NORTH KOREA: REDUX
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203753704577255322862397942.html?mod=opinion_newsreel
Nobody could believe North Korea’s luck when its soccer squad scored a goal off mighty Brazil at their 2010 World Cup match-up in South Africa. So we’ll forgive Kim Jong Eun if he feels like the diplomatic equivalent of Robinhood for the point he just won against the Obama Administration.
On Wednesday, North Korea announced that it would stop enriching uranium, suspend its nuclear tests and allow U.N. nuclear inspectors to inspect its nuclear facilities (or at least those it chooses to declare).
Associated PressFormer U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright after arriving at the Pyongyang, North Korea, airport in 2000.
In exchange, the U.S. has agreed to provide 240,000 metric tons of food aid over the next year. The deal is said to contain verification mechanisms to ensure that the food doesn’t merely feed North Korean soldiers. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton calls it “a modest first step in the right direction.” Other Administration officials insist they won’t let themselves be fooled by empty Pyongyang promises.
Good luck with that. When the Clinton Administration (with Japan and South Korea) negotiated the Agreed Framework with Pyongyang in 1994, it too won promises from the regime that it would close its weapons-breeding reactor at Yongbyon and put its plutonium under seal in exchange for 500,000 tons a year in oil, two “light-water” reactors and a variety of U.S security guarantees.
That economic lifeline was certainly helpful to Kim Jong Il, who managed to keep his regime afloat and avoid the fate of most Soviet clients. But it didn’t keep him from flouting the terms of the agreement.
In 2002, the Bush Administration confronted Pyongyang with evidence that it was pursuing a parallel program to enrich weapons-grade uranium. The North acknowledged the charge and admitted it had been doing so for years, only to deny it again later. It then pulled out of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and expelled U.N. inspectors.
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The North conducted its first nuclear test four years later. And in September 2007 we learned, thanks to an Israeli strike, that Pyongyang was secretly building a nuclear reactor in the Syrian desert, notwithstanding President Bush’s explicit warning that the U.S. would react harshly to such proliferation attempts.
Once again, however, the U.S. tried to make a deal. In June 2008 President Bush announced that he was lifting sanctions on the North after Pyongyang offered an obviously incomplete nuclear accounting and destroyed portions of its already obsolete Yongbyon facility. “We will trust you only to the extent that you fulfill your promises,” said Mr. Bush, sounding a lot like those State Department gnomes sound today.
The Obama Administration came into office a few months later, and the Kim family promptly welcomed the U.S. diplomatic overtures with ballistic missile tests, a second nuclear shot, the expulsion of U.N. inspectors, withdrawal from the negotiating table, and, for good measure, the hostage-taking of a couple of American reporters. So it was back to tough talk and sanctions—until now. What’s changed?
Well, there’s a new Kim on the throne. Advocates of a deal have also modified their expectations. Instead of arguing that we are on the road to de-nuclearizing the North, they claim that some agreement is better than allowing the North’s nuclear program to run at full speed, and at least some North Koreans might get better fed in the bargain. Some South Koreans add that the North stages fewer provocations—like shelling South Korean fishing villages or torpedoing patrol craft—when it’s at the negotiating table.
At least that’s an honest argument for trying to keep Pyongyang bribed a little longer. But the problem is that throwing another lifeline to another Kim works at cross-purposes with what ought to be the basic U.S. goal of regime change. With the food aid, the younger Kim will be able to make up enough of the country’s one-million ton harvest shortfall to keep the elites, the military and some portion of the work force fed. This, in turn, will allow him to keep cracking down on private markets, which pose the biggest threat to the regime’s control over the population.
The overwhelming odds are that this deal will do little more than further prolong the agony of North Korea’s people while sustaining a regime that poses a security threat to its democratic neighbors and the U.S. The Obama Administration has done pretty well so far in treating the North to a diet of economic pressure and diplomatic neglect. What a pity for it now to go down the same dead-end road that so conspicuously failed its predecessors.
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