WASHINGTON - Tuesday's deal between North
Korea and five other nations, including the United
States, to take the first concrete steps toward
nuclear disarmament in exchange for aid and
normalized relations marks a long-awaited
diplomatic breakthrough for US President George W
Bush and a clear victory for "realists" in his
administration.
The deal, which was
announced after several days of talks in Beijing,
was immediately denounced as a defeat by one of
the administration's former leading hawks, former
ambassador to the
United Nations John Bolton,
who is considered close to Vice President Dick
Cheney.
"It sends exactly the wrong signal
to would-be proliferators around the world,"
Bolton charged in a CNN interview. "It contradicts
fundamental premises of the president's policy
he's been following for the past six years and,
second, it makes the administration look very weak
at a time in Iraq ... when it needs to look
strong."
But a statement issued by the
White House removed any doubt that Bush stood
behind the accord. "I am pleased with the
agreements reached today at the six-party talks in
Beijing," the statement, which was issued in
Bush's name, declared. "These talks represent the
best opportunity to use diplomacy to address North
Korea's nuclear programs."
Whether the
deal, which lays out steps by all six parties -
Russia, Japan, South Korea, as well as China, the
US and North Korea - to be taken over the next 60
days, will act as a precedent for possible direct
negotiations with Iran, the other surviving member
of Bush's "axis of evil", over its nuclear program
remains to be seen.
But there is little
doubt that, if all goes smoothly during that
period, the hand of administration realists,
centered in the State Department, will be
strengthened against the hawks. The latter remain
largely concentrated in Cheney's office and in the
National Security Council staff and have long
opposed direct bilateral talks between Washington
and Pyongyang of the kind that apparently made
Tuesday's accord possible.
Indeed, as
recently as last spring, they had prevailed on
Bush to prevent his top negotiator on Korea,
assistant secretary of state for East Asia
Christopher Hill, from conducting one-on-one talks
with his North Korean counterpart, Kim Kye-gwan,
"outside of the six-party talks".
But
after some eight months, several North Korean
ballistic-missile firings on US Independence Day
and one North Korean nuclear test later, Bush
agreed to appeals by Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice that the two men meet in Berlin
in January to hash out the basic elements of the
deal announced on Tuesday.
"I think they
could have gotten this agreement a long time ago,
and I think there was a good possibility that it
would have headed off the North's acquisition and
test of fissionable material," said Don
Oberdorfer, a Korea specialist at the Johns
Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies
in Washington. "It's only now that the
administration is willing to deal with them in
serious ways."
Tuesday's deal will require
Pyongyang to shut down its Yongbyon nuclear
facility, readmit inspectors from the
International Atomic Energy Agency to verify
compliance, and prepare a "complete" accounting of
all its other nuclear facilities and programs
within the 60 days.
Within 30 days, the US
Treasury will review and partially lift financial
sanctions imposed in late 2005 to punish Pyongyang
for alleged counterfeiting and other illicit
activities, while Washington will also help
finance an initial shipment of 50,000 tonnes of
heavy fuel oil (HFO) to North Korea. The US will
also begin the process by which North Korea can be
removed from its list of state sponsors of
terrorism.
In addition, the parties will
create five working groups to thrash out
outstanding issues with Pyongyang, including its
total denuclearization, how aid will be tied to
progress in denuclearization, normalization of
diplomatic relations with Japan and the US, and a
peace agreement that would put a formal end to the
Korean War and establish a new regional security
mechanism.
Given sufficient compliance
over the 60 days, the foreign ministers of all six
parties will meet to assess progress and launch a
second phase of the process that will include the
continued supply of HFO to North Korea in exchange
for the disabling of all of Pyongyang's nuclear
facilities.
In a briefing with the press
after the announcement, Rice stressed that the
accord marked only a beginning in what many
analysts believe will be a long and tortuous
process with no guarantee of ultimate success.
"This is still the first quarter," she told
reporters. "There is still a lot of time to go on
the clock, but the six parties have now taken a
promising step in the right direction."
Analysts from both the right - such as Bolton
- and the left pointed out that the core of the
agreement is very similar to the 1994 Agreed
Framework worked out between the administration of
president Bill Clinton and Pyongyang. That deal
called for the provision of HFO and other energy
assistance, including two light-water nuclear
reactors provided by Japan and South Korea, in
exchange for a permanent freeze on North Korea's
plutonium program at Yongbyon.
In 2002,
however, the Bush administration, based in part on
investigations of the network of Pakistani nuclear
scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan, accused North Korea
of violating that accord by secretly working on
another program to produce highly enriched uranium
for weapons. Pyongyang, however, has steadfastly
denied it has such a program, and many analysts
believe the conflict could pose a major obstacle
to progress on Tuesday's agreement.
Other
potential problems loom equally large. While North
Korea has committed itself to complete
denuclearization under another six-party agreement
reached on September 19, 2005, the latest accord
provides no specific details about the disposition
of the plutonium produced so far by Yongbyon -
enough, according to the US intelligence
community, to produce up to eight or even more
bombs. It is also silent about North Korea's
advanced missile-development program.
Those uncertainties will likely make the
accord vulnerable to attack, particularly from
hawks who have long warned that North Korean
leader Kim Jong-il cannot be trusted and has no
intention of giving up his arsenal because, in
their view, his regime's survival depends on it.
Democrats, who have long supported the
kinds of bilateral talks that led to Tuesday's
agreement, may also be tempted to score political
points against the administration by pointing out
that the pact could have been reached in 2003,
before North Korea had actually exploded a nuclear
device.
"It's important that the Democrats
in particular hold their fire and not take this as
an opportunity to say, 'Hey, we told you so,'"
said John Feffer, a Korea specialist who runs the
website Foreign Policy in Focus. "There's still a
faction within the administration that no doubt
wants to derail this, and Democratic gloating will
only strengthen it."
Rice and Hill argued
that Tuesday's agreement is an improvement over
the 1994 framework and would have been difficult
to reach before now. They stressed in particular
the regional context in which the accord was
negotiated, especially China's leadership role in
obtaining it and strong vested interest in
assuring compliance.
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