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North Korea: Let's hear it for
diplomacy
By John Feffer
(Posted with permission from Foreign
Policy in Focus)
War so
far has not returned to the Korean Peninsula.
Negotiators from six countries - North and South Korea,
China, Japan, Russia and the United States - sat down in
Beijing on Wednesday to keep it that way. In a world
dominated by military "solutions" to obdurate 
problems, even the muted vote
for diplomacy represented by this week's Six-Party Talks
should be cause for celebration.
But few are
optimistic about this latest attempt to solve the
current Korea crisis. Most pundits believe that the best
possible outcome of the meetings, which are due to wind
up on Friday, would be a time and a date for the next
parley. If one of the six doesn't storm out, the meeting
will be a success. The United States has refused to
offer any inducements; North Korea has not diminished
its harsh rhetoric toward the US. Japan, meanwhile, has
insisted on introducing the issue of abductees, which
may very well torpedo the discussions. Although South
Korea, China and Russia are eager for a diplomatic
solution to the nuclear issue, they are the least
influential of the six.
Good cop, bad
cop
The administration of US President George W
Bush has been playing it very coy, even trotting out a
version of "good cop, bad cop". So, as State Department
hardliner John Bolton was blasting Kim Jong-il by name
41 times in a recent speech in Seoul, his more moderate
colleague Richard Armitage was expressing grudging
admiration for Kim as a "canny" poker player. Even as
Bush has repeatedly insisted on the importance of a
diplomatic solution, senior Pentagon adviser James
Woolsey advocated in the Wall Street Journal for a
campaign of 4,000 daily air strikes against North Korea.
And officials in Washington have floated rumors of the
carrots they plan to wave at the talks in Beijing,
namely a non-aggression pact and various economic
incentives, only to have other officials categorically
deny that "bad behavior" will ever be so rewarded.
Disagreements within the Bush
administration
Most recently, a rough compromise
position has emerged: if other countries offer North
Korea incentives to end its nuclear program, then the US
will not object. It is difficult to say whether this is
a true compromise between the faction in Washington that
believes negotiations to be appeasement and the faction
that predicts that a war would exact a terrible toll on
human life and Bush's electoral chances. At the heart of
this disagreement within the administration are two
issues: the underlying purpose of North Korea's nuclear
program and the durability of the government in
Pyongyang.
Victor Cha, a Korea specialist at
Georgetown University, has argued that North Korea wants
to add nuclear weapons permanently to its military
arsenal rather than trade this bargaining chip for
various goodies. According to this interpretation,
negotiations are futile. Only sticks will compel North
Korea to give up its nuclear deterrent. This argument,
however, is circular. The various strategies that the US
has been pursuing to undermine the government in
Pyongyang will only encourage North Korea to view its
nuclear program more as a deterrent than a bargaining
chip, which will only necessitate harsher measures until
the regime retaliates or finally collapses.
The
Bush administration embarked on the regime-change path
based on a mixture of wishful thinking and unreliable
defector testimony that was subsequently dismissed by
the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Thinking the
Kim Jong-il regime on its last legs, the Bush
administration backed away from the missile deal that
the previous administration of president Bill Clinton
had almost negotiated in its final months. It refused to
negotiate with an "evil" country and ignored potential
compromises that emerged after the revelations
concerning North Korea's uranium-enrichment project last
October.
More recently, the administration
created the 11-nation Proliferation Security Initiative
(PSI) with the stated intention of restricting the trade
in weapons of mass destruction through interdiction at
sea and by air, though the underlying objective appears
to be to shut down the North Korean economy. Hardliners
have also considered inviting large numbers of North
Korean migrants in China to seek asylum in the US, with
the hopes of stimulating an East German-style collapse.
And still the regime in Pyongyang remains more or less
intact.
Changes of nuance
It might
seem as though the moderate wing of the administration
has gained an important victory over the regime-change
crowd by moving forward with the Six-Party Talks.
Indeed, a good deal of political capital has been
expended to line up the players. On August 8, for
instance, the Bush administration responded to Russian
entreaties by declaring Chechen fighter Shamil Basayev
an international terrorist. In what might be viewed as a
quid pro quo, Russia recently participated in
unprecedented military exercises with Japan and South
Korea to prepare for possible government collapse in
North Korea and an accompanying outflow of refugees.
Washington has also lobbied hard with Beijing to turn
the screws on its putative ally. With the Pentagon
seriously overstretched and the US public in no mood for
another war so soon, the administration needs at least
the appearance of flexibility. This is what the analysts
in Washington call a "change of nuance", which is
apparently several notches down from a change of policy
and perhaps only a shade above a change in spin.
However, while deal-making and diplomacy appear
to be more prominent at the moment, the hardliners are
by no means dormant. Washington and Tokyo are about to
pull the plug on the most significant achievement of the
Clinton engagement policy, the Korean Peninsula Energy
Development Organization, which was to substitute two
civilian nuclear reactors for North Korea's
nuclear-weapons program. And PSI is gathering steam with
a joint naval-interdiction exercise scheduled for next
month.
And so the Bush administration has yet to
resolve its serious internal differences over North
Korea policy. What might seem a crafty strategy of
carrot-and-stick is more likely infighting and
incoherence. The hardliners likely believe that the
current negotiations will not produce any viable
solutions and are thus willing to bide their time.
The Six-Party Talks will probably not be
diplomacy's finest hour, for the Bush administration
seems in no rush to work out a solution and, because of
internal dissent, in no position to offer any
significant inducements. However, with the stakes so
high on the Korean Peninsula, even half-hearted
diplomacy is better than no diplomacy at all.
John Feffer (johnfeffer@aol.com ),
editor of Power Trip: US Unilateralism and Global
Strategy after September 11 (Seven Stories Press),
writes regularly for Foreign Policy In Focus. He
is the author of the forthcoming North Korea, South
Korea: US Policy at a Time of Crisis (Seven Stories
Press).
(Posted with permission from Foreign
Policy in Focus)
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