PYONGYANG WATCH
Part 2: Bush's U-turn: Too little, too late
By Aidan Foster-Carter

The story so far: As an underwhelmed world awaits yet another dreary round of go-nowhere six-party talks in Beijing, President George W Bush's administration's well-hidden dove faction springs a surprise. For the first time, the United States offers Pyongyang a plan. Incentives, even.

So how come George W finally saw the light, for once listening to [Secretary of State] Colin Powell rather than [Vice President] Dick Cheney and the axis of hawk? Two reasons, both rather persuasive right now. In a nutshell: At home, the prospect of elections; and abroad, a phalanx of fed-up allies.

Unlike the Middle East, Korea rarely shows up on US political radar screens. But John Kerry is making easy hay of the administration's North Korea policy, or lack of one. He charges Bush's inaction with letting Kim Jong-il just power ahead and build more nukes. Karl Rove, Bush's political adviser and Rasputin, reckons this campaign is hitting home.

Just as importantly, everyone else round the hexagonal table in Beijing was fed up with US intransigence. Not just Russia and China, predictably, but even America's allies. South Korea is pursuing its own peace process with the North, nukes notwithstanding. In fact the new US nuclear proposal is a modified version of an earlier draft from Seoul.

But Japan was the key mover. Premier Junichiro Koizumi has zigzagged on North Korea. Yet he returned from his May trip to Pyongyang for a second summit with Kim Jong-il convinced that the Dear leader means business on the nuclear issue - and said as much to Bush soon after, when they met at the [Group of 8] sessions on Sea Island, Georgia, in mid-June.

So has the US made, in Pyongyang parlance, a "bold switchover" to engagement? Not so fast. This mightily miffed Washington's hawks, who wasted no time in striking back.

It was only last week, so you might remember how the headlines veered daily. Tuesday: Talks to open, expectations low. Wednesday: Optimism! The US has a plan! And then on Thursday, a total change: "North Korea Test Threat Casts Shadow Over Beijing Talks."

Or so they hoped. Yup, it was hawk-leak time again. Unnamed sources in Washington, presumably with access to top-secret cables on the nitty-gritty of the talks, claimed that during a two-hour bilateral side meeting between the US and North Korea, Pyongyang's chief delegate, vice foreign minister Kim Kye-gwan, threatened to test a nuclear device.

Who done it? No way would Secretary Powell or his deputy, Richard Armitage, jeopardize their own new initiative, just as the talks were starting. This timing, plus the negative tone of the accompanying anonymous quotes, leads Washington insiders to point the finger at the camp of John Bolton, undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, and the hawks' Trojan horse in the State Department. Bolton's allies include Robert Joseph, head of non-proliferation in the National Security Council.

End of story, end of talks? Fortunately not. By Friday, the furor passed. US negotiators on the spot calmly dismissed Kim's comment as typical tactics: a passing remark, hinting at hawk vs dove disputes over policy in Pyongyang. (Guess it takes one to know one…)

Meanwhile North Korea tabled its own proposal. It offered to freeze its plutonium site at Yongbyon, if given 2,000 megawatts of power a year, a quarter of its total consumption, equivalent to some 2.7 million tons of fuel oil. Not coincidentally, this is the generating capacity of two light water reactors that were being built by KEDO: the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization consortium. This sounds like a hint that the DPRK tacitly accepts that this project - stalled since the current crisis broke in late 2002 - is now a dead letter, so fulfillment of its urgent energy needs must be found elsewhere.

So at least, and at last, we had concrete proposals from the two principals. It's a start, but there was nowhere near enough common ground. For one thing, Pyongyang still denies it has a second nuclear program, based on highly enriched uranium (HEU). It was HEU, you may recall, that launched this second North Korean nuclear crisis in October 2002. The US accused them of having it, and claims they confessed. The DPRK denies both.

China says the US has failed to produce clear evidence of HEU. This is all the odder now that Pakistan's Dr No, aka Abdul Qadeer Khan, has finally been fingered and is talking. The story has always been that Islamabad traded nuclear secrets for help with its Ghauri missile; I wrote about this three years ago ("Nukes and missiles: the Pakistan connection," AToL, 5 June 2001 http://www.atimes.com/koreas/CF05Dg02.html). But the CIA has not yet had direct access to Dr Khan, and may never get it.

HEU apart, North Korea's first reaction to the new US proposal was predictably less than enthusiastic. They jibbed at IAEA inspections, wanting some lesser substitute. No dice. And they want the US too to chip in with oil aid, as it did in KEDO. That sounds doable.

In theory, that is. Washington recognizes that its complex proposal will have to go back to be mulled over in Pyongyang, where mills grind exceedingly slow at the best of times.

But these are not the best of times. The new US proposal offers too little, and comes too late. Why on earth should Kim Jong-il trust an administration so riven by internecine strife? - especially if he's betting that ere long he may face a new, nicer interlocutor?

Mind you, he might be wrong there, on two counts. One: Incredible as it may seem, the guy who gave us war without end in Iraq plus galloping budget deficits could still get re-elected. Two: If it's Kerry, then sure, he'll talk seriously - but he won't be a pushover.

That's another dumb macho hawk myth: that Democrats are soft on Kim Jong-il. Anyone who thinks that should read a recent online interview in the Washington Post with Robert Gallucci, who under Bill Clinton negotiated the Agreed Framework of November 1994 that defused - but only postponed, critics say - the first North Korean nuclear crisis.

This is a man to heed - especially in Seoul, if they can put their current love-fest with the North (a topic for another time) on hold for a moment. To borrow a finely crafted phrase from the 1662 Church of England Book of Common Prayer - they don't mint them like this any more, alas - these are words to "read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest".

Gallucci recalls that in mid-1994, "we seemed to be on the road to war if not on the brink. We could get there again. Imagine if we had credible reports that the North was going to sell plutonium or HEU to a terrorist group. Could an American president let that happen, knowing that we would have a hard time defending against an unconventional delivery of a nuclear weapon to an American city...and no way to deter those who are prepared to die for their cause? Yes, tremendous loss of life if war comes, but war could come."

That is sobering. It's a worst-case option, which is why Gallucci - now, as then - favors talks. But here again, he is tough-minded: "The possibility of war was a backdrop to our negotiations a decade ago, and I think that helped to focus minds in the North." In that context, I wonder what Kim Jong-il really reckons he has to fear from an administration patently bogged down deep elsewhere, whose bark is worse than any bite it is capable of.

- Oops, I was forgetting. His term almost over, George W Bush has finally plumped for the engagement which, in ABC (Anything But Clinton) mode, he long shunned. Does he mean it? Will he stick to it? - or will Cheney, [Defense Secretary Donald] Rumsfeld, Bolton et al win the day again? As Gallucci says, he "should have moved to genuine negotiations long ago". The prophet Dylan offers sound counsel too: "So let us not talk falsely now; the hour is getting late."

Aidan Foster-Carter is honorary senior research fellow in sociology and modern Korea, Leeds University, England.

(Copyright 2004 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for information on our sales and syndication policies.)