“I loathe Kim Jong Il,” said President George W. Bush. Waving his finger in the air, he shouted, “I’ve got a visceral reaction to this guy.” Hardly words that easily roll off the tongue. The supposition must be that this was a well-considered policy statement. Five years have now rolled by since they were uttered and although Bush these days thinks more soberly, at least out loud, about how to deal with North Korea’s reclusive leader, policy for too long has been as crudely shaped as earlier was the megaphoned vocabulary. If the newly announced “deal” is truly a deal we have arrived there by the most roundabout of routes.
The American negotiator, Christopher Hill, has bravely struggled with his corseted brief. Clearly he has established a personal rapport with North Korea’s chief negotiator, Kim Kye-gwan. Left to their own devices one gets the impression they could have made a good deal months, if not years, back that preserved the important interests of both sides — strategic security and a promise of the shelving of Washington’s policy of regime change for North Korea and real movement toward a nuclear bomb-free North Korea for the US.
Yet, although a deal has now been announced it could still fall apart — torpedoed by the issue that has bedeviled the negotiations since they began in 2005, how much subsidized energy the West should supply in return for North Korea sacrificing its plutonium-based and enriched uranium-based nuclear industry. Clearly, Hill is under the tightest instructions not to compromise on the US refusal to return to the status quo ante — when America was quite happy to be part of the international effort to build two state-of-the-art light water nuclear reactors (that do not produce waste suitable for bomb making) to meet North Korea’s electricity needs and, while they were being built, supply it with enough fuel oil to keep industry moving. So there is no promise to complete the half-built nuclear reactors. The US is keeping that in reserve until a further round of negotiations succeed in persuading the North to dismantle its nuclear weapons. Meanwhile, one should expect some last— minute North Korean brinkmanship over the quantity of fuel oil being promised.
The status quo ante was the deal the US negotiated during President Bill Clinton’s first term and it was brokered in a piece of daring diplomacy by former President Jimmy Carter and Kim’s late father. But when Bush sabotaged the inclinations of his own State Department, the North Koreans considered themselves sorely provoked and steamed ahead to test a nuclear device, spitting hard in the eye of Washington and all its works.
If George Bush over Iraq has gone against the received wisdom of the Republican ancien regime of his father, with North Korea he followed in their footsteps. It was Brent Scowcroft and Robert Gates who advocated an act of war with North Korea back in 1994 when US intelligence revealed that North Korea had removed spent fuel rods from a nuclear reactor, placed them in a cooling pond and perhaps was about to reprocess the used uranium to provide plutonium for up to six nuclear weapons, Scowcroft and Gates demanded the Clinton order the US to bomb the reprocessing plant. It was a nonsensical idea if Gates’ earlier pronouncement was correct — that North Korea already possessed two nuclear bombs. The North would surely have retaliated with a war that would cost 50,000 American lives (so the Pentagon told Clinton) resisting an invasion of South Korea. Indeed, the North in that belligerent mood might have used one of its nuclear weapons on the South. As the Republicans tripped over themselves, trying to square an impossible circle, Carter made his dash to Pyongyang and showed what careful, persistent but open-minded diplomacy could do.
For Bush and the Republican hierarchy to clinch the proffered deal today would be the mother of all volte-faces.
We should remember Chester Crocker — Ronald Reagan’s assistant secretary of state for Africa — who had the near impossible job of untangling the visceral Republican hostility to any deal that might give Angola with its Marxist liberation movement and its Cuban backers the peace deal its desperate war-torn population craved for. Washington encouraged white-led South Africa to move in and fight the Cubans. Only when the Cuban Air Force bested the South Africans was Crocker able to persuade his masters in Washington that there was a deal long on the table that could be consummated. We should never forget how Crocker had to “take the road less traveled by” and how many died during the unnecessary detour. George W. Bush and the Republican Party made a similar mistake North Korea. But finally, as with Reagan and Angola, a swift application of harsh reality — in this case North Korea’s bomb test — seems to have brought them down to earth.
