It sounds at first like a reasonable deal.
North Korea apparently agrees to forgo its threatening long-range missile testing for the time being, so long as it is involved in negotiations over weaponry and status with the United States. Washington, in turn, agrees to lift the trade sanctions that have barred all trade and commerce with the self-isolated “hermit kingdom” of Pyongyang for 50 years.
North Korea gets the kind of constant recognition it loves (and the attendant payoff in oil and food). The United States gets a promise that the missile testing will be halted while everybody tries to work things out. It is an attempt, in the administration’s words, to improve relations “at a markedly faster rate.”
That, although there are mysterious bits and pieces to the still-tentative agreement arrived at during talks in Berlin, is effectively what President Clinton and his staff confirmed this week. It is also what many specialists believe to be the “best deal” for now, given the strengths and weaknesses on both sides.
A traditional hard-liner on the problems of the Korean peninsula, the respected William Taylor of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, has returned from still another trip to Seoul and long talks with South Korea’s President Kim Dae Jung. He is convinced that the leader’s “sunshine policy” of cautious engagement of the North is the only way. Taylor has been to the North many times and has no illusions about it.
“I came away from Seoul this time convinced that there is no alternative to this `constructive engagement,’ ” he told me. “What is the alternative? North Korea has us between a rock and a hard place. The Taepodong missiles could destroy all of Japan. We know that North Korea has chemical and biological warheads, and Japan has no missile defense.”
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That last point is the key. The United States, while beginning work on a missile-defense system that would stop the long-range missiles from hitting U.S. territory, is at least six years away from such a system. A theater missile-defense system for Asia is pending, with Japan having agreed to it but South Korea still hesitating. So the deal becomes one of buying time from the threat of the North, which is OK. But it further becomes one of parallel hope that somehow the Stalinist regime in Pyongyang will along the way (favorite words) “moderate, open up, liberalize.” And that is where I have problems.
We have no example–not one–where a totalitarian regime, with fascists or Stalinists or tyrants, whatever we want to call these unpleasant people, has opened up with those same people in charge. Russia began its change with Khrushchev’s “de-Stalinization” in the ’50s –and reached its present level of relative change only 40 years later with Gorbachev. In China, the Communist Party continues to hold total power; it has not really liberalized.
What’s more, as analysts and journalistic observers are publicly noting, these “buy-out” foreign policies at heart amount to a kind of blackmail by regimes such as North Korea’s. At virtually every press conference from Europe to the Pacific where this subject came up, journalists (for the first time, so far as I can see) peppered American diplomats and politicians with questions about “rewarding” Pyongyang with ongoing negotiations, with food and fuel aid, for its theatrically hostile stands against the rest of the world.
At the meeting of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Forum in Auckland, New Zealand, National Security Adviser Samuel R. “Sandy” Berger impatiently rejected suggestions that waiving sanctions only rewards North Korea “for not doing something that it should not have been threatening to do in the first place.”
Some analysts have even suggested that the Taepodong 2 missile is, for the North, more a negotiating chip than an offensive weapon. And as James Lilley, our erudite former ambassador to Beijing, pointed out to me, this kind of foreign-policy pandering to the North is flowing over into our relations with China. “As China pushes us more and more in order to get into the World Trade Organization,” he noted, “she, too, is maneuvering us into a supplicant position, in this case on membership in the WTO.”
In short, the cunning masters of North Korea, who gladly starve their own people while they blame the famine on the West’s unwillingness to give them more, are simply upping the ante every time we “negotiate” in their “guilt and get” game.’ Indeed, opposition presidential candidate Lee Hoi Chang, president of the largest party in the South, the Grand National Party, spoke with a few of us here this week, about the North Korean behavioral syndrome.
“This is a typical approach that North Korea takes,” he said. “It receives the maximum and gives the minimum. It takes the competitor through stages and involves them in a very tenacious bargaining. The test ban was a bait for the U.S., but not any basic change in behavior. In fact, provocations from the North have increased in recent months.”
There’s been much speculation and critical talk ever since the United States started playing these games with its highly questionable agreement of 1994 (by which the U.S. and Asian nations attempted to buy off Pyongyang’s aggressive nuclear program with aid) that we were trying to pre-empt the North’s aggressive intentions. Now, it seems, we are trying to pre-empt the pre-emption.
The problem is that the Clinton-style liberals (unlike traditional liberals) don’t engage tyrants very well. They either want to “save” them, like Jimmy Carter, or they want to buy them off, as the Clinton team has tried with such mixed success to do.
Are we buying time, or are we instead only buying more trouble?