Who's at fault for the current North Korean problem? Ultimately, Kim Jong Il is responsible. You cannot fairly say it's Clinton's fault or Bush's fault because really, Kim is the one who made these decisions and took these actions and who now pretty much holds every card he ever wanted in his relations with the rest of the world.
But of course, with proper diplomatic efforts, Kim might have been guided toward making different decisions, and that's part of what we're arguing about nowadays. To a certain extent it's a pointless argument: who cares how we got here, the point is that we're here and now what do we do? But at the same time, an examination of how we got here offers strong indications of what we ought to do next (assuming that anything can be done anymore). It also might suggest what we might do about that other looming problem, Iran's quest for a similar nuclear capacity. Because make no mistake, Iran is watching closely how the U.S. responds to North Korea's crashing of the nuclear party; and if North Korea gets away with it, nothing will stop from Iran from doing the same.
So: is it Clinton's fault, or Bush's? There is definitely blame to be spread all around, as there usually is; but judging by the limited research I've done so far, the most convincing timeline of what happened and why is Fred Kaplan's in the May 2004 Washington Monthly. Is it slanted toward Clinton's side of things? Of course it is: the title is "Rolling Blunder," and the subtitle is "How the Bush administration let North Korea get nukes." But opinions aside, the facts as they are laid out suggest some interesting conclusions.
One conclusion: diplomacy does work, and should not be automatically dismissed as appeasement. (By the way, an interesting note about Neville Chamberlain's much-reviled appeasement policy toward Nazi Germany: as this BBC biography suggests, appeasement might have gotten a bum rap--"Current thinking has shifted, however, believing Chamberlain to have shrewdly agreed to appeasement to give the British armed forces the time they desperately needed to prepare for full-blown war.") Appeasement, then, in those circumstances was not an end in itself but a quiet recognition that war was inevitable and that time was desperately needed to prepare conventional forces for what must surely come. Given that we are now in the nuclear era, delay doesn't really serve much purpose anymore because the aim is not to match North Korea in firepower--we already vastly outmatch any other nation in firepower, both conventional and nuclear--but to prevent even one use of a nuclear weapon by anyone under any circumstances.
Enter diplomacy. I think it's fair to argue that technologically, the nuclear genie is right now escaping from the bottle, and that this was bound to happen someday, that no president, no nation, no ideology can prevent it from happening. Any technology eventually becomes pervasive. So the only policy that really helps in the long term is persuasion, i.e., diplomacy. Give a country, a nation, a rogue state, whatever you want to call it, an alternative to nuclear war and, because MADD isn't altogether a bad idea, that nation will probably take the alternative. But if you back that nation into a corner where it believes there are no other alternatives, and it has a nuke in its pocket, chances are the unthinkable will happen. And I'll tell you, when I was watching Bush's 2002 State of the Union speech and heard him drop the line about the Axis of Evil, I cringed. I knew in an instant that this could only lead to desperate trouble down the line, as indeed it has.
Because Bush & Co. only seem to understand the persuasive powers of force; it's the only weapon, so to speak, in their arsenal. We already know that the Bushies never really believed there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, that--in keeping with a long-standing neocon theory about spreading democracy in the Middle East--as soon as September 11th happened, the Bushies knew they had all the excuse they needed and, despite all Bush's blather about exhausting diplomatic options, really they had settled on war pretty much from the git-go. (We know this because Richard Clarke and Paul O'Neill, among others, have told us so.) But so far, all their saber-rattling has only resulted in spectacular failures: the now-endless war in Iraq, the rise of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as a powerful spokesman for the Muslim world (precisely because of his bellicose opposition to Washington's bellicosity, a clear-cut case of like spawning like), and now North Korea's development of nuclear weaponry. Benjamin Franklin's definition of insanity is "doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results." With their one-note response to every situation, the Bush administration certainly seems to meet that definition. (Contrast with the FDR administration, wherein Roosevelt would, famously, try absolutely anything to see if it would work; if it didn't, he dropped it and tried something new. When have you ever seen George W. Bush abandon any idea and try something new?)
In Mr. Kaplan's timeline (there is an update of his positions here, dated yesterday, in Slate), it seems to me that one moment stands out more than any other: on October 21, 1994, after Clinton sent Jimmy Carter to Pyongyang to negotiate with Kim Jong Il, Carter came back with the Agreed Framework, under which, as Kaplan writes, "North Korea would renew its commitment to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, lock up the fuel rods, and let the IAEA inspectors back in to monitor the facility. In exchange, the United States, with financial backing from South Korea and Japan, would provide two light-water nuclear reactors for electricity (explicitly allowed under the NPT), a huge supply of fuel oil, and a pledge not to invade North Korea." This is the agreement that the current administration claims has failed, thus leaving them no choice but to pursue other options--when they say that "bilateral talks failed," this is what they're referring to.
But it's interesting to note the timing: October 21, 1994, only a couple weeks before the "Republican Revolution" that swept control of Congress away from the Democrats. With their new power, as Kaplan writes, "Since the accord was not a formal treaty, Congress did not have to ratify the terms, but it did balk on the financial commitment." (Check out this interview with Robert Gallucci, the chief U.S. negotiator with North Korea at the time; about halfway down, he talks about the Congressional reaction to the Agreed Framework.) Thus the agreement was crippled from the start, and once the North Koreans saw that we weren't honoring the agreement from our side, what possible reason did they have to honor it on theirs? In fact, no matter what you're hearing today, it is not the North Koreans who first broke their word, we did. The newly-Republican U.S. Congress did.
Then, almost immediately upon taking office, the Bush administration started upping the ante. The Axis of Evil, and so forth. Leading us to where we are now.
And what do we do next? Well that's the billion-dollar question, isn't it? But from my consideration of all the above, I have to think that sitting down at the table with these guys, even if it's exactly what they want, must be a pretty good idea. I'm not sure whether we have any good carrots or sticks anymore, but it sure as hell seems obvious that threatening the North Koreans just ain't working and we desperately need to try something different.
And if we should reach some sort of compromise, howsabout this time we actually keep our word?
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