America's Plan B for North Korea ... Track II
By Peter Lee
A delegation including former United States president Jimmy Carter will go to
North Korea to explore the possibility of Pyongyang abandoning its nuclear
weapons.
For this he received the obligatory label of "useful idiot" from regime-change
activists; no, excuse me, The Daily NK, in a sententious show of restraint,
expressed the pious hope that
Carter would merely refrain from extending his previous practice of useful
idiocy into the third generation of North Korean leadership:
"The Daily NK, for one, would hate to see former president Carter become a
'useful idiot' for Kim Il-sung, son Kim Jong-il and now even Kim Jong-eun." [1]
It has to be confessed that, post-Libya, any sort of disarmament approach would
appear to be an exercise in futility.
March 1, pre-Libya - when war in the Middle East was just a gleam in the eyes
of National Security Council aide Samantha Power - US Assistant Secretary for
East Asian and Pacific Affairs Kurt Campbell, in a display of misplaced
optimism, invoked the value of the Libyan precedent for North Korea in
testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee:
It was only a
few years ago that a number of people who were looking at some of the
developments in Libya thought that it would be impossible to create any kind of
program whereby a very secretive but determined program that Qadhafi was
undertaking ... would be stopped. Through purposeful diplomacy of the [George
W] Bush administration we achieved that. Imagine the circumstances in Libya
today if there was a nuclear dimension ... [85:33]
Today, we
can certainly imagine "a humanitarian intervention scenario dangerously
complicated by nuclear weapons" in North Korea.
Because it certainly looks impossible to "create any kind of program whereby
the secretive but determined program that [North Korea] is undertaking ...
would be stopped".
Conventional wisdom states that one can stick a fork in North Korean
denuclearization because of what happened to Gaddafi after he surrendered his
weapons of mass destruction program in return for normalization of relations
with the United States.
As Jeffrey Lewis recounted on the website Arms Control Wonk, that conventional
wisdom is shared by North Korea:
Hey, remember when Bush administration
officials tried to convince Kim Jong-il that he could get the same
denuclearization deal Bush gave Qadhafi? Yeah, the last couple of days
[commencement of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization no-fly-zone campaign]
might explain why Kim didn't think it was such a great idea.
Apparently the DPRK [Democratic People's Republic of Korea] is drawing the same
lesson. From KCNA: The present Libyan crisis teaches the international
community a serious lesson.
It was fully exposed before the world that "Libya's nuclear dismantlement" much
touted by the US in the past turned out to be a mode of aggression whereby the
latter coaxed the former with such sweet words as "guarantee of security" and
"improvement of relations" to disarm itself and then swallowed it up by force.
[2]
Whether Libya's ramshackle nuclear enterprise would have
ever deterred the United States is forevermore a matter of speculation.
However, what is for sure is that the ability of the United States to live up
to a bargain has certainly been called into question.
Neither the Bush nor the Barack Obama administrations have been interested in a
public airing of America's broad engagement with the Gaddafi regime in the past
seven years. However, its elements are worth recalling:
2004: Libya signs "additional protocol" with International Atomic Energy
Agency; the Bush administration lifted most Libya sanctions and unfroze Libyan
assets; oil exports to US resume; European arms embargo lifted.
2005: All materials and components related to Libya's nuclear weapons
development program removed.
2006: All highly-enriched uranium (20 kg) removed from Libya; full diplomatic
relations restored; all trade restrictions removed; US arms embargo expires.
2008: Comprehensive Settlement Agreement rushed through and becomes effective
with Libya's payment of $1.5 billion in a special fund, so that the United
States government can shield Libyan assets under a "national interests" waiver
from lawsuits by relatives of victims of previous Libyan terrorist attacks; US
ambassador to Libya (first since 1972) confirmed.
2009: The Bush administration budgets over $3 million for economic assistance
and counter-terrorism aid, plus $350,000 to educate and train Libyan security
forces and to "create vital linkages with Libyan officers after a 35-year break
in contact".
April 2009: Gaddafi's son, Mutassim, meets officially with Hillary Clinton in
Washington in his capacity as Libya's national security adviser.
2010: The Obama administration replenishes the education and training budget
and adds $250,000 in Formal Military Funding to the Libyan air force and coast
guard, and continuing the anti-terrorism funding at a reduced level.
The US oil companies (ConocoPhillips, Marathon, Hess, and Occidental) were
back, and the United States was preparing to build a brand new $100 million
embassy in Tripoli.
Individuals and institutions associated with the anti-Gaddafi Libyan Islamic
Fighting Group (LIFG) were sanctioned as Specially Designated Global Terrorists
by the Treasury Department in 2004, 2006 and 2008.
Students of our current infatuation with the freedom fighters in Benghazi will
be interested to note that the Congressional Research Service noted the
announcement of a formal political alliance by a member of the LIFG and al
al-Qaeda in 2007 and observed:
Reports suggest that eastern Libya may
be a stronghold for LIFG members and other extremist groups that could pose a
threat to Libya's security. [3]
This elaborate diplomatic,
economic, and regional security edifice was overturned in a couple weeks by the
contagious enthusiasm of [French philosopher] Bernard Henri-Levy for the
freedom fighters in Benghazi, and [French President] Nicolas Sarkozy's dreams
of personal glory and political advantage.
The Obama administration, driven by its own domestic political calculations and
the need to show solidarity with France and the United Kingdom, thereupon
proceeded, with a reluctance that almost everyone acknowledged but virtually no
one appreciated, to join the NATO bombing campaign against Libya.
The R2P ("Responsibility to Protect") cat is out of the bag. US diplomatic
undertakings are now officially conditional, to be discarded when the right
combination of outrage, advantage, weakness and importuning and opportunistic
allies mandates a humanitarian intervention.
Pyongyang is free to imagine a situation in which it strikes a deal with the
US, Japan and South Korea, only to have unrest in North Korea - which unlike
Libya, has no restraint-encouraging oilfields - provoke declarations from
anti-North administrations in Seoul and Tokyo of a political/humanitarian
crisis that demands a military response, thereby stampeding the US into joining
some kind of military action to support its allies and demonstrate it still
occupies the leadership role in North Asia.
If US security guarantees, peace treaties and regional strategies have been
devalued enough by the new R2P doctrine, it would appear that the best
assurance of North Korea's continued survival is the deterrence provided by its
nuclear weapons program.
However, it is a good bet that the Obama administration's North Korea policy
will not be significantly impacted by the Libyan precedent.
Because, for the past couple years - and well before the complications of the
Libya factor - the central tenet of the Obama administration's North Korea
policy has been the premise that North Korea would never, ever surrender its
nuclear weapons and the leverage they provide.
In recent testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, General Walter
Sharp, who runs the military show in South Korea, reaffirmed that he did not
envision a scenario in which North Korea would give up its nuclear capability:
"I think it is clear that Kim Jong-il believes he has to have it for regime
survival." [4]
Therefore, Carter is probably not going to North Korea to attempt to accomplish
the impossible - denuclearization. He is probably using the eternal issue of
denuclearization as a pretext for going to Pyongyang to discuss something new:
rapprochement.
What this seems to mean is that the Obama administration is - gingerly, and
through third parties - inching away from its previous policy of "strategic
patience", ie letting South Korean President Lee Myung-bak carry the North
Korea ball and hoping he would spike it in the regime collapse endzone.
Unfortunately, Lee didn't even make it past midfield.
In a spirit of hopeless optimism or cynical calculation, it appears that Lee
persuaded the Obama administration that China, mindful of its burgeoning
economic ties with South Korea and craving the validation of the democracies as
a "responsible superpower", would line up against North Korea together with the
South and the United States.
The exact opposite occurred.
North Korea rolled the dice and challenged Seoul's intransigence (and tested
Beijing's forbearance) by (allegedly) sinking the frigate Cheonan.
Lee's 9/11 moment came and went. His effort to demonstrate South Korea's new
global stature by slighting the six-party talks and taking the issue to the
United Nations Security Council was thwarted in a public and embarrassing way
by China and Russia.
Political and military bungling dissipated the sense of national outrage and
unity, and China, instead of abandoning Pyongyang, threw its full weight behind
the North's continued survival.
Today it is clear that China is determined to frustrate Lee's hope of North
Korean regime collapse and maintain the North indefinitely as a buffer state.
Obama's frustration with the disappointing outcome led him to accuse Chinese
President Hu Jintao of "willful blindness" over the Cheonan dossier.
The US and South Korea followed up with some ostentatious muscle flexing during
military exercises off the Korean Peninsula, sending US-Chinese relations to
their recent nadir.
The North Koreans thereupon pounded Yeonpyeong Island with a virtually
unanswered artillery barrage, revealing an embarrassingly paper-tigerish aspect
to Lee's pretensions to serving as freedom's frontline bad ass in North Asia.
Lee's current position is that North Korea must apologize for the Cheonan
sinking and the Yeonpyeong shelling before serious talks can resume; since
Pyongyang claims the Yeonpyeong assault was justified retaliation, and has not
even acknowledged its responsibility for the Cheonan outrage, he will
presumably have a long time to wait for his apology.
As an official position, the United States government backs the demand of South
Korea, its crucial North Asian ally, thereby allowing Seoul to maintain an
effective veto on resumption of the six-party talks and formal
government-to-government contacts.
However, "strategic patience" is beginning to look a lot like "strategic
paralysis".
The US, which has seen a North Korea policy that was a) going nowhere b) backed
into a diplomatic cul-de-sac by President Lee and c) and complicating already
fraught relations with China, has apparently been quietly rethinking its North
Korea policy.
In his March 1 testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Stephen
Bosworth, the special representative for North Korea Policy, made some
conciliatory noises instead of harping on the Cheonan and Yeonpyeong:
"[W]e
have repeatedly told them ... that regime change is not the objective of our
policy ... I don't think they should be operating under the fear that we are
determined to undermine the regime."
A possible solution to the
government-to-government impasse: Track II contacts, low-key engagement with
North Korea by private groups and individuals, thereby sparing South Korea
embarrassment of official US repudiation of "strategic patience" and sparing
North Korea policy from the ferociously hostile attentions of the Republicans
in the US Congress.
As described by Dr Tong Kim of the Ilmin Institute of International Relations
at Korea University in an April 3 op-ed in the Korea Times, there's a
surprising amount of "Track II" activity already happening, and it's going both
ways:
North Korea is sending scientists, trade specialists and
agricultural officials to the US when they are invited by private institutions,
including Georgia University, New York University at Syracuse, and University
of California at San Diego. In addition, there will be more North Korean groups
to visit America in the fields of sports and culture, as American private
sponsorships become available.
...
Among the recent Track II activities, last week's discussion in Germany between
a DPRK foreign ministry delegation and the Aspen Institute may be most
significant in terms of policy substance. The participants included former
undersecretary of state Tom Pickering and Pyongyang's foreign ministry director
of American affairs, Li Gun. The discussion topics were the issues of
denuclearization, a peace treaty and economic assistance from the South and the
international community, which in fact are the very issues to be discussed in
government-to-government negotiations, when they take place. [5]
There is an unmistakable American foreign-policy wonk element to "Track II"
that leads one to believe it is conducted under the watchful eye, if not tacit
endorsement, of the US State Department.
An alert and resourceful writer/journalist, Justin Rorhlich, was able to breach
the wall of secrecy and reveal on April 12 that a North Korean delegation had
recently visited the United States and been permitted to gaze upon America's
techno-democratic holy of holies, Google headquarters:
A delegation of
12 North Korean economic envoys flew back to Pyongyang on Sunday after spending
two weeks touring companies that "represent main strands of the US economy".
The group visited Google (GOOG), Home Depot (HD), Bloomberg, Citigroup (C),
Qualcomm (QCOM), Sempra Energy (SRE), Union Bank and Universal Studios, as well
as a mushroom farm, a seafood wholesaler and the Port of Los Angeles, where
they leaned about trade infrastructure.
Journalists were not permitted access to the visitors (they entered the
Googleplex through a back entrance under tight security), and no mention of the
trip appeared in the American media. I stumbled on the story after striking up
a conversation with a DPRK official at the North Korean Embassy in Berlin,
Germany.
While Russian news outlet ITAR-TASS maintained that "[T]he initiator of these
meetings is unknown", the North Koreans were in fact invited to the US by Susan
Shirk, director of the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation at the
University of California, "to see firsthand what improved relations with the
United States might mean in terms of economic cooperation."
From 1997-2000, Shirk served as deputy assistant secretary of state in the
Bureau of East Asia and Pacific Affairs from 1997-2000, and is the head of the
Northeast Asia Cooperation Dialogue, an organization engaged in "track-two"
diplomacy.
Sources say the North Koreans attended lectures at Stanford University and NYU,
where they learned about "the market economy, consumer protection, what a CEO
does, corporate strategies in the US, and an overview of the western legal
system". [6]
The next and, by far the highest profile, Track
II initiative is Carter's upcoming visit.
In keeping with the unofficial character of the trip, Carter is not visiting
under the auspices of the US-based Carter Center, which often coordinates its
electoral and human-rights monitoring activities with the State Department.
Instead, he is visiting as a member of a delegation of the group of "Elders", a
sort of superhero justice league of retired statesmen conceived by Virgin's
Richard Branson.
North Korea may be prepared to reciprocate.
In advance of Carter's visit, North Korea announced that it had been detaining
a Korean-American - according to the BBC, possibly an evangelically-inclined
businessman named Jun Young-su - since November, encouraging speculation that
he would be released to go home with Carter as a demonstration of North Korean
interest in improved ties. [7]
Another bargaining chip is the fresh-out-of-the-box uranium-enrichment facility
the North Koreans thoughtfully unveiled to Siegfried Hecker during his November
visit.
South Korea's Foreign Minister Kim Sung-hwan visited Beijing at the end of
March, apparently in futile pursuit of Chinese support for taking the North
Korea enriched-uranium issue to the UN Security Council.
Prior to his arrival, the Chinese government made it clear it had no patience
for South Korea's attempts to drive the debate - or determine the forum - for
discussion of North Korean nuclear issues:
Beijing's assistant foreign
minister Hu Zhengyue ... was quoted as saying the US and China still
"officially do not know of the program" and that all that is known of it is
"what one expert saw from a distance". [8]
Bosworth seemed to
be willing to take Dr Hecker - the emeritus director of Los Alamos National
Laboratory - at his word that what he saw in North Korea was, indeed, a
uranium-enrichment facility.
At the same time, Bosworth proposed some more modest, achievable and hopefully
transitional goals that were also, paradoxically, more sweeping:
...
there are important things that I think we can try to achieve, relating to the
question of proliferation, relating to their production of fissile material,
both for the plutonium program and from their uranium enrichment program.
Non-proliferation and a cap on fissile material production are the cornerstones
of Obama's (Nobel Peace Prize-winning) strategy to revitalize and universalize
the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) regime. By putting the
uranium-enrichment facility on the table and linking it to the US NPT policy,
the North Korean issue is, at least partially, removed from its local security
matrix (and vulnerability to Seoul's veto) and becomes part of America's global
non-proliferation concerns.
The US State Department has disavowed any endorsement of Carter's trip. By
remarkable coincidence, however, there has been a flurry of diplomacy back and
forth in recent weeks.
The Chinese negotiator, Wu Dawei, proposed a three-stage process: Inter-Korean
talks, followed by bilateral talks between the US and North Korea, followed by
resumption of the six-party talks.
By offering up inter-Korean talks as the hors d'œuvre, the Chinese
proposal isolated South Korea and put considerable pressure on Seoul not to act
as an impediment.
South Korea's top nuclear envoy, Wi Sung-lac, did his best to put a brave face
on events and assert that Seoul was, all appearances to the contrary, actually
in the driver's seat.
According to the Korea Times:
Before leaving Seoul for Washington, Wi
Sung-lac, South Korea's chief nuclear negotiator, said at the airport that the
South's voice was partly heard in the Chinese official's proposal.
But he warned of misinterpreting the role of South-North contacts in achieving
a nuclear-free North Korea. The inter-Korean talks should not be misunderstood
as an easy test that North Korea can pass without showing its sincerity for
denuclearization, he noted.
Wi stressed that North Korea and China must understand that major progress for
denuclearization should be made at the South-North Korea talks. Another foreign
ministry official said that Seoul is not interested in talks for the sake of
talking, adding there are several measures that Pyongyang need to take before
resuming dialogue. [9]
Secretary Clinton will visit Seoul this
weekend for further consultations.
It is unlikely that Obama administration is prepared to subject South Korea to
the humiliation of backtracking on the apology demand in order to get the
diplomatic ball rolling.
But clearly the will is there to do something, and a way may be found to
finesse Seoul's anxieties.
Even if formal talks go nowhere, well ... there's always Track II.
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
