The White House ought to know it cannot treat North Korea with the same arrogance as Iraq. However President Bush’s unique brand of precision sledgehammer diplomacy has worsened already strained relations with North Korea. In blowing the whistle on Pyongyang’s continuing nuclear weapons program last year, Washington miscalculated and played into North Korean hands. By focusing on the country’s nuclear program, it allowed the North Korean government to ratchet up the stakes progressively, first by announcing it would resume the operation of nuclear reactors, (turned off after the 1994 Framework Agreement with the US, in return for aid), then by throwing out UN inspectors and now by repudiating its accession to the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty.
Bush wants to get on with humiliating Iraq and finishing his father’s Gulf War business. Now, however, the growing danger from North Korea is diverting White House and Pentagon attention to the Far East. This may well explain why all of a sudden, the urgency seems to have gone out of Washington’s demands that the UN weapons inspectors complete their search for Iraq weaponry.
The key to understanding the extraordinary North Korean regime, a repressive Communist dictatorship unsafely fossilized from change, is to realize that this is a country that considers itself under siege. Its people, who for 50 years were taught to revere the state’s founder, Kim Il-Sung, as the “Great Leader”, believe themselves surrounded by enemies eager to crush them. Only in Kim himself can they find protection. The dictator may have died in 1994 but he remains his country’s leader, officially branded “ President for Eternity”. Kim’s son and successor Kim Jong-il, defers continually and very publicly to his father’s guiding principles. Of course for the top leadership, who have the resources to understand the realities of the outside world, such shenanigans are bunk. For them the maintenance of North Korea’s paranoid and aggressive isolation is the only way to hang onto their own power and privileges.
Knowing that North Korea is on Washington’s hit list of countries that deemed to comprise an Axis of Evil, Kim has almost certainly calculated that were he to just sit back and let the Americans deal with Iraq as they see fit, North Korea’s turn would be next. A military attack against heavily armed North Korea may be unthinkable but it can be expected that Washington will seek to isolate the regime completely, hoping that by persuading China and Russia to cut off support, the country will simply collapse. Whether China could be persuaded to allow a united Korea on its doorstep with a continued US presence, as the White House wants, is another matter. The crucial section of the North Korean statement announcing its withdrawal from the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty comes at the end where it sets out a need for dialogue. What Kim is trying to do is to lock the Americans and North Korea’s neighbors into a firm commitment, not only to leave his country alone, but also to resume the economic support that will permit his regime to survive. If Washington does not parley now, then North Korea will press ahead with its nuclear weapons program so raising the price that it hopes it will eventually be paid for compliance.Kim no doubt thinks his is a win-win position. He is betting that the Bush White House wants so badly to topple Saddam Hussain’s regime, that it will be prepared to pay a high price to bring North Korea back into line. On the face of it, he seems to be correct. Even if Washington would ever contemplate fighting to destroy North Korea, it could hardly do so at this moment. President Bush is therefore pretty well between a rock and a hard place. Maybe it would have been better last year to have ignored North Korea’s resumed nuclear program, in the same way that Washington has so long turned a blind eye to Israel’s equally illegal acquisition of nuclear weaponry.
