North Korean nukes: Flurry,
then fallback By Donald Kirk
WASHINGTON - The US is concocting a new
proposal to compensate for the failure of
President George W Bush to get anywhere at last
weekend's gathering of Asia-Pacific leaders in
Hanoi with his pet project for a quarantine on
North Korea's trade in weapons of mass
destruction.
Rebuffed in an intense
diplomatic drive to persuade South Korea's
President Roh Moo-hyun to sign on to the
Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI), Bush, or
at least his advisers, are developing an
elaborate new scheme to bring
Seoul into line militarily.
The gimmick
this time is what Under Secretary of State
Nicholas Burns calls a "program of global
partners" all banded together in loose
collaboration with the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (NATO). US diplomats are so
enthusiastic about the idea that they plan to
present it formally when NATO members meet next
week in the Latvian capital of Riga.
The
scheme may seem far-fetched considering that one
of the partners is South Korea's former colonial
occupier, Japan, but analysts see it as a fallback
position that the US is promoting after the
failure to draw South Korea into the PSI. The PSI
already has about 70 countries committed to
sharing intelligence and using force if necessary
to curb North Korea's nuclear ambitions, but South
Korea balked at any program that might antagonize
Pyongyang - and jeopardize Seoul's efforts at
North-South rapprochement.
Burns did not
say specifically that the partnership had anything
to do with Washington's desire to find a
diplomatic cover for interdicting vessels carrying
weapons of mass destruction, including nukes and
their components as well as the missiles for
delivering them to targets near and far. The aim,
however, was obvious from Burns' explanation of
whatever South Korea might have in common with
prospective partners Japan, Australia, Sweden and
Finland.
The whole idea, he said, was "so
that we can train more intensively, from a
military point of view, and grow closer to them
because we are deployed with them". All the
countries he named, he noted, were "very
interested in working more closely with NATO"
while "working with us politically from time to
time to talk about the strategic landscape of the
world, where the threats are occurring".
The US appeared to have fallen back on
this plan after analyzing the statement on North
Korea that emerged last weekend from the annual
meeting in Hanoi of the Asia-Pacific Economic
Cooperation (APEC) group. After all the posturing
was done, none of the assembled potentates wanted
to do a thing, in practical terms, to stop North
Korea from brandishing the nuclear threat.
The final statement from the meeting was
an exercise in face-saving that may have mollified
Bush, at least to public appearances, but
represented the failure of the US crusade to sink
real teeth into the sanctions approved by
unanimous vote of the UN Security Council after
North Korea tested a nuclear device in October.
The fact that the statement was an oral
declaration - and never committed to writing -
exposed its fundamental vacuity.
Not that
APEC could have been expected to come up with any
stronger version. The Americans, well before Bush
met the presidents of China and South Korea, knew
that both of them had no intention of agreeing to
anything involving the use of real force. Roh told
Bush in Hanoi that his government just couldn't
agree to a plan that might do more to invite or
provoke a North Korean attack than to prevent it.
As for China's President Hu Jintao, Bush
when he saw him focused on China's role in
bringing North Korea back to the six-party talks,
as Pyongyang finally promised at the end of
October. While Bush was on his way to Indonesia
after APEC, the chief US negotiator, Christopher
Hill, was off to Beijing, anxious to get the
Chinese to impress on their North Korean friends
the rewards for coming to the table - and then on
coming to terms with giving up their nukes.
At the same time, the US denied reports of
any willingness finally to go easy by lifting some
of the financial restrictions on dealings with
Macau's Banco Delta Asia and other institutions
through which North Korea previously spread
counterfeit currency.
For all such
protestations, the impression was that Hill was
prepared to hold out the possibility of
"flexibility" even as North Korea excoriated South
Korea for voting for an innocuous UN General
Assembly resolution condemning North Korea for its
human-rights record.
South Korea, which
had previously abstained from all such motions,
supported this particular resolution in a
trade-off for its rejection of the PSI. That
argument, of course, did not impress Kim Jong-il
or his propaganda machine, which opened up a
barrage of intimidation designed to ensure that
South Korea did not yield to US pressure, but
North Korea had nothing to fear.
The
example set by China and South Korea in their
response to PSI set the course for the rest of the
APEC leaders. Only Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo
Abe was inclined to toughness, and he would not
advocate stopping North Korean vessels without
strong support from other powers - something he
was sure not to get as long as many shared the
view that any sign of renascent Japanese
militarism trumped North Korean nukes.
If
Bush still entertained delusions of strength about
stifling the North Korean nuclear threat, he had
to have been acutely aware as he met Roh in Hanoi
that impatience over the South's reluctance to
confront the North could tear apart the fabric of
the frayed US-South Korean alliance. Roh, like all
the other leaders there, had to have been highly
sensitive to the defeat that Bush suffered in the
mid-term US elections on November 7 in which his
Republican Party lost control of both houses of
Congress.
Despite the "global partnership"
that the White House now envisions between NATO
and a few other powers, including South Korea and
Japan, Bush can hardly conjure the collective
might needed to suggest any action lurking behind
his tough words. The most the US can do is dangle
the prospect of huge quantities of aid if only
North Korea give up its nukes - a happy ending
that no one in his right mind imagines.
Diplomatically, the US might also come out
with a statement that the Korean War is indeed
over - and it's time to replace the armistice of
July 1953 with a peace treaty. Members of Bush's
entourage undermined hints of this show of
largesse, though, by warning publicly that the
next round of six-party talks should get down to
serious dealing, not just empty talk.
The
bottom line, after a flurry of meetings and
statements, was that APEC accomplished little or
nothing when it came to stopping or discouraging
North Korea from its nuclear program. The meetings
between Bush and leaders of other regional powers
may have done more to reveal differences than to
find a common solution.
Kim Jong-il may
rest secure in the knowledge that the nations
ranged against his program are divided by their
own differences and uncertain of their ability to
stop him without inciting a war that perhaps no
one would win. Under the circumstances, the
partnership between NATO and a few other carefully
selected invitees seems like a desperation attempt
to turn failure into a measure of success.
At least, however, diplomats may chew on
the idea in hopes, however vain, that South Korea
is ready to risk the consequences, rhetorically,
politically and militarily, of affiliation with a
far-reaching anti-North Korean grouping - in
addition to its tiresome but existing alliance
with the US.
Journalist Donald
Kirk has been covering Korea - and the
confrontation of forces in Northeast Asia - for
more than 30 years. (Copyright 2006 Asia
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