Let’s start at the beginning. What is the goal of our policy toward North Korea–nuclear disarmament or regime change? President Bush has repeatedly hinted that it’s regime change. Most recently he explained to Bob Woodward that while there are those who worry about the fallout of overthrowing the regime, he did not. “Either you believe in freedom… or you don’t,” he explained.
But we have no way of achieving this goal. A military attack on North Korea is impossible, not because it may have one or two crude nuclear weapons, but because it will retaliate by obliterating a large part of South Korea. Seoul is 35 miles from the North Korean border. Our options are constrained not by nukes, but by geography. Without the means to do it, regime change is not a policy, but a daydream.
And the crisis at hand is not that Kim Jong Il has suddenly become more evil. It is that North Korea will, within months, become a plutonium factory. A nuclear North Korea will overturn the strategic landscape of East Asia, weakening deterrence on the Korean peninsula. It might make Japan go nuclear, which would push China and Japan into a nuclear-arms race. In other words, very bad stuff. That’s why our primary short-term concern has to be disarmament.
Harvard professor Ashton Carter, one of President Clinton’s senior defense aides, puts it sharply: “We told the North Koreans that we were not out to topple them but we would not tolerate their going nuclear. The Bush administration is doing the opposite. For two years it signaled that it was out to get them, but now that they’re going nuclear, it says that’s not a crisis. For American interests, this gets things backwards.”
So much for goals. Now, what tools can we use to make North Korea disarm? The big divide between the United States and its allies is that the Bush administration wants to use sticks, while the allies want to use carrots. Partly, this reflects differing perceptions of the threat. For Washington, the main danger posed by North Korea is nuclear proliferation. For the Chinese and South Koreans, the paramount danger is chaos. They worry that using too much pressure will spark a war or a North Korean implosion–and they would have to deal with the resulting bloodshed, instability, refugees and bills.
What little leverage exists is wielded by our allies. China supplies food aid to North Korea. South Korea does some trade with it. The North’s biggest fear, that Japan will go nuclear, is not something Washington can credibly threaten. (Remember, making loose threats is what got us into this situation in the first place.) The reality is that no one has much leverage. North Korea is one of the two or three most isolated regimes in the world. Its people are eating grass for food. Economic sanctions are unlikely to force change.
That’s why the Clinton administration settled on a bargain that gave the North Koreans fuel in return for assurances that they would stop making plutonium. Republican hard-liners railed against this “appeasement” and for two years we have had a policy of cheap rhetoric and cheap shots–except it suddenly isn’t so cheap anymore. As a result, the chest-thumping machismo from the hard-liners has now morphed into sophisticated realism. The situation is very complex, you see. Soon the administration will return to a version of the Clinton policy it condemned. Senior officials have already told CNN that while they will not “negotiate” with North Korea, they could well “talk.” I suppose it all depends on what the definition of the word “negotiate” is.
At the next National Security Council meeting Colin Powell should ask that the group all hold hands and repeat after him, “Diplomacy is not appeasement,” swallow its pride and get to work. If the administration negotiates well, using a mixture of sticks and carrots, it could significantly improve on the Clinton deal, which had some flaws and blind spots. We don’t just need to cap but to reverse North Korea’s nuclear program. Ronald Reagan said of Gorbachev’s Russia, “Trust but verify.” With the North Koreans, I suggest a simpler motto, “Verify and verify.”
Eventually this grotesque regime will fall and President Bush will be well remembered for speaking plainly of its evil. But between now and then we do need a policy.
