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North Korea: Fortune will favor
the bold
By Bruce Klingner
During her Asia trip next week, US
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will face a
region deeply split over the North Korean nuclear
crisis and increasingly distant from and
distrustful of Washington's policy. North Korea's
admission that it has built nuclear weapons and
its threat to resume missile launches has
reinforced South Korean, Chinese and Russian fears
of instability and led to impassioned pleas for US
flexibility in order to induce Pyongyang to return
to the six-way talks. Rice is to visit India,
Afghanistan, Pakistan, Japan, South Korea and
China from Monday through March 21.
Pyongyang's alternating use of threats and
conciliatory statements reflects traditional North
Korean tactics to define negotiating parameters
and extract maximum benefits for minimal
concessions, in some cases demanding rewards for a
return to the status quo. Although North Korea's
actions were directed primarily at forcing the
administration of US President George W Bush to
accept Pyongyang's prerequisite demands, they were
also likely intended to divert global attention
from suspicions of Pyongyang proliferating nuclear
material to Libya.
On February 10 North
Korea announced that it had built nuclear weapons
- no surprise to anyone who had been following the
situation - and was building more because of US
hostility. It announced it was suspending
participation in the six-party talks, but later
said it could return under certain conditions.
These include the United States ending its hostile
rhetoric (Rice called Pyongyang an "outpost of
tyranny") and its perceived interference, such as
the congressional North Korea Human Rights Act
aimed at helping defectors and those who help
them. The talks involved North and South Korea,
China, Japan, Russia and the US.
Japan,
for its part, has allowed Washington to do the
hard work by confronting North Korea on the
nuclear issue but concurrently implemented new
maritime regulations to constrain Pyongyang's
ability to earn hard currency through bilateral
trade. Tokyo's tougher insurance laws, taken in
lieu of more inflammatory official sanctions, were
the result of rising nationalist ire over
Pyongyang's foot-dragging on resolving the issue
of Japanese abducted by North Korean agents over
the years.
Missile moratorium: The dog
that hadn't barked
On March 3, Pyongyang
threatened to resume testing long-range missiles,
renouncing in effect its self-imposed
missile-launch moratorium. Pyongyang justified the
renunciation of the ban on the failure of the US
to pursue direct bilateral relations, a longtime
North Korean strategic goal.
Pyongyang had
enacted the restriction in September 1999 in
return for an "unlinked" US promise to ease
economic sanctions that was announced by
Washington several days later. Since the inception
of the missile-test moratorium, North Korean
leader Kim Jong-il had affirmed the ban on several
occasions, eschewing opportunities to threaten to
resume missile launches and demand additional
compensation, raising speculation that Pyongyang's
missile program was quiescent because of problems
with its long-range missiles.
Although the
1998 launch of a Taepo Dong-1 caused great
consternation by overflying Japan, its third stage
exploded and failed to place a satellite in orbit.
Media sources have since reported on occasional
missile and rocket explosions at North Korea's
launch facility.
Kim's threat to resume
missile launches, coming so soon after the nuclear
announcement, was likely calculated to intimidate
its neighbors by raising the specter of North
Korean nuclear weapons with delivery systems.
Military experts estimate that the Taepo Dong-2
would be able to deliver a nuclear payload to the
continental United States.
Pyongyang
avoids crossing the Rubicon
The collective
indifference - or the calculated decision to react
calmly - shown by the international community to
North Korea's nuclear and missile threats has left
Kim Jong-il with the choice of escalating the
situation still further in order to gain his
desired diplomatic and economic objectives - or
having to develop an alternative strategy.
Despite its belligerent rhetoric,
Pyongyang has always carefully calibrated its
position to avoid transgressing a point of no
return, instead allowing itself a way to
deescalate the situation or forcing its opponents
to accept a new status quo through "creeping
normalcy".
North Korea was talked down
from its lofty perch in 1993-94 by achieving
direct bilateral talks with the US and,
eventually, the Agreed Framework. The aborted
crisis in 2003 after Pyongyang's admission to an
illicit uranium-based nuclear-weapons program is
particularly illustrative: after quickly
implementing a series of increasingly provocative
steps that led some experts to predict war on the
Korean Peninsula by mid-2003, Pyongyang simply
allowed the situation to dissipate, having
achieved no concessions or even an apparent
reaction from Washington.
Kim is unlikely
in the near term to undertake extreme actions,
such as a nuclear test, since it would undermine
Pyongyang's efforts to characterize the Bush
administration as the cause of the nuclear impasse
and isolate the US from the other six-way-talks
participants. Moreover, a test would eliminate the
strategic ambiguity that has allowed South Korea
and China to deny the existence of North Korean
nuclear weapons.
Increasing questions
of US assertions
Washington's failure to
find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has
emboldened South Korea, China and Russia to
express their skepticism over US intelligence
claims about North Korea's nuclear-weapons
programs. Asian officials have publicly questioned
or dismissed US reports, including recent
assertions that Pyongyang exported uranium to
assist Libya's nuclear program.
South
Korean Unification Minister Chung Dong-young
sought to undermine the veracity of Pyongyang's
own admission. His comments, however, were in
conflict with a White Paper put out by Seoul's
Ministry of Defense that stated that the North had
probably assembled one or two nuclear weapons.
Opposition lawmakers accused Chung of "idle
optimism".
Chung and Foreign Minister Ban
Ki-moon asserted that there was no immediate
reason to change Seoul's policy of engaging with
the North, "despite fresh uncertainty" over
Pyongyang's nuclear program. Hong Seok-hyun, South
Korea's new ambassador to the United States,
indirectly criticized the US hardline policy: "As
diplomatic means, there are carrots and sticks,
but they say the finest horse trainers use carrots
first."
Early this month, Chinese Foreign
Minister Li Zhaoxing questioned the validity of US
intelligence reports after a visit to Beijing by
Michael Green, senior director for Asian Affairs
at the National Security Council. Green reportedly
briefed the Chinese leadership, saying that the
North Korean nuclear program had progressed
further than previously estimated and was selling
nuclear materials abroad.
In Moscow,
meanwhile, Sergei Antipov, Russia's deputy atomic
energy minister, told reporters this Thursday that
North Korea has no nuclear weapons despite
Pyongyang's claims to the contrary. Li's and
Antipov's dismissive comments indicate that
neither Beijing nor Moscow is likely to support
any US efforts to gain United Nations Security
Council support for a strong international
response to Pyongyang, such as possible sanctions.
Regional reluctance to accept US
intelligence estimates will likely be reinforced
by the forthcoming report of a US commission that
reportedly takes a highly critical view of US
intelligence on the North Korean and Iranian
nuclear programs, though no details are publicly
available. The presidential-directed commission,
led by retired federal judge Laurence Silberman
and former Virginia governor and former senator
Charles S Robb, is scheduled to provide its highly
classified findings by the end of March - with a
redacted, unclassified version to be released
shortly thereafter.
The US Senate Select
Committee on Intelligence is conducting
"preemptive oversight" on US intelligence
reporting on the North Korean and Iranian nuclear
programs as a follow-on to its scathing report on
US prewar conclusions on Iraq's nuclear weapons.
The committee leadership of Pat Roberts of Kansas
and John Rockefeller of West Virginia have
concluded that current intelligence on North Korea
and Iran has "come up short".
Kim
Jong-il's diplomatic shortcomings
While Kim
Jong-il has been tactically brilliant, playing a
poor hand well and avoiding both regime collapse
and military attack, he has been unable to parlay
his diplomatic advantage into tangible strategic
benefits. Kim has time and again refused to take
the necessary conciliatory steps to receive
lucrative rewards of international aid and
development.
Although such rewards would
provide direct economic benefit as well as
generate a less threatening environment, allowing
North Korea to redirect its limited resources to
improve its condition, Kim perceives the price for
such development - namely opening the country to
the contagion of capitalism and democracy - as
simply too high.
As a result, Kim and the
region remain locked in an endless loop of
cyclical crises with predictable threats and
gestures by a regime unwilling to risk either
raising tension too far or defusing the
confrontation completely. Breaking the pattern
seems unlikely, absent bold initiatives that both
North Korea and the United States seem unwilling
or unable to implement. In fact, both sides may
find the status quo preferable to the
alternatives, including further negotiations.
Bruce Klingner is with Eurasia
Group, an independent research and consulting firm
that provides global political risk analysis. His
areas of expertise are strategic national
security, political and military affairs in China,
Korea and Japan. He can be reached at klingner@eurasiagroup.net.
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