When I wrote six weeks ago regarding the U.S. attempt to stop the North Korean nuclear bomb program that “by year’s end . . . there will be no more room for wobble. The choice will be blockade or surrender,” I half expected this wobbly president to surrender. But even I was stunned by the extent of the capitulation in the “deal” the State Department has just made with North Korea. The place to properly sign this agreement is on the deck of the battleship Missouri. It is unconditional surrender.
Start at the beginning. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which North Korea freely signed, requires a country to allow two kinds of inspections of its potential nuclear facilities: regular inspections of self-declared nuclear sites and challenge inspections of sites undeclared by the host country but suspected by the world of harboring nuclear bomb work.
As we learned to our sorrow in Iraq, regular inspections alone are useless. Iraq built a huge nuclear program while faithfully allowing international inspectors to pore over its declared sites.
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Which is why last year the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) demanded challenge inspections of two North Korea waste dumps for evidence of weapons-grade plutonium production. North Korea refused. It then announced would not allow regular inspections either.
What did the Clinton administration do? It began a long series of negotiations with the North Koreans offering them all kinds of goodies, most importantly, cancellation of our joint military exercises with South Korea if they would come back into compliance with the NPT.
Now the administration has reached agreement. What is the deal? Does North Korea comply with the NPT? No. Does it allow challenge inspections? No. Does it allow even regular inspections, which the administration itself declared last year to be inadequate? No. What then? The IAEA will be allowed a one-time inspection of seven declared sites. In return, North Korea reportedly gets something it has coveted for years: cancellation of our “Team Spirit” exercises with South Korea.
“A total rout,” says Gary Milhollin, director of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control. As the talks have proceeded Clinton has systematically abandoned one position after another.
The administration has a problem. It wants at all costs to get this problem off its plate, but the NPT has tough provisions to thwart the temptation to do so. Specifically, when a country reneges on its NPT obligations and refuses inspections, the IAEA declares that “continuity of safeguards is broken.”
Hans Blix, head of the IAEA, was getting ready to use exactly those words at a United Nations speech on Nov. 1, but held off much to the relief of the Clinton administration. With IAEA surveillance cameras and batteries in North Korea now about to go dead, however, Blix would have had no choice but to declare continuity broken.
So some genius figures out that a one-time inspection would allow battery and film to be replaced and the IAEA to say that, technically, continuity had not been broken. No whistle blows, we pretend that the NPT is intact, and the crisis goes away.
True, the one-time inspection would do nothing to stop, slow down, or even enlighten us about the North Korean nuclear program. But the point of the Clinton policy is not to stop the North Korean bomb. It is to get the administration off the hook.
Hence the deal. Result? (1) The NPT is dead. North Korea broke it and got a huge payoff from the United States not for returning to it but for pretending to. Its nuclear program proceeds unmolested.
(2) The IAEA, if it goes along with this sham, is corrupted beyond redemption. It is supposed to be an impartial referee blowing the whistle on proliferators.
(3) American credibility, not very high after Clinton’s about-faces in Bosnia, Somalia and Haiti, sinks to a new low. This is a president easily cowed and dangerously weak.
This administration would not recognize a foreign policy principle, phony or otherwise, if it tripped over one in the street. The State Department, mixing cravenness with cynicism, calls this capitulation “very good news.” For Kim Il Sung, certainly. For us, the deal is worse than dangerous. It is shameful.