and almost certainly known to US intelligence from the outset, however, it elicits little more than a reprimand.
The next round of "Six-Sided Talks" in Beijing, scheduled for late February 2004, will have to confront the issue of who said what, and what they meant, in Pyongyang in October 2002.
Whatever the outcome of the uranium enrichment story, it seems beyond doubt that, until the Kelly-initiated crisis and the ensuing breakdown of the Agreed Framework, North Korea had honored its commitment to freeze the graphite-moderated reactor works and waste storage ponds at Yongbyon. The 1994 Agreement covered the plutonium-based (Nagasaki-type) weapons program, not the uranium-based (Hiroshima-type) program that became the subject of the Kelly allegations in 2002 and the Khan revelations in 2003. US experts visiting Yongbyon in December 2003 found that one small (5 MW) experimental reactor had been turned on to provide the local town with power and heat, but the larger (50 MW) reactor works were in such a state of dilapidation and disrepair that they estimated it would take years to restore. The storage ponds were empty, however, suggesting that the plutonium had been processed and might be incorporated in a weapons program.
5. During the run-up to the Iraq war, many commentators noted that whether or not Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, he was rational and hence deterrable, and thus not a serious threat outside his own borders. Indeed, these commentators suggested that the only conceivable scenario in which Saddam might use WMD was in the event of a US attack. Does this same logic apply to North Korea?
No serious analyst has ever suggested that North Korea was preparing to attack or invade any of its neighbors or constituted any threat to regional peace except if faced with threats to its own survival. North Korea is best seen as a porcupine, stiffening its bristles and looking fierce to try to repel attack, rather than a tiger rapaciously seeking prey.
Although North Korea has neither threatened nor committed any act of aggression against any neighboring state, its relationship with South Korea is of course in a different category. Ever since the country was divided by external intervention in 1945, both North and South have committed themselves to restoring national unity, each claiming national legitimacy. The civil war of 1950 to 1953 arose out of that contest and fifty years on remains unresolved, but the momentum of reconciliation between the two has accelerated greatly since the shift from confrontation to "sunshine" under the previous South Korean presidency of Kim Dae Jung. South Korean people today are more fearful of the United States than of North Korea.
6. Are the North Koreans paranoid? And, if so, why?
If paranoia means unreasonable, groundless, or grossly exaggerated fear, then the word is inappropriate to describe North Korea, whose fears can hardly be described as unreasonable.
While in Washington the North Korean "nuclear threat" has been an issue for the past decade, Pyongyang has faced the US nuclear threat for the past half century. North Korea has lived under it for longer than any other nation. During the Korean War it escaped nuclear annihilation by the barest of margins. General MacArthur, his successor as Commander-in-Chief, General Ridgway, presidents Truman and Eisenhower, and the Joint Chiefs, all at one or other stage favored or recommended using nuclear weapons against North Korea. Britain and other allies opposed its use, but in the end it was only fear of Soviet retaliation, and following the death of Stalin the rapid progress in negotiations, that prevented it. Then, just four years after the Armistice and in obvious breach of it, the US introduced nuclear artillery shells, mines, and missiles into Korea, keeping them there, adjacent to the Demilitarized Zone, designed to intimidate the non-nuclear North, for 35 years till they were finally withdrawn at the insistence of the South Korean government. Even withdrawal did little to diminish the threat as perceived by Pyongyang since the rehearsals for a long-range nuclear strike on North Korea continued. Under the "Agreed Framework," however, Clinton finally lifted the threat, pledging no first-use of nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear state. That reprieve was in turn revoked under Bush and North Korea was specifically included on the "Nuclear Target List."
Watching its fellow "axis of evil" country Iraq being pulverized in 2003 although (as we now know) it had no weapons of mass destruction nor any immediate prospect of developing them, Pyongyang could be forgiven for concluding that its turn was likely to come next, and that its only hope of survival was actually to possess what Saddam Hussein had not. Without nuclear weapons North Korea was a poor and insignificant country; with them, perhaps only with them, it might not only deter American attack but actually induce it to enter negotiations on long-standing grievances.
North Korea's perception of its role in the 20th century (and the 21st to date) is that of victim, suffering from a series of colossal and uncompensated injustices at the hands of colonial Japan and the US. Its demands for lifting of the threat against it and for recognition and normalization may be voiced in strident tones, but that is best seen as a measure of its anxiety. What the world has never recognized is the core of legitimacy in Pyongyang's cry for settlement: of the bitter legacy of colonialism (from Japan) and of nuclear intimidation, economic embargo and diplomatic isolation (by the US).
7. What is the role and position of the key regional players in the current North Korea crisis: South Korea, Japan, and China?
The "Six-Sided Framework" set up during 2003 was designed to present North Korea with a united front of regional and global powers (US, Japan, China, Russia, South Korea) insisting on its nuclear disarmament. As the crisis has developed, however, the US position has steadily weakened and the Six-Sided frame has served to bring pressure, unexpectedly, to bear on Washington as much as on North Korea. Strangest of all, China, designated by the early Bush administration as the real strategic threat to the United States, moved to centre stage in the negotiations.
All six of the countries are committed to a non-nuclear peninsula, and, save for the US, all consider the idea of another war in Northeast Asia absolutely anathema. While none dare openly oppose the US, North Korea's four neighbor countries share the belief that its security problems are genuine and serious, and that North Korea should be entitled, without having to plead for it, to the guarantee of its right to exist. All express doubts about the US intelligence on North Korea's possession of nuclear weapons, and about the US version of the events that led to the collapse of the Agreed Framework in 2002.
South Korea: South Korea, which once fought a fratricidal war and has been locked in hostile military confrontation with the North ever since, now shows least fear and most understanding of its neighbor and has chosen a path of dialogue and cooperation, a policy styled by former President Kim Dae Jung as "Sunshine," stemming from a vein of Confucian wisdom in which human nature is seen as complex but never evil, and in which even the poor, desperate and friendless are entitled to respect. It chooses to believe that change is in the cards and any residual military threat is adequately contained, and shows no sympathy for the moralistic, fundamentalist frame within which North Korea is represented as "evil." Ultimately, as one critic put it, South and North Korea constitute a single "family business."
At any given moment now, hundreds of South Korean diplomats, bureaucrats, and business people are in Pyongyang, doing deals, talking to their opposite numbers, working out new links by road, rail, fiber-optic or pipeline between North and South, or framing investment projects in energy, tourism or manufacturing.
Japan: Korea was Japan's colony in the first half of the 20th century. Japanese dominance was followed by externally imposed division, civil and then international war, and then the Cold War. It took 20 years before Japan made any move to "normalize" its relations with South Korea, and to this day no relations exist with North Korea.
Under Cold war conditions, it was more-or-less impossible even to imagine reconciliation between Japan and North Korea. After it, North Korea's demand for apology and compensation for colonialism was the major sticking point. Only when enfeebled to the point of desperation by economic crisis in the 1990s did it agree to set that demand aside. North Korea also showed its eagerness for change when it offered visiting Japanese Prime Minister Koizumi in September 2002 a dramatic apology for having abducted thirteen Japanese citizens during the late 1970s and early 1980s and for the "spy ships" that intruded into Japanese waters in the 1990s. It then returned to Japan the five it said were the survivors of the thirteen people abducted. These indications of desire for change came to naught, however. Instead, a huge Japanese wave of anger over the abductions overshadowed all else.
The abductions of two and a half decades ago, at the height of the Cold War, were a form of state terrorism, and outrage was understandable. However, the Japanese response was itself strange, in that it followed the North Korean apology and promise not to commit such acts again. Furthermore, both sides were well aware that Japan had undertaken state terror in the not so distant past on a much larger scale, including the mobilization of large numbers of Korean young women into sexual slavery, and that it took Japan more than half a century before it began, grudgingly, to admit and to make reparation (indirectly and inadequately).
The question of the six children of the former abductees became central. Now in all cases adults (the youngest aged 18), brought up entirely in North Korea, knowing no language but Korean and in some cases ignorant even of the Japanese identity of their parents, the Japanese government nevertheless insisted that they be handed over, "returned" to Japan. North Korea, for its part, protested that Japan was in breach of an October 2002 understanding to the effect that the parents would return to North Korea after a one or two week stay in Japan to determine the future of their families. It argued that the children were not "things" to be simply shifted around, but human beings with their own sense of identity; it should be up to them to decide, after discussion with their parents, where they want to live.
The North Korean government continued in 2003 and 2004 to reiterate essentially the same position. To a visiting Japanese government delegation in February 2004 it said that if the parents would only fly to Pyongyang, thus fulfilling the terms of the bargain, the family members could, if they wished, then depart with them. That was not enough to satisfy the Japanese authorities, who remained bent on unconditional handover of the family members, regardless of what the individuals in question might think. The long-term solution in human rights terms would be the creation of a relationship in which these young people would be able to move freely between North Korea and Japan, between their own (should they so choose) and their parents' homes in a future "normalized" relationship, but such a position has very few supporters in contemporary Japan.
The continuing showdown with North Korea constituted a major axis of political and institutional change in Japan. With fear and hatred of North Korea a shared social consensus, Japan has taken a series of recent steps towards "normalizing" its military ("Self-Defense") forces and strengthening its support for the US military in its global operations. Prime Minister Koizumi specifically linked the Self-Defense Force detachment sent to Iraq to the expectation that the US would defend Japan in the event of a North Korean attack. Japan has also committed itself to purchase of a massively expensive and unproven (US) missile defense system to ward off any North Korean missiles, tightened the rules governing the entry of North Korean ships into Japanese waters, and passed legislation to authorize unilateral economic sanctions on North Korea if it judged the situation to warrant it.
China: China has the closest of historic ties with North Korea and is today both the source of most of the supplies of food and energy on which North Korea depends and the most likely possible model of how it might develop in the future; in the North Korean present, Chinese see their own past. The Chinese role in brokering a resolution of the problem of North Korea has steadily grown, at the US request. The Chinese "bottom line" is that there must not be any resort to force. China was bold enough to say, from its position as convener and chair of the Beijing August 2003 talks, that it was the US that was the major obstacle to the negotiations. Steady Chinese pressure since then has been instrumental in bringing the US to soften its position. From absolute refusal to negotiate until North Korea agreed unilaterally to a complete, verifiable, irreversible end to its nuclear programs (at the three meetings that took place in 2002 and 2003), the US in late 2003 indicated it was ready to offer some kind of security guarantee and to consider graduated steps to resolution. China has also been instrumental in persuading North Korea to come to the table again without the draft document it sought in advance and to agree to a freeze (and ultimately destruction) of all its nuclear programs, not only weapons-related ones.
China has long disputed US intelligence estimates about North Korea and has stated in advance of the February meeting that it is not persuaded of the central American claim about North Korea's possession of a uranium enrichment program. On this, given the record of US intelligence and its manipulation on Iraq, Washington will have a hard time persuading its negotiating partners in Beijing. Any successful resolution of the current problem is likely to enhance China's role as the lynchpin of a future East or Northeast Asian order, with the "Six" constituting the core of a future community.
8. Does anyone know what the status is of North Korea's weapons programs? Can you summarize what we do know.
American intelligence first estimated back in 1993 (possibly earlier) that North Korea had "one, or possibly two" nuclear weapons. Like the intelligence on which the US in 2003 went to war against Iraq, it seems to have been false and/or subject to political manipulation. By 2003, the US had shifted to adopt the South Korean, Russian and Chinese view that North Korea actually did not have any nuclear weapons. It then argued that it had the ingredients (plutonium and uranium), and the will and intent, to develop them.
It is almost certainly true that North Korea would like to have nuclear weapons, its own "deterrent," but also that it suspended its efforts to produce them when it felt its security needs were satisfactorily met by the Agreed Framework in 1994, only changing course when the US itself changed course from Clinton to Bush. North Korea today almost certainly has plutonium, and may be in the process of extracting more of it from the waste rods removed from the Yongbyon ponds, but it seems highly unlikely that it has achieved "weaponization." As for delivery system, the Nodong missile has been test fired only once, in 1993; the longer-range Taepodong likewise once, when it failed to achieve orbit and crashed into the ocean in 1998; and the supposedly improved model, Taepodong 2, also once, when it blew up on the launching pad in 2002 (according to South Korean intelligence). It is hardly a scintillating record.
Objective assessment is complicated by the fact that both US intelligence and Pyongyang share an interest, for different reasons, in having the world think North Korea possesses both nuclear weapons and a delivery system, the US in order to justify its hegemonic role in East Asia, and North Korea in order to deter US attack.
9. What is the Bush administration currently trying to achieve with respect to North Korea?
The use of the singular begs a major question: does the Bush administration have a policy or is North Korea the axis of contest between rival factions within it. Jack Pritchard, till his resignation in August 2003 a Senior North Korean specialist at the State Department, says of American policy (New York Times, 21 January 2004): "At best it could be described only as amateurish. At worst, it is a failed attempt to lure American allies down a path that is not designed to solve the crisis diplomatically but to lead to the failure and ultimate isolation of North Korea in hopes that its government will collapse." No outside critic could match the severity of this assessment by someone who has been deeply involved in policy implementation.
For the neo-conservative group within the Bush regime, whether in the 1990s or today, history and politics are less important than the moral frame. North Korea is evil and should be liberated. Where political, economic and historical differences can be negotiated, evil can only be stamped out. Bush himself has made no secret of his loathing for North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, in terms similar to those he used for Saddam Hussein. He has, however, also intimated, in quite contrary mode, that a peaceful, negotiated solution in Korea is possible and even expressed optimism about the prospects. As the mire in Iraq deepens, a more conventional diplomatic view of the North Korean problem again comes to the fore in Washington. In very crude terms, while the neoconservatives around Cheney and Rumsfeld prefer ultimatum, backed by the readiness to use force, and the president himself is disinclined for compromise, the State Department favors negotiation and cooperation with regional powers.
The current US position -- readiness to meet North Korea's security concerns by some form of document and to offer economic aid in return for complete, verifiable and irreversible abandonment of its nuclear programs -- is a big step forward from that enunciated by James Kelly in 2002 and 2003. Indeed on the face of it this is close to what North Korea seeks (though it fudges the key issue of full diplomatic normalization). However, the 25 February Beijing meet will face some major obstacles:
1. How to arrive at a mutually satisfactory text to guarantee North Korea's security;
2. How to establish the truth about the claims and counter-claims concerning an enriched uranium program;
3. How to address the North Korean demand for deletion from the list of terror-supporting countries;
4. How to persuade the US to accept the North Korean "freeze" as sufficient warrant of good faith to justify the resumption of shipments of heavy oil in the short term, and an end to the virtual economic embargo of North Korea in the long term;
5. How in the longer term, to persuade all sides that the issue to be settled is not merely a putative North Korean weapons program but normalization of relations on all sides;
6. How to incorporate in that normalization a permanent peace agreement to settle the Korean war of 1950-53;
7. How to resolve the issue of North Korean abductions of Japanese, and simultaneously the issues of Japanese abductions and abuse of Koreans during the long colonial period.
It is the agenda not just of nuclear weapons on the peninsula but of the accumulated problems of a century, and therefore almost certainly too much to be settled in a few late February days. Pyongyang may be calculating to survive until November by stringing out the negotiations in the hope of facing a more amenable US government following the November elections, while the US, weakened by events in Iraq, will not find it easy to persuade the world to adopt its intelligence estimates and is in no position to resort to force in the short term.
10. How would you assess the Bush administration's strategy?
Two major contradictions affect US North Korea policy, nuclear on the one hand, strategic on the other.
The US wants to maintain nuclear-based hegemony over the earth, and indeed over the universe, while blocking any new countries from joining the existing nuclear club. The non-proliferation regime to which it signed up in 1968 was a deal by which those countries that did not possess nuclear weapons pledged not to take steps to get them, while those with weapons pledged not to threaten non-possessors and to take steps to eliminate their existing arsenals and move to comprehensive nuclear disarmament. Until the nuclear club powers take seriously those obligations, their insistence on others fulfilling their obligations is mere hypocrisy. If security can indeed only be guaranteed by possession of nuclear weapons, then there can be no complaint at North Korea. If that is not the case, then the possessing powers must take steps towards elimination of all nuclear weapons.
The second contradiction is between short and long-term US objectives. Regime change in North Korea would remove a thorn in the US side, but at the same time it might serve to undermine US regional hegemony. George W. Bush and Kim Jong Il stand in a paradoxically symbiotic relationship. Bush's loathing for Kim, and his nuclear threat, maintains the isolation and siege conditions that allow Kim to legitimize his rule, mobilize nationalist support, and crush opposition. Bush, for his part, rules and reigns over Northeast Asia because Japan and South Korea feel compelled by the North Korean threat to seek American protection and to shelter under Washington's "nuclear umbrella."
The framework of US military presence in East Asia is justified in Seoul and Tokyo by the threat from Pyongyang. Without the "North Korean threat" -- whether resolved peacefully or otherwise -- Washington strategists would have to think of some new justification for the bases in Japan and South Korea, and for the massively expensive anti-missile system soon to be constructed in the region. Some might want to declare China the real enemy, but a military alliance with the United States whose orientation was containment and hostility towards China would find little support in contemporary South Korea and Japan. Paradoxically, if the US does accomplish what it wants in North Korea -- regime change -- it could find that its own domination of the region is undermined.
It is time for the US to grow beyond the Cold War assumptions of Asia as a threatening and yet economically crucial area that must be maintained under tight control. In time, Asia, especially East and Northeast Asia, most likely in close cooperation with Southeast Asia, will emerge as an autonomous global centre of power and wealth. The process is, indeed, already advanced. The security reliance on the chain of US bases and on Washington's priorities becomes increasingly anomalous.
North Korea is a tiny country that has successively been colonized, invaded and abandoned. Its neighbors are the booming core of the world economy. Incorporated into "normal' relations with them, North Korea could be expected to become increasingly like them. North Korea's neighbors have their reasons for wanting to incorporate North Korea into the emerging Asian community and should be encouraged to take the key role in doing so on their own terms. To accomplish this, the price North Korea seeks for abandoning its nuclear weapons program is not unreasonable: an end to nuclear intimidation, diplomatic normalization and removal of economic sanctions.
It would be sensible for the US, while maintaining the existing security guarantees to both South Korea and Japan, to give North Korea the chance to show if it really does wish to change. Kim Jong Il's avowed desire for opening and normalization should be tested. He should be invited to talks in Washington or Tokyo or anywhere else and his willingness to denuclearize put to the test. Attempts to enforce change by issuing demands and refusing negotiation simply will not work. North Korean "face" is an important part of the security equation and a sympathy for the pain and the sense of justice that drive it, however perverted, will be needed for security goals to be met. Kim Jong Il's rule feeds off the current tension and he would not long survive the process of whittling it away, the normalization of economic and political relations with Japan and the US, and the steady flow of Japanese and other capital into the country.
Above all, a resolution of the problem will depend on seeing it not in the narrow frame of North Korean threat but in the broad context of history. That will require taking Seoul seriously and with respect, rather than as a recalcitrant and scarcely reliable ally because it no longer follows Washington uncritically. North Korea is essentially a Korean problem, and South Korea must assume a central role in negotiations and plans for the future because its people must after all live with their northern compatriots.
11. How does the U.S.-NK impasse impact on issues of peace and security in Northeast Asia? Are there regional approaches to any of the issues that could prove fruitful in resolving the issues both of U.S.-NK conflict and moving toward a reduction of regional tensions?
North Korea is a structural pivot of contemporary US hegemony in East Asia. Washington's post-Cold War vision asks Japan and Korea, in effect, to accept a future world predicated on continued fear and hostility to North Korea, such as to require their continuing military, political, and economic dependence on the United States. For Japan, the role of the "Britain" of East Asia is on offer, and its actions in Iraq suggest that Koiziumi's Japan is keen to take up the offer. For South Korea, or a united Korea, no clear role has yet been articulated, but one thing is clear: it is expected to remain secondary to Japan, perhaps as a kind of East Asian Northern Ireland. However, while US regional and global policy offers negative priorities -- anti-terror, anti-"evil," security against North Korea -- from East Asia there are tentative signs of the emergence of an alternative, non-imperial vision. Beyond the gloom, anger, and rising tension of the "North Korean crisis" may be detected a process of evolution in a "European" type direction. Like Europe, however, East Asia has its own rhythms and its own dynamics, and its tectonic plates are moving towards greater mutual cooperation and community. People begin to ask why it is that East Asia in the twentieth century failed to evolve a concert of states other than the Japanese-dominated "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere" in the first half and then the US-dominated "free world" in the latter half, the former disastrous, the latter originally a Cold War product, and increasingly anomalous as the conditions that gave it birth disappear. Offered ongoing dependency on the US, structured around bilateral treaty arrangements and trade flows rather than any regional consensus, and marked by a base structure meant to last till well into the century ahead, the peoples and states of East Asia are likely at some point to reply: no thank you. Permanent East Asian dependence on American markets and security guarantees looks more and more anachronistic. Looking at the evolution of postwar Europe, people ask why Asia should not follow a similar path.
The Kim Jong Il regime in North Korea is indefensible, but violent intervention to change it is more likely to lead to the sort of chaos that engulfs Iraq and Afghanistan than to a resolution of problems that, in the last resort, only the Korean people, north and south, can solve. The necessary condition for them to do this is the "normalization" of the Korean peninsula, with problems ignored for far too long finally addressed: the lack of any peace treaty to settle the Korean War, the absence of diplomatic relations between North Korea and the world's two most important countries, the US and Japan. Only then will it be possible to liquidate the militarized tension that has blighted the lives of North Korea's people for half a century and created the conditions within which the dictatorship sustains itself.
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