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2 Peace or appeasement with
Pyongyang? By Sung-Yoon Lee
SEOUL - In the wake of the drastic
reversal in the US administration's North Korea
policy early this year - from one of rhetorical
pressure and economic strangulation to a quixotic
blend of unbridled appeasement of the Kim Jong-il
regime - just what the six-party process on the
denuclearization of North Korea has permutated
into remains clear: a formal process for accepting
North Korea as a de facto nuclear-weapons state
and, consequently, a process for perpetuating the
division of the
Korean Peninsula.
The
participants in the six-party process will protest
that the denuclearization of North Korea remains
the ostensible objective of the hitherto
impressively unimpressive intermittent
multilateral meetings in Beijing. But since its
inception in August 2003, the six-party
nuclear-dismantlement process has resembled more a
multilateral forum for devising ever new and
creative means for providing aid to North Korea
than a serious forum for serious nuclear
diplomacy. A separate inter-Korean forum exists
for that very purpose of unilateral giving - it is
known as the North-South Ministerial-Level
Meetings, now into their 21st generous, if
otherwise futile, round.
The latest
six-party meeting (the 12th, counting all "rounds"
and "phases") on the denuclearization of North
Korea confirms that the multilateral negotiations,
although some 100 days behind schedule as defined
in the "breakthrough" agreement signed by the six
parties on February 13, is on track and proceeding
as planned - that is, planned according to the
North Korean playbook. North Korea, by making such
token gestures as shutting down its Yongbyon
reactor and readmitting inspectors from the
International Atomic Energy Agency - who
themselves will actually be the ones vigorously
monitored and chaperoned under the watchful eyes
of the North Korean state - is guaranteed to reap
the generous fruits of nuclear blackmail so long
as the six-party process stays on its current
trajectory.
A startlingly simple fact
stands in the way of achieving the ostensible goal
of the six-party process: there is simply no
precedent by which nuclear diplomacy, in the
absence of new pressures and a new political will
with attendant regime change, has led to the
complete denuclearization of a nuclear-weapons
state. South Africa made a strategic choice after
F W de Klerk became president in 1989 to end its
political system of apartheid and dismantle its
nuclear arsenal as a policy of gaining acceptance
by the international community. Kazakhstan,
Ukraine and Belarus - which inherited Soviet
nuclear weapons in the wake of the dissolution of
the Soviet Union - all made a strategic decision
in the early 1990s to negotiate away their nuclear
weapons and reorient themselves toward the United
States and western Europe.
If there
actually existed a magic formula for persuading a
nuclear-weapons state to dismantle its nuclear
arsenal for political and economic aid, one
wonders why it was not applied to the Soviet Union
in the late-1940s, Britain in the early 1950s,
France in the late 1950s, China in the mid-1960s,
India in the early 1970s, and Pakistan in the
mid-1990s. States develop nuclear weapons to
possess them and to revel in the power and
prestige that such worldly possessions grant them,
not to bargain them away for money or food -
blandishments that carry a short expiration date.
The administration of US President George
W Bush, now into its twilight legacy phase and
desperate for any kind of diplomatic victory
during its remaining 18 months in office -
especially vis-a-vis the three "axis of evil"
states - is apparently content to continue the new
six-party process of accepting a nuclear North
Korea and perpetuating the division of the Korean
Peninsula. In line with maintaining the mirage of
"progress" on the six-party talks, the US is now
even studying the possibility of signing a peace
treaty with North Korea to bring the Korean War of
1950-53, which ended in a ceasefire and armistice
rather than a peace treaty, to a formal
conclusion. Optimists on both sides of the Pacific
are celebrating such a move, sighing with relief
that genuine peace on the Korean Peninsula may
finally be at hand.
Yet peace, not war, is
what we've had on the Korean Peninsula over the
past 54 years since the armistice was signed on
July 27, 1953. The past 54 years of peace is the
longest in Korean history since the arrival of the
Atlantic powers in the mid-19th century. During
this time South Koreans have enjoyed the greatest
period of economic growth and material comfort in
the history of the Korean nation. Such a peace, as
imperfect as it has been, has existed not only
despite the absence of a peace treaty with North
Korea, but because of the presence of US forces in
the South and the consequent balance of power
between the two Koreas. South Korea's military
power may now have equaled or even surpassed that
of the North.
But more than victory in
war, security in peace is what Koreans and
Americans have striven for over the past
half-century and is
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