Foreign Policy Blogs

North Korea Conundrum

We’ve been waiting since mid-June to find out what consequences will follow from North Korea’s presumed sinking of a South Korean warship, since the Obama administration has repeatedly said that such a wanton act cannot be allowed to stand without consequences. As yet the UN Security Council has not adopted tougher sanctions to punish the North Koreans. And while the United States has delayed by three years the time when, in theory, it would cease taking military command in an all-Korea military conflict, that scenario really is rather theoretical–and in any case this is just one consequence, not consequences.
The immediate situation reflects a more fundamental conundrum that has had policy makers and policy wonks wringing their hands and grinding their teeth for well-nigh a decade: How to penalize Korea for having used membership in the Non-Proliferation Treaty as cover for an aggressive nuclear-weapons program, and for ditching the treaty and going nuclear as soon as it felt disposed to do so. The situation obviously sets a terrible precedent, and obviously it would be in everybody’s best interest if some way could be found of punishing North Korea so severely that no other country will ever be inclined to follow its example.
So why is it so hard to devise an adequate punishment? The short answer is two-fold.
North Korea’s leadership is on the one hand so crazy, one can’t rule anything at all out when one considers how it might react to being punished. And on the other hand the leadership has made such a terrible mess of the country, it’s hard to think of any punishment that could make things noticeably worse–without, that is, making things so bad the crazy leadership might actually do the unimaginable.

The long answer is that U.S. policy toward North Korea since the early 1990s has been crippled by partisanship and ludicrously unrealistic expectations. Siegfried Hecker, a former director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, writing this last winter in Daedalus, has provided an authoritative account of how North Korea acquired the technical expertise and confidence to go all-out for nuclear weapons, starting roughly in 1989 with the end of the Cold War and the collapse of its Soviet patron. When IAEA inspectors discovered discrepancies in the North’s materials accounting in 1992, Pyongyang’s reaction was to throw the inspectors out and threaten NPT withdrawal.
The situation built to such a critical point by 1994, as former US Defense Secretary William Perry has recounted more than once, that North Korea threatened to turn Seoul into a “sea of flames”–something it was in a position to actually do–and the United States withdrew non-essential personnel from the South. The crisis was only diffused with the freelance intervention of former president Jimmy Carter, who brokered what came to be known as the Agreed Framework. It required the North to shut down its nuclear weapons operations and re-open its facilities to international inspection, in return for fuel oil shipments and provision of a standard light-water power reactor.
But for the next decade, U.S. neoconservatives and hawks kept up a steady drumbeat of assaults on the Agreed Framework, portraying it as an act of appeasement, as described in an outstanding PBS Frontline report by Martin Smith. As a result, the United States dragged its feet in keeping up its part of the framework.
After the election of George W. Bush, when it became apparent that the North now also trying to open a uranium-enrichment route to the bomb, Bush declared the Agreed Framework dead, portraying the North as part of the “axis of evil.” The former U.S. ambassador to South Korea Donald Gregg characterized the new U.S. position as not a policy but an attitude, and with good reason: It accomplished nothing and indeed backfired.
Arguing for the administration’s position on Martin Smith’s Frontline, Richard Perle decreed that the United States could not allow its interests in Korea to be confused with South Korea’s. What he seemed to be clearly implying was that if the United States had to take military action to stop a North Korean nuclear program, and if that action resulted in the total destruction of Seoul and engulfed the whole peninsula in a terrible new war, so be it.

Perle’s adversaries in arms control used to call him the prince of darkness, but in the spirit of Plato, who equated evil with ignorance, perhaps they should have called him the prince of stupidity. Could anybody seriously believe the United States would be so irresponsible, foolish and indeed evil as to risk plunging Korea into another war?
The inevitable result of the Bush administration’s attitude was that North Korea in fact went nuclear at first opportunity, and though the international community imposed sanctions, there was nothing anybody could realistically do to prevent it from developing an arsenal. After its first test fizzled, it soon tested again, exactly as nuclear weapons expert Richard Garwin had predicted it would.
Today, the only real hope for North Korean nuclear disarmament is that the regime will crumble, which some well-informed observers are predicting may actually happen. Articles in recent issues of The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker discuss the catastrophic impact of last November’s currency reform and suggest that popular disenchantment with the regime may finally be spreading.
Unless the regime collapses, however–and in light of past experience only a fool would bet that will happen any time soon–there may nothing that the international community can do to denuclearize the country.
The lesson, if there is one, is that it will be essential in dealing with future crises of the same ilk to avoid the divisions that crippled U.S. policy toward the North. Not only was the United States unable to negotiate effectively, summarizes Hecker, but we “allowed Pyongyang to cross with impunity every red line we have drawn.” Throughout, the U.S. negotiating position was “hampered by out inability to sustain consistent policies through transitions in administrations.”
Thus, the North exploited U.S. divisions to “play a weak hand with success. Unless we learn from the lessons of North Korea, others may be able to do the same.”

 

Author

William Sweet

Bill Sweet has been writing about nuclear arms control and peace politics since interning at the IAEA in Vienna during summer 1974, right after India's test of a "peaceful nuclear device." As an editor and writer for Congressional Quarterly, Physics Today and IEEE Spectrum magazine he wrote about the freeze and European peace movements, space weaponry and Star Wars, Iraq, North Korea and Iran. His work has appeared in magazines like the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists and The New Republic, as well as in The New York Times, the LA Times, Newsday and the Baltimore Sun. The author of two books--The Nuclear Age: Energy, Proliferation and the Arms Race, and Kicking the Carbon Habit: The Case for Renewable and Nuclear Energy--he recently published "Situating Putin," a group of essays about contemporary Russia, as an e-book. He teaches European history as an adjunct at CUNY's Borough of Manhattan Community College.