THIS nation and the world have every reason to be skeptical about the supposed breakthrough announced yesterday with North Korea. Every five or six years we are told that the North Koreans have agreed to stymie their pursuit of nuclear weaponry in exchange for both tangible and intangible goodies from the West.
This time it appears the North Koreans have garnered two promises from the United States: One, that we’ll consider diplomatic relations with Pyongyang, and second, that we’ll consider helping them build a light-water nuclear reactor.
And what have we gotten in exchange?
Well, the North Koreans say they will end their nuclear program and readmit weapons inspectors. And, as chief U.S. negotiator Christopher Hill put it,
“This is first time they have committed to completely dismantle their weapons in an international agreement. They
cannot just stall and pretend it does not exist. I think they have gotten the message.”
That’s nice. But North Korea doesn’t exactly have a good record when it comes to holding up their end of the bargain.
Last time we made a big deal with Pyongyang, we shipped it $10 billion worth of aid and promised, as we did yesterday, to help them build nuclear reactors (ones that couldn’t be used to generate material for bombs).
That was in 1994. It turned out that despite that agreement, North Korea never really stopped developing its weaponry. When, in 2002, the U.S. confronted the North Koreans with evidence of their duplicity, they announced publicly that they were going nuclear, and earlier this year announced they had a bomb.
American officials are most pleased by the fact that the deal doesn’t call for a “freeze” on existing programs, as the Clinton deal did in 1994, but an outright destruction of them.
What’s interesting about North Korea’s declaration that it would give up its nuclear weapons is that this time it
didn’t get all that much from us. The promises we’ve made are conditional. There’s no set date by which either of the major concessions by the United States is to be granted to Pyongyang.
You’re not seeing administration officials delivering each other high-fives. Everybody seems to be treating this whole business with the skepticism it deserves. The president called it a “positive step” and not much more, pointing out that “the question is, over time, will all parties adhere to the agreement.”
Translation: I’m not betting the ranch on this one holding up. Even so, what happened here is a stunning and unexpected vindication of the Bush administration approach to the North Korean problem. The famously go-it-alone, unilateralist United States has spent three years working with five other nations to bring North Korea to its senses.
This approach was treated with withering scorn by Democrats last year, in particular by John Kerry, who described the Bush policy as “one of the greatest abdications of foreign policy that I’ve seen in all the years that I’ve been in the Senate. . . . They’ve handled it miserably. Abysmally.”
Kerry and other Democrats wanted to give the North Koreans what they wanted – to treat them as though they were the Soviet Union reborn and negotiate with them one-on-one. “We should have been engaged in bilateral negotiations from the get-go, from the beginning,” he said in 2003. “And it was obvious that when you announce a policy of pre-emption and you invade another country, and you begin to build bunker-busting nuclear weapons, that Kim Jong Il was going to find a way to get the attention of this administration and he did.”
Kerry’s contention that the Bush administration’s conduct somehow caused the North Koreans to abrogate its 1994 deal with the United States was contemptibly absurd. The CIA was warning as early as 1995 that the North Koreans were violating the “agreed framework” the Clinton administration had worked out with Pyongyang. By 1999, Clinton’s onetime defense secretary, William Perry, declared: “What they’re doing is moving forward on their nuclear weapons.”
Now, it’s not like Clinton had a lot of options when it came to dealing with the monsters who run North Korea. It’s an impossible country to deal with, and by seeking to bribe its Stalinist leaders he was only following in the footsteps of the Reagan and Bush the Elder administrations.
But at least the Bush the Younger administration has demonstrated that toughness, resilience and a willingness to stay the course in these negotiations – without giving away the store – can bear fruit.
At the same time the negotiators were finishing up the agreement with North Korea, millions in Afghanistan were again defying terrorist threats to continue that country’s once-unimaginable progress toward democracy. Thus, over this past weekend, the two faces of Bush foreign policy – the use of go-it-alone military might to help effect change in Afghanistan and the use of multilateral negotiations with North Korea – were seen in their best lights.