| |
Bush's North Korea policy still a
shambles
By Aidan Foster-Carter
(Used by permission of Pacific Forum CSIS)
These
are busy times for US diplomacy toward Korea. As usual,
the focus is on North Korea, but the trips and
diplomatic visits are taking place to the South - I use
the words "diplomacy" and "focus" loosely here, as will
be seen.
On November 16 Donald Rumsfeld visited
Seoul for the first time as US defense secretary, on
part of what Agence France-Presse (AFP) headlined a
"sensitive Asian mission". (Does Rumsfeld do sensitive?)
But aside from the nuclear knot, Rumsfeld is tackling
two other tricky issues. US plans to pull back forces
from their long-established tripwire position along the
Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) - and maybe cut their strength
from the current 37,000 troops - have rattled an ally
grown increasingly ambivalent about its relations with
the United States and uneasy with the Bush
administration's stance on the North.
More
immediately, Rumsfeld will have a hard time pressing
Asian allies to join the US in its Iraq quagmire. With
Japan - also on his itinerary - declining to send forces
any time soon, South Korea's vacillating President Roh
Moo-hyun, faced with strong domestic opposition, may
also follow suit. At best, according to Roh's spokesman,
South Korea will commit just 3,000 troops to join 700
medics and engineers already in Mosul, rather than the
10,000 the US had reportedly hoped for.
Following hot on Rumsfeld's heels is James
Kelly, who as assistant secretary of state for East
Asian and Pacific affairs is the top US policymaker on
the region. Kelly traveled to Seoul last Wednesday,
after visits to Tokyo and Beijing, where he focused on
the six-party talks on the North Korean nuclear issue,
of which a second round may be held in Beijing in
mid-December.
President George W Bush himself,
who headed for the United Kingdom rather than Asia,
seems a convert to a diplomatic solution. "Not every
situation needs to be resolved through military action.
And I would cite to you North Korea and Iran," he told
British newspapers. This new, softer note on the two
remaining "axis of evil" regimes was first heard on his
whistle-stop tour of six Asian nations last month, which
excluded South Korea. But the line is not consistent: en
route to Australia, Bush said he had no respect for Kim
Jong-il as a leader who "starves and shrinks his own
people".
At a sensitive and delicate time for
diplomacy, trying to coax North Korea back to the table,
one expects John Bolton to weigh in. Sure enough,
another AFP headline on November 13 read: "Bush
administration hawk fires new volley at North Korea".
Although on this occasion the under secretary for arms
control and international security eschewed personal
attacks on Kim, he warned that "blackmail and bad
behavior ... will not be rewarded" and that "North Korea
will not be given inducements" to mend its violation of
past commitments.
Actions speak louder still.
This seems an odd moment not just to insist that no new
incentives are being offered, but also to take away what
North Korea had been given before. On November 5 the
executive board of KEDO (the Korean Peninsula Energy
Development Organization) - comprising the US, Japan,
South Korea, and the European Union - suspended the
consortium's light-water reactor (LWR) project at Kumho,
a project already in limbo for the past year. Pyongyang,
predictably, riposted with threats to seize KEDO's
assets at the Kumho site, and demanded compensation.
Suspension is one thing, termination another. On
November 13 the US ambassador in Seoul, Thomas C
Hubbard, said the United States has no plans to revive
the LWR project - even if the DPRK (Democratic People's
Republic of Korea) comes into nuclear compliance. As
much as Kim violated at least the spirit of the 1994
Agreed Framework (AF) with his second secret nuclear
program based on highly enriched uranium (HEU), this
closure will hardly encourage him to trust future US
promises, if any.
Hubbard too may have regrets
that he cannot voice. As deputy assistant secretary of
state in the administration of president Bill Clinton,
he was influential in setting up KEDO. By chance, his
former boss is yet another recent high-level American
visitor to Seoul. Clinton met both Roh Moo-hyun and his
predecessor, Kim Dae-jung: doubtless amid nostalgia for
the good old days, when the US and ROK (Republic of
Korea) saw eye-to-eye and engagement seemed to be
working.
Clinton is a reminder that there is
nothing wrong with a US president changing his mind, not
least over as tough a nut as North Korea. As is now well
known, early on his watch a second Korean war came
uncomfortably close in May-June 1994 over the first
North Korean crisis, until former US president Jimmy
Carter as deus ex machina flew to Pyongyang and
saved the day. Thereafter, the Clinton administration
consistently pursued engagement with the DPRK, as was
seen by the AF, KEDO, high-level visits in both
directions and a missile near-deal aborted when time ran
out.
One can, and Republicans vocally did,
criticize all this as appeasement. The HEU and other
revelations, not least one that the June 2000
inter-Korean summit was in effect bought by Seoul,
undoubtedly leave a sour taste and damage the case for
Sunshine: suggesting as they do a recidivist and cynical
DPRK, which has merely been stringing its interlocutors
along.
Thus one would expect a new
administration, of a different political stripe, to
review policy on Korea as on other matters. Given recent
history, a case can be made that Kim Jong-il is beyond
redemption, and therefore regime change is the only way
forward. In my view, that is a wrong conclusion and also
a perilous path. But had Bush pursued it consistently,
it would be easier to understand. That would have
entailed, if not military action (God forbid), then a
better-planned version of the latter-day Proliferation
Security Initiative (PSI), which as it stands is mere
gesture politics (send a gunboat, in 2003?) adding yet
another conflicting ingredient to the chaotic policy
mix.
What is only too clear, unconscionable and
alarming is that fully three years after George W Bush's
election, and less than a year before he comes up for
re-election, the US still does not have any discernible
unified joined-up policy on North Korea whatever. The
mixed messages outlined above are merely the latest in a
long line, baffling and bemusing friend and foe alike.
This is an extraordinary dereliction of duty by
the world's sole superpower over what remains one of the
planet's most dangerous crises. Regardless of ideology,
and granted that there are no good options, it is hard
to imagine how North Korea could have been handled worse
than it has been by the Bush administration. Under Bush,
the US has failed either to formulate a North Korea
policy, to speak with one voice (an astonishing
indiscipline) or even, arguably, really to focus on
Korea at all, obsessed and preoccupied as it is by West
rather than East Asia.
The proof of the pudding
is before us. A year ago, North Korea's nuclear
ambitions were at least partially curbed. Now, Kim
Jong-il is free to pursue both the plutonium and HEU
routes to the bomb. None of the DPRK's multiple other
concerns - missiles, chemical and biological weapons,
state crime and more - has even begun to be addressed.
Frankly, the situation is completely out of control.
As for the six-party talks: much as North Korea
is indeed a threat to one and all, its insistence
ultimately on dealing with the United States (as in
1994) must cast doubt on how much a multilateral
framework, and a cumbersome one at that, can accomplish.
The curious lowering of the bar - should we cheer simply
if the DPRK deigns to turn up a second time to a table
it already sat around once, as if this were progress? -
shows how remote any substantive solutions remain.
Even if all the current shuttling delivers a
second six-way meeting next month, it is surely illusory
to imagine it will produce any more progress than the
first one in August. Kim Jong-il may well reckon - and
would he be wrong? - that Bush's newfound penchant for
dialogue is no genuine change of heart or mind, but
driven by the Iraq disaster and electoral calculation.
Knowing that both factors will restrain even
Bolton and his ilk, why would North Korea make any
concessions at this time? A year hence, it will face
either a Democratic president who will return to
Clintonesque engagement, or a second-term Bush who - for
all we know - may well revert to a harder line. Either
way, the Dear Leader will surely keep his powder dry for
now.
No one said handling North Korea was easy,
but it should not have been such a mess as this. (The US
is not solely to blame. South Korean self-deception has
not helped either, but that is another article.) The
basic choices were, and are, quite simple: either you
seek regime change, or you deal. (Squeezing can be part
of either; one of PSI's problems, unlike China 's
carefully calibrated temporary holdback of oil, is that
it is unclear if this is meant to nudge or strangle.)
And going the deal route means concessions by both
sides, even if that sticks in hawk craws.
At the
early apogee of "axis of evil" rhetoric, George W Bush
seemed keen to emulate Bruce Lee, vanquishing a dozen
villains simultaneously. Belatedly, bloodied by Iraq, he
is learning the wisdom of Sun Tzu. Coldly: with al-Qaeda
a permanent mortal enemy, now joined by Ba'athist
remnants in Iraq to make the whole Middle East a
tinderbox, why on Earth would one not secure the Korean
flank by buying off the nasty but secular and sui
generis DPRK?
But for now, three years in,
we finally know what the Bush administration's North
Korea policy is. It is a shambles, and a disgrace. We
can only pray it will not be another disaster.
Aidan Foster-Carter is honorary senior
research fellow in sociology and modern Korea at Leeds
University, England. He covers inter-Korean relations
for Pacific Forum CSIS's online journal, Comparative Connections. He
can be reached at afostercarter@aol.com.
This article is used by permission of Pacific Forum CSIS.
|
| |
|
|
 |
|
