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North Korea, US and elusive
detente
By Ehsan Ahrari
Despite the forthcoming attempts under the
auspices of the six-nation negotiating forum - involving
North and South Korea, the United States, China, Japan
and Russia - to resolve the North Korean nuclear
weapons-related conflict with the US, relations between
Washington and Pyongyang are likely to remain unchanged.
These ties are marked by a high degree of suspicion and
mistrust.
North Korea and the United States have
two radically different systems of government, whose
mutual ties are still determined by a zero-sum game that
was a driving force of the US-Soviet Union ties during
the Cold War years. Relations between the United States
and China - another communist state - have gone through
substantial changes largely because of the latter's
decision to become part and parcel of global economic
arrangements. Consequently, the Chinese political
system, despite being still authoritarian, is more open
now than it was in the past decades. North Korea, on the
contrary, remains a hermit nation. As such, it remains
closed and unconnected with the global economic network,
and least understood. Unless these characteristics
undergo noteworthy transformation, there are few bases
for a changed relationship between the United States and
North Korea.
North Korea has decided to stand up
to the United States at a time when the latter's power
and influence is at an all-time high. Ironically enough,
North Korea has reached the bottom of its economic
underdevelopment in the same duration, but it is also
wielding (or threatening to wield) nuclear arms. So,
regarding the regional order in East Asia, the United
States has a lot at stake by militarily confronting
North Korea. Even though America's military victory
related to such a potential is beyond any doubt, it has
learned a bitter lesson in the post-Saddam Hussein Iraq
that military victory - based on unilateral actions - is
temporary, and very expensive to boot. That might be one
reason why the administration of President George W Bush
is so resolute about finding a multilateral and
diplomatic solution to its ongoing conflict with North
Korea.
The chief obstacle in the way of a
near-term resolution of the North Korea-US conflict is
the intense antagonism that prevails on the part of both
parties. Washington is quite vocal in iterating that it
has no faith in North Korea's future promise of
abandoning its nuclear-weapons development program,
unless such a promise is firmly couched in guarantees of
transparency and intrusive and frequent inspections of
its nuclear facilities by the International Atomic
Energy Agency (IAEA).
Realities related to this
conflict from Pyongyang's perspectives are very
different. As North Korea sees it, the Bush
administration did not want to take up the progress made
during the presidency of Bill Clinton on the Agreed
Framework and use that as a point of departure for
further negotiations when it entered office in 2001.
Instead, Washington froze further negotiations, taking
the position that the Clinton administration was too
accommodating of Kim Jong-il's regime. While the United
States and North Korea were not negotiating, Bush in his
2002 State of the Union speech raised the level of
strident rhetoric by labeling the latter a member of the
"axis of evil". Such a depiction also heightened the
level of suspicion and fear of United States' intent in
North Korea.
The United States' refusal to
negotiate left North Korea talking with South Korea and
Japan, while its high preference was to have a bilateral
dialogue with the Bush administration. The absence of a
US-North Korea diplomatic engagement might have been the
catalyst of Kim Jong-il's decision to restart his
nuclear-weapons program. However, a complete picture of
that reality is that the long-standing distrust between
Washington and Pyongyang was only further deepened
during the first two years of the Bush presidency. As
the initiation of the six-nation dialogue gets closer,
nothing has been done to ameliorate this suspicion. One
wonders what new diplomatic grounds were broken by the
recent harsh condemnation of the US under secretary of
state for non-proliferation, John Bolton, of Kim
Jong-il's regime. No one in East Asia needed reminding
or educating what a brutal dictator Kim really is. North
Korea not only responded in kind, but insisted on not
dealing with Bolton in future diplomatic exchanges.
The United States and North Korea are entering
the negotiating round with a heightened level of mutual
antagonism. South Korea, Japan, and China are expected
to apply pressure on North Korea to unravel its nuclear
weapons program. Russia is also there; however, its
presence is not as significant as the other three
actors, especially China. Beijing's role is most
significant, since it provides North Korea 70 percent of
its oil and a third of its food supplies. As such, it is
in a position to apply pressure on Kim. The general
expectations are that Japan and South Korea will play a
crucial role in bankrolling the agreement eventually
negotiated by the six parties. The clincher in these
negotiations is the willingness of the United States to
offer concessions. No one is very hopeful in that
regard. By the same token, it is not clear how generous
the US Congress will be in offering any economic
assistance to Pyongyang, if such assistance were to be
negotiated as part of the ultimate package.
One
must also keep another very important aspect of reality
in mind as the six-nation negotiating process gets under
way. A consistent US position that the issue of North
Korean nuclear-weapons program should be resolved
through the use of diplomacy does not mean that the
option of regime change is off the shelf. On the
contrary, various low-level US officials have pointed
out from time to time that all options are being
actively considered in Washington. Most recently, the US
officials were talking about a "dual-track strategy" of
negotiations and punitive actions against North Korea.
However, no one is certain about the modalities of that
strategy, especially whether the option of regime change
is excluded from it. The United States is scheduled to
conduct a joint naval exercise in the South Coral Sea
off northeastern Australia next month, which is clearly
aimed at sending a sharp signal to North Korea to
unravel its nuclear-weapons program. Those variables
might also be driving forces behind Kim's adamant
refusal to abandon the nuclear-weapons development
option.
Even though both China and South Korea
are opposed to the notion of regime change in North
Korea, Pyongyang also knows the limitations of that
opposition. Almost all major powers were opposed to
regime change in Iraq; however, that fact did not deter
the Bush administration. If the United States does not
pursue the alternative of regime change in North Korea,
it will be for internal or external reasons of its own,
such as potential domestic pressures against it, or if
Washington were to be gravely concerned about the
ensuing chaos in East Asia. Pyongyang does not want to
leave itself open for the development of such
eventualities and give up its nuclear weapons, that it
regards the ultimate source of its security.
The
most troubling aspect of North Korea's mistrust of the
United States is that the latter had walked away from
the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, calling it
irrelevant in the post-Cold War strategic environment.
So, even after providing security guarantees to North
Korea - negotiated in a multilateral forum - there is no
certainty that Washington would not abandon it in the
future by claiming altered strategic realities as a
rationale.
Despite the Bush administration's
insistence on having a diplomatic resolution of the
North Korean nuclear weapons-related conflict, North
Korea remains quite unsure about America's real
intentions. By the same token, despite the possibilities
that North Korea would agree to abandon its nuclear
option as a result of a multilaterally negotiated
agreement, Washington remains equally suspicious of
Kim's real motives. These realities do not provide many
bases for optimism to the world community.
What
if Kim really wants to develop nuclear weapons, come
what may? Would the US then follow the option it used
against Iraq, or would it respond it to the way it
responded to the decisions of India and Pakistan to go
nuclear? Uncertainties, uncertainties! But that is no
different from the uncertainties related to the Cold War
years. Only its specifics are different. Plus ca
change, plus c'est la meme chose.
Ehsan Ahrari, PhD, is an Alexandria,
Virginia, US-based independent strategic analyst.
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times Online Co,
Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for
information on our sales and syndication policies.)
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