The past 20 years of US-North
Korea negotiations have produced little more than
a series of disappointments. The last three US
administrations have little to show for their
attempts to bring stability to Northeast Asia
other than the reality of a nuclear-armed North
Korea that had the audacity to shell a South
Korean island.
In light of the difficult
history between Washington and Pyongyang, the most
recent round of talks in Beijing concluded with
startling concessions from North Korea. According
to the so-called "Leap-day deal," Pyongyang has
preliminarily agreed to place a moratorium on
testing long-range ballistic missiles and nuclear
weapons, end enrichment activities at the Yongbyon
nuclear facility and allow inspectors from the
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to
return to North Korea. In return, Washington
agreed to deliver 240,000 tons of badly needed
nutritional assistance to North Korea and
(according to the North
Korean press release)
move towards providing the energy-starved country
with a light water reactor.
Of course, any
deal with Pyongyang is bound to invite criticisms
from those who believe that even the smallest
assistance prolongs the suffering of the North
Korean people. Critics have pointed to the
narrowness of the agreement as a potential barrier
to fully denuclearizing North Korea and a few have
even accused President Obama of utilizing the
negotiations as an "election year gimmick". [1]
There are certainly many drawbacks in the
arrangement, both strategic and ethical;
nonetheless, the "Leap-day deal" retains the
potential to greatly reduce tensions in the region
and ensure a better future for all parties.
Officially, the US government decouples
the link between food aid and denuclearization.
However, Washington's year-long delay in providing
assistance has attracted criticism that the Obama
Administration is utilizing the humanitarian
crisis in North Korea to its advantage. [2]
Indeed, it is extremely difficult to explain how
the US stance on assistance appears to correlate
with the development of talks between the two
countries' nuclear envoys. In fact, the official
US statement on the "Leap-day Deal" made little
effort to conceal that correlation.
Among
the opponents of the most recent deal, Andrew
Natsios stands out because of his experience as an
administrator for USAID during the George W Bush
administration and his expertise on North Korea's
"Great Famine" of the mid-1990s. In a Washington
Post op-ed on March 8, he censured the "Leap-day
Deal" for sending a message that encourages
Pyongyang to build more nukes and divert aid with
impunity. [3]
His reasons are simple: past
engagements with Pyongyang revealed the regime's
intentions to never surrender its nuclear arsenal.
In fact, Natsios claims that the US-North Atlantic
Treaty Organization intervention in Libya probably
fortified North Korea's resolve to keep its bombs.
Furthermore, now that the linkage between
food and nuclear weapons has been established, he
believes that the efforts by the international
community to monitor the distribution of aid will
become subordinated under the advancement of the
nuclear negotiations. Natsios asks what would
happen if Pyongyang brazenly diverts food aid in
the future while negotiations are going smoothly.
He is concerned that Washington may ignore
problems in aid monitoring as long as the
denuclearization negotiations are going well.
He advocates using food aid as leverage
against human-rights abuses instead and promoting
overall changes in the defunct political system
rather than dragging out the regime's lifespan.
While his analyses are reasonable in some
aspects, Natsios' conclusions ignore several
crucial details that prevent them from becoming
viable options.
To start, the deal to
exchange nuclear concessions for food was cemented
by Pyongyang when it demanded food aid from the
United States as a show of "willingness to
establish confidence". This does not necessarily
reveal North Korea's belief that nuclear weapons
will guarantee food aid nor does it send a message
that building more nuclear weapons will be ensure
future negotiations. In fact, inconsistent
negotiations and frequent suspension of aid from
the United States since the 1994 Agreed Framework
probably rendered the North Koreans unable to
predict how Washington will react to nuclear
provocations.
Two things are noteworthy
about the "Leap-day deal": first, Washington is
not providing rice; it is giving North Korea
240,000 tons of emergency nutritional supplements
that will most likely go to the most vulnerable
members of society. Second, Pyongyang accepted the
deal despite initially demanding the remaining
330,000 tons of rice that was promised to North
Korea prior to the abrogation of the agreement
outlined in the 2005 Joint Statement.
Some
observers criticized the administration for
supposedly repeating past errors, suggesting that
Washington simply provided food for an empty
concession. However, the new agreement is vastly
different. Washington did not provide Pyongyang
with what it really wanted and refused to budge
until the North Korean representatives accepted
the offer given by the US. There is certainly a
moral dilemma when withholding badly needed
humanitarian aid, but this is surprisingly not
what most of the critics are focused on.
One can argue along with Natsios that
precedence shows North Korea's unwillingness to
keep its promises. However, this aid package will
hardly be sufficient to get the country through
the lean months between harvests. The North
Koreans will return to negotiations for further
talks with hopes of receiving grains and they will
be pressed to make further concessions in their
nuclear program. And why not? Pyongyang's immobile
nuclear arsenal never constituted the country's
first line of deterrence. That role has always
been taken by the forward long-range artillery
units that are constantly trained on Seoul, a
completely different situation than in Gaddafi's
Libya.
Natsios is rightly suspicious about
the efficacy and viability of the current US
foreign policy direction in ensuring the
denuclearization of the Korean peninsula. However,
his dismissal of the negotiations is also flawed
for the same reasons. It has been less than a
decade since North Korea acquired nuclear weapons
and there have not been enough talks to fully
assess how far Pyongyang will go to protect its
new arsenal. At the least, the moratorium on
uranium enrichment at the Yongbyon nuclear
facility, the suspension of ballistic missile
tests and the return of IAEA inspectors are
definitely positive developments.
Others
(such as analysts on Fox news) appear to be in
support of completely isolating North Korea, which
also means allowing hundreds of thousands of North
Koreans to starve, because Pyongyang cannot be
trusted to maintain its promises on its nuclear
program and its leadership maintains a track
record of abrogating agreements. For the
propagators of this outlook, the only condition
under which Washington should engage in
negotiations is when Pyongyang has already
abandoned its nuclear program. Of course the
denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula would
eliminate the need for such talks to take place,
thus these commentators add little to unraveling
this difficult situation.
On a mechanical
level, the monitoring issue that both Natsios and
the US State Department raise ad nauseam is a
non-argument because NGOs that have been on the
ground have consistently reported satisfactory
distribution of aid by the North Korean government
throughout 2011. Furthermore, even if the aid is
siphoned off by the state, injecting the country
with surplus food in of itself will have an
overall positive effect for the food starved
society. As Chris Green assessed in a recent
article on Sino-NK:
"This is one oft-unspoken fact that
muddies the waters of the 'aid transparency
debate'; namely, that giving grain to the North
Korean state ends up diluting prices in the
[markets], something that is good for ordinary
consumers." [4]
Of course, as State
Department spokespeople remind us regularly, it is
not Washington's responsibility to keep the North
Koreans fed; nonetheless, it is in the best
interest of the United States to prevent the North
Korean people from dying of starvation or
suffering from chronic malnutrition.
The
most important thing that Natsios and many others
seem to ignore is how long much time has passed
since the World Food Program rang warning bells of
the crisis. It has been more than a full year. If
aid was on the table, it should have been
delivered months ago without preconditions in
accordance with the principles of US foreign
policy and ethics. In the face of such a massive
food deficit, withholding humanitarian assistance
to leverage relief for a separate humanitarian
issue, as Natsios recommends, carries the
potential of losing both the starving and everyone
else he is trying to save.
The North
Korean population at large and in particular the
children constitute the future of the country. If
North Korea is destined to collapse one day, then
the people's failing health pushes the impending
burden of reconstruction onto South Korea and
invariably the United States. Medical case studies
and historical precedents show the adverse long
term consequences of starvation on the development
of a society. (See my previous article Dutch
Hunger and North Korea, Asia Times Online, Nov
1, 2011.) If Washington's long-term objective is
to build a more stable region, then it should
assist in providing for the North Korean people's
survival as to secure the ultimate strategic aims
of the United States.
The anti-diplomacy
route to resolving the nuclear issue grew out of
the presumption that North Korea's foreign policy
is both predictable and repetitive, looking only
to take aid in return for broken promises. This
outlook fails to take into account the constantly
changing socio-economic, political and military
realities on the peninsula.
The North
Korean leadership's acceptance of the deal after a
prolonged struggle over the different quantities
is quite significant. Marcus Noland from the
Peterson Institute of International Economics
believes that Pyongyang's concession on the amount
of aid reveals the existence of a decision-making
body that is capable of making policies that
deviate from the late Kim Jong-il's positions. [5]
Although Noland hesitates to assert the same
analysis, this flexibility suggests that the North
Korean leadership may be truly concerned about the
conditions of the people.
The food
situation in North Korea is dire and its leaders
know this better than anybody else. Pyongyang is
worried not only because North Korea hopes to
celebrate Kim Il-sung's centennial with a degree
of prosperity, but also because the state cannot
function while the nation starves. According to
testimony from high-ranking North Korean defectors
like Hwang Jang-yeop, the central government's has
been extremely concerned about the food crisis
since the famines of the 1990s. With this in mind,
it is possible that Washington has finally engaged
Pyongyang with things that force the latter to
remain engaged.
Given that Pyongyang is
prepared to negotiate for aid, the talks could
expand beyond the boundaries established in the
exploratory talks. Currently the moratorium only
focuses on curbing activities at the Yongbyon
site, which in of itself is a great stride forward
when considering the uranium enrichment facility's
estimated productive capacity. [6] Yet, this is
not enough because it is quite likely that North
Korea has underground facilities hidden away that
have the ability to substitute Yongbyon's role. At
the same time, Pyongyang will be hard pressed to
make any future agreements to secure nutritional
assistance or otherwise without conceding further
nuclear or military assets.
Negotiations
for a light water reactor may be a significant
challenge due to South Korea's opposition, but
President Obama may have successfully brought the
United States to a place where further engagement
is possible.
The announcement by Pyongyang
on its plans to launch a "satellite" in
celebration of Kim Il-sung's centennial has
already imperiled the hard-won agreement.
However, negotiations must not only go on,
but pick up the pace. As North Korea's economic
and political ties with China and the Russian
Federation deepen, Washington's economic
importance to Pyongyang will diminish. More
importantly, should Washington leave North Korea
without means to better secure and distribute
food, the consequences will yield an immense human
cost that will continue to undermine the region's
stability long into the future.
With the
leadership in Pyongyang testing the international
waters, this is a rare opportunity to set the two
countries on a path towards establishing a less
volatile region. The stakes are too high for both
Washington and Pyongyang to miss this chance.
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