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Problems with Bush's North Korea Policy

James Palais
Professor of History
University of Washington

Feburary 8, 2003

There was a time after the end of the Korean War (1950-53) when U.S. policy toward Korea was the defense of South Korea from another invasion from North Korea.  At present U.S. policy poses a threat to the lives of a million or more South Koreans - let alone North Korean civilians - because of the likelihood of a preventive war or surgical strike by the U.S. against North Korea.  North Korea, which has built up a large and well-trained army has lost its capacity to win a war of aggression against South Korea because of the collapse of communism and the unwillingness of Russia and China to support a war of aggression.

In 1994 North Korea compromised with the Clinton administration by signing the Agreed Framework of 1994 because Clinton was willing to negotiate with North Korea and engage in quid-pro-quo negotiations.  The result was not the total transparency of North Korea's nuclear facilities but a freeze on nuclear waste that could have been processed to make plutonium for atomic weapons.  Critics of this agreement, many of whom are in the Bush administration, were dissatisfied because North Korea did not destroy all its potential nuclear weapons facilities, but why was North Korea so reluctant to destroy them?  Because such facilities constituted North Korea's ultimate deterrent to any U.S. president determined to remove North Korea from the map.

The Clinton administration was working toward more agreements with Kim Jong Il, the leader of north Korea, but failed to close the deal and left it to the Bush administration to conclude.  No sooner did George Bush become president, however, than he criticized Clinton's Agreed Framework as a case of appeasement of North Korean nuclear blackmail, denounced North Korea as part of the "Axis of Evil", announced that he loathed Kim Jong Il, and refused to support the "Sunshine Policy of President Kim Dae Jung of South Korea to achieve the peaceful resolution of problems with North Korea.

Was it any surprise that the North Koreans interpreted this as a shift of U.S. policy to outright hostility and responded by renouncing the Agreed Framework, removing the rods from their nuclear reactor in preparation for reprocessing, and canceling its membership in the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT)?  Meanwhile, U.S. intelligence discovered that North Korea had begun work on a separate project, an enriched uranium bomb, even before withdrawing from the Agreed Framework.  North Korea admitted the project, but where did the technology come from?  From our ally, Pakistan, which to this day has not been subject to the kind of threats the Bush administration makes against North Korea for potentially spreading nuclear weapons technology around the globe. 

It is not clear whether Kim Jong Il asked Musharaff for a favor or Musharaff granted it to obtain North Korean missiles, but the North's action was certainly born of distrust of U.S. bona fides, perhaps the failure of the Clinton administration to fulfill the promise of a negotiated settlement even before Bush was elected president.  George Bush responded in high dudgeon by threatening to condemn North Korea before the International Atomic Energy Agency for abandoning the NPT and to seek sanctions against it, which might easily have led to war.  Cooler heads prevailed in Washington, and Bush announced that the U.S. did not have any plans to go to war with North Korea and would settle the North Korea nuclear problem through "negotiations".  

Bush, however, defined "negotiations" as a willingness to talk to North Korean representatives but not to discuss any "quid pro quos".  "Quid pro quos" means bargaining, and a refusal to bargain is nothing more than a refusal to negotiate.  Bush claimed he was "negotiating" instead with South Korea, Japan, China, and Russia, but to what end?  Not to consider their approach to peaceful negotiation, but to persuade them to adopt his hard line.  The North, however, insists on negotiating only with the U.S. because the U.S. has the nukes, and agreement with others does not guarantee security.

Bush has been demanding that if North Korea first reveals, dismantles, and destroys all nuclear weapons facilities past and present, then he might see fit to grant aid, but what self-respecting sovereign would give up its last line of defense on such a promise?  Would the U.S. have done so for the Soviet Union?  The North Koreans responded by requesting direct negotiations to end their nuclear weapons program in exchange for a non-aggression pact, but Bush rejected the proposal, which was tantamount to preserving the right for preventive war or a nuclear first strike.  Bush later dispatched B-1 and B-52 bombers to Guam in obvious readiness for a surgical strike against reactivated North Korean nuclear facilities.

Contrary to American officials and pundits who perceive North Korean nuclear weapons as an offensive threat, the North Koreans know that they would not be able to use them without suffering massive retaliation.  Others (including Clinton on the Larry King show) claim that the real threat is North Korea's willingness to sell weapons to anyone with the price.  The only reason why the North might do so is because its economy is in dire straits, but there is a solution to that problem - supporting the South Korean effort to enter into joint economic ventures to provide opportunities for development and exports abroad, and opening U.S. markets for such products - all of which should be on a negotiating agenda.

The specter of immense tragedy looms over all the Korean peninsula as long as the U.S. continues to refuse meaningful negotiations with North Korea.  The time has come for George W. Bush to become a statesman and turn to a diplomatic solution.