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US-North Korea: Politicking Bush
style?
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON
- Does the new willingness of the administration of
President George W Bush to "talk" with North Korea mark
a major policy shift or a tactical maneuver designed to
put Pyongyang on a back burner while Washington focuses
world attention on Iraq?
That is the big
question following Tuesday's release of a joint
US-Japan-South Korean communique in which Washington,
after vowing for weeks not to talk with North Korea
until it dismantled its nuclear programs, agreed to talk
after all, even while it continued to insist that it was
not prepared to "negotiate".
Washington has also
tried to defuse the crisis by not urging the
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to refer that
matter to the United Nations Security Council as quickly
as the administration had been urging until this week.
Whether these steps will be enough to persuade
Pyongyang, which has been systematically raising the
stakes over its nuclear intentions in the last month, to
pause remains to be seen.
Independent analysts
are divided both over whether Washington is now willing
to be more flexible in dealing with Pyongyang, as its
Asian allies have urged, and, if so, whether a deal that
could resolve the crisis can still be put together. "I
think the administration has taken the first step toward
a more sensible and effective policy," said Don
Oberdorfer, a Korea expert who met with North Korean
officials in Pyongyang in November.
But he was
less optimistic about a deal. "I think the North would
have given up their uranium-enrichment program in
November for a promise of non-aggression if it had been
made in the right way, but when the US refused to engage
them in October and November, and then began to bring
pressure by cutting off the oil, the military [in
Pyongyang] got the upper hand and are now going straight
for nuclear weapons as fast as they can go."
Initial indications one day after the communique
was issued were not favorable. While North Korea flatly
ignored the offer of talks with the United States,
spokesmen for the administration of President George W
Bush stressed that, having made the offer, Washington
was under no obligation to follow through in the absence
of new moves by the North.
"The ball is in their
court," said White House spokesman Ari Fleischer. "We'd
like to hear from North Korea about the steps they're
taking to come back into compliance with international
obligations so they will dismantle their nuclear-weapons
program."
The administration has taken the
position, since last October when Pyongyang confirmed
the existence of a uranium-enrichment program capable of
producing atomic weapons, that North Korea is violating
a 1994 bilateral accord with the United States called
the Agreed Framework.
It provided that Pyongyang
would freeze a plutonium-producing Yongbyon nuclear
plant in exchange for the construction by South Korea
and Japan of two light-water nuclear reactors and
shipments of heavy fuel oil from the United States and
others to maintain the country's power supply while the
reactors were being built.
Washington considers
the uranium-enrichment program a violation of both the
Agreed Framework and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation
Treaty.
As a result, the administration, which
cut its oil shipments and persuaded Japan and South
Korea to do likewise, has said it will refuse to
negotiate any new agreements, including a formal
non-aggression agreement requested by the North, until
the country dismantles all of its nuclear programs.
Citing Washington's decision to cancel oil
shipments, Pyongyang escalated the crisis last month by
disabling IAEA monitoring equipment and expelling IAEA
inspectors at the Yongbyon plant in preparation for
firing it back up into operation.
The US Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA) believes that Pyongyang had
produced two atomic bombs before the 1994 accord and,
with the plutonium fuel rods that were put in storage as
part of the Agreed Framework, could produce another half
dozen within as little as two months once the plant is
fully operational.
The North Korean move appears
to have been carefully timed. With Washington mobilizing
for war in Iraq, Pyongyang knew that a US military
response was unlikely, especially after the election
last month of Roh Moo-hyun, the South Korean
presidential candidate who was most strongly wedded to
the "Sunshine Policy" of the incumbent, Kim Dae-jung.
Indeed, Pyongyang has tried very hard in recent
weeks to use Bush's refusal to hold talks with it to
drive a wedge between Washington and Seoul, where
anti-American feeling has risen sharply both because of
Washington's intransigence during the crisis and the
acquittal in a US court martial of two servicemen
accused of accidentally crushing two Korean schoolgirls
with their armored vehicle last June.
The
administration had not only come under pressure from its
Asian allies. Its rejection of talks with North Korea
also came under strong attack at home by both Democratic
lawmakers and some leading Republicans.
Top
Democrats charged that Bush had brought the crisis on
himself by pursuing a policy of gratuitous confrontation
with North Korea since taking office, while Republicans,
notably the new chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee, Richard Lugar, dismissed the administration's
efforts to play down the seriousness of North Korea's
moves and urged it to enter into talks designed to stop
Pyongyang from producing any new bombs.
In the
face of these pressures, the administration finally
moved in the past few days, first by delaying the IAEA's
referral of the crisis to the Security Council and then
by agreeing to "talks".
Some analysts believe
this could mark a major turning point. "I think they
will be getting in touch with the North Koreans,
probably through others at the beginning, with the clear
aim of bilateral discussions, and, if we're fortunate,
we'll end up in negotiations," said Oberdorfer.
"This is another sign that the administration's
head-butting approach to world politics isn't going to
work," said Charles Kupchan of the Council on Foreign
Relations. "I think it's a victory for the [Secretary of
State Colin] Powell faction [of the administration] to
some extent and a victory for China, Japan and South
Korea."
But others were less sanguine. "I think
the Bush administration is prepared to have North Korea
have an unrestrained nuclear-weapons program while they
try to isolate Pyongyang in hopes, long-term, of
bringing down the regime," Gary Samore, a former
non-proliferation expert with the administration of US
president Bill Clinton, told the Wall Street Journal.
"I don't think the administration is backing
down," said Chalmers Johnson, a Northeast Asia
specialist at the University of California. "They're
just dissimulating as usual. They're trying to smooth
ruffled feathers until after Iraq," he added.
(Inter Press Service)
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