The entire history of nuclear weapons argues against this.
Bribery. It’s how the US keeps in good relations with other countries we want on our good side. Why didn’t we simply bribe North Korea with food and maybe a seat at the grown-ups table prior to their going nuclear?
It all boils down to : “WHOOPS, WRONG DICTATOR.”
Whoops, you just killed 1 million North Koreans, 600,000 South Koreans and 90,000 Japanese instead of 40,000 Iraqis.
I went to high school on army bases in Korea 1979-1983 and my mom (Korean) taught 1st grade there 1979-2000. When I visited there in 1999, the USO offered some tours that technically went into North Korea (just the absolute most southwestern part of the peninsula, and just sort of rural/rocky areas).
All I can really say about North Korea is that their dictators are unpredictable, and they’re treated like something approaching diety there, no matter how bad the famines are. One of the TV news magazine shows had a great report from Pyongyang where the TV crew was strictly channeled into areas where they would only see the best of North Korea. Any questions about famine were like “What famine?” :p There’s no dissent. No free press whatsoever. The troops goose step in a way that makes you think of WW2 Germany. Honestly, it makes current day Russia seem like a paragon of democracy and freedom of the press, by comparison.
For better or worse, the Bushies seem to see North Korea as irrational, and that talking to them ‘through’ China or Russia or what have you is better. It obviously ain’t working. It’s just hard to know what North Korea wants. What would Condoleeze Rice talk to them about if she met with them. What’s the best place for bulgogi and kimchee? Do you ever watch “Lost” and that Korean couple? :) Now that you got nukes, we’ll be nice to you?
I’m less worried about North Korea opening a can of nuclear whoop-arse on my uncles and cousins in Korea than I am about about the ramifications you might read about further down in articles – that Japan may consider entering the nuclear arms race out of fear (because they want the same M.A.D. assurance the U.S. theoretically had during the Cold War) even if it would completely be against their post WWII non-aggression laws. That China might defend North Korea if anyone (U.S., Japan, anybody) takes aggressive action against them. Cripes that’d be like the Korean War all over again.
I don’t see the U.S. doing anything crazy, especially with virtually all its ground forces tied up in Iraq and Afghanistan. There are not that many U.S. troops in Korea anymore (something like 30,000 last I read).
A pundit last night made the point the nuclear weaponry means securing the DMZ border becomes that much more important, lest they use tunnels to try to smuggle a nuclear device inside South Korea’s borders.
I’m reminded a bit of SSI’s People’s General wargame though in that one it’s the U.S. stepping in to protect Taiwan from China.
I realize that this may come as a shock to some of you, as the American educational system doesn’t teach History quite as well as it’s supposed to – and what little History it does teach is really just disguised indoctrination – but the USSR ain’t what it used to be.
To say nothing of the Cold War…
Uhm, what?
The country has shit for resources. They can’t feed their population without tons of food aid given to them by Seoul, China and the USA every year. If they piss off China, sanctions amount to a siege; there is no way to smuggle anything in between China, SK and Japan. Even if the USA doesn’t get involved, they are beyond fucked.
Riddle me this, Batman: What does a desperate country with a gigantic military do when they have no other options left to them?
The bulk of the history of nuclear weapons exists in a world dominated by a pair of superpowers, with most of the rest in treaties with those two. The world since that point in time hasn’t really had much history where nuclear weapons were involved.
Mutual Assured Destruction isn’t valid any more, if it ever was.
Dance, dance, dance!
It’s a real good time for Japan to have elected a new, more hawkish leader. I’m feeling really good about the guy who wants to rewrite the constitution to allow for more foreign military activity who also seems to want to (again) rewrite the text books regarding WWII, China, Korea, etc. to edit out those inconvient “Japanese aggression/rape/murder” parts coming to power at the same time as North Korean nuclear tests. Wheeee!
We already do.
So we’re supposed to just keep giving them bribes as we’ve always done, while they continue to increase their military capabilities willy-nilly?
Brilliant!
The difference between the Bush administration and the Clinton administration are solely that of tone, and that not even that different. The Clinton administration was extremely close to ordering airstrikes on North Korea in response to the original discovery of nuclear refining; that was undercut at the last minute by Carter’s meeting Kim Jong Il - a meeting which wasn’t sponsored by and actually really pissed off the Clinton administration - and though Carter’s keen negotiating skills and bravely standing by his principles, managed to get North Korea to agree to accepting lots of bribes (free fuel, free nuclear reactor, massive food and economic aid, assurances of no interference in NK internal affairs), and giving in return very limited inspections of one nuclear site. Of course the NK regime would never have a secondary hidden site, that wouldn’t be fair play!
As it happens the North Koreans weren’t the only ones to violate the agreed framework (both the US and South Korea dragged their feet in delivering North Korea the agreed-upon bribes and tribute) but if in some parallel universe the North Koreans weren’t refining uranium for nuclear processing off somewhere else, it would literally be the only treaty in the history of North Korea that they hadn’t violated. Occam’s Razor applies. As a Clinton-era negotiator with North Korea stated correctly, there cannot be negotiations based on trust between the West and North Korea, because there is no basis for trust.
So, the atmosphere is similar to the nuclear reduction talks between Reagan and pre-Gorbachev Russia, only even more so; Russia of the 1980s and 1990s wasn’t as isolated, desperate and arguably insane as North Korea. Any movement will have to come about as a result of a united front between EVERYONE concerned - China, South Korea, Japan, Russia, the UN, and the US - to ensure that North Korea has no options save to agree to nuclear disarmament and an intrusive inspection policy. This will probably result in the collapse of the Kim regime and replacement with, as Kaplan aptly described, a Chinese client state. This is not in the interest of the Kim regime, but it is in the interest of the entire rest of the planet.
Actually, the U.S. very recently offered bilateral talks to the North Koreans. Apparently, this nuke test is their response. (Remember when bilateral talks were McCullough’s panacea for the nuclear standoff? I guess we’re past that now.)
You can’t conduct diplomacy with North Korea, because they’re just not serious about it. They will take your bribes and then violate your treaty. They will make their threats and act belligerently despite the cost in sanctions and international isolation. They simply are not reasonable.
The question remains: Is the world content to cross what TIME magazine earlier today called “the nuclear Rubicon?” We shouldn’t be.
Wikipedia on the Clinton-era Agreed Framework treaty.
Interview with a Clinton-era defense official on how close we came to war with North Korea at the time:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/kim/interviews/acarter.html
It bears noting that the Agreed Framework was predicated on North Korea’s insistence at the time that their nuclear refining was purely for peaceful energy needs and they had no intention of creating nuclear weapons, which is why it was agreed to ship North Korea massive shipments of fuel and a working proliferation-resistant nuclear reactor. Today’s announcement does put that insistence in some perspective.
It is also worth noting that North Korea’s current weapons program is not the result of work done post-Agreed Framework breakdown, which some blame on Bush’s intransigence. The Agreed Framework finally collapsed due to work done by North Korea on uranium refining specifically for nuclear weapons production, thus violating the spirit of the treaty while still receiving bribes from the West for not engaging in plutonium refining.
In October [2002], Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly traveled to Pyongyang to confront North Korean officials about the HUE program. Although the Agreed Framework did not explicitly address uranium enrichment, it did stipulate that North Korea would remain a party to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which clearly prohibits the development of any type of nuclear weapons program. Apparently surprised by how much the U.S. had learned, the Pyongyang officials admitted to the existence of the HUE program, in direct violation of the NPT.
The sudden and startling admission prompted U.S. President George Bush, along with South Korean President Kim Dae Jung and Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, to issue a statement demanding that North Korea dismantle the uranium program in a prompt and verifiable manner. The next month, Bush ordered all shipments of heavy fuel oil to North Korea stopped until North Korea undertook verifiable steps to dismantle the program.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/kim/nukes/nukes.html
Basically, what the Clinton administration’s diplomacy succeeded in doing was delaying North Korea from achieving nuclear weapons in the 1990s. It didn’t stop them from creating nukes, it merely slowed them down. Ten years later, we’re back to square one. And blaming that on George Bush (or Bill Clinton, for that matter) is seriously myopic. It’s entirely due to the North Korean insistence on a nuclear “deterrent”.
Right, that was definitely my opinion. Good summary!
Daniel, I take it you favor a draft and invading North Korea? Not sure what your policy advocacy about rubicons is.
On the note of who’s fault it all is, we have Clinton doing a lot of work, trying to stave it off or trick them or whatever. We have Bush doing…nothing, basically. It’s a shitty situation, but christ, they look like they’re just intentionally setting themselves up where war is the only option, just like Iran and Iraq.
From a long-term perspective, note that the Kim regime didn’t decided a bomb was necessary until the USSR collapsed. The seemingly-obvious explanation is that they decided they couldn’t can’t protect themselves from the US anymore and the only way to do that is to get a bomb.
Short of the US (and Japan?) guarenteeing to leave them alone, or getting half the Korean penisula butchered in a military invasion, or just hoping for a convenient mass Kim leadership heart attack, I really have no idea what would convince them to stop them going for a nuke, much less stop being international pariahs.
While we certainly have more justification to invade North Korea than we did Iraq, a total economic blockade should result in the NK government’s collapse. This would require active cooperation by China, and it’s doubtful they’d acquiesce to that. Failing that, there are no good options. Merely varying degrees of bad ones.
What should the Bush administration have done? The North Koreans clearly were cheating on the treaty the Clinton administration signed with them. Should we have signed another one? Maybe they’d follow that one? The North Koreans view diplomacy as another form of conflict. The Bush administration decided, correctly in my opinion, that proceeding with further negotiation was up to the North Koreans changing their positions, not in our seeing how quickly we could bribe them into another photo-op friendly conference as Kim Dae Jung did.
Short of the US (and Japan?) guarenteeing to leave them alone, or getting half the Korean penisula butchered in a military invasion, or just hoping for a convenient mass Kim leadership heart attack, I really have no idea what would convince them to stop them going for a nuke, much less stop being international pariahs.
On that we agree. And as I keep saying, what the US does is kind of not all that important here. It’s really up to the North Koreans and the people footing their bills. As long as China and South Korea keep propping up their economy, the Kim regime will endure.
It’s pretty optimistic to think that a cessation of economic aid to NK would result in the collapse of the Kim regime.
I don’t think the Kim family harbors a celestial Stauffenberg, I’m guessing if we somehow convince the international community to cut off food to North Korea one of Beijing/Seoul/Toyko/Etc. would be(if not glowing) certainly less desirable in a few weeks. And it’s real easy for Bush/Clinton/Warner/etc. to bluster about cutting off aid when the cost of a full fledged war with North Korea might result in the deaths of what, 10 or 20K American soldiers worst case? That’s a terrible outcome but there won’t be mustard gas shells clanking off the White House. We would need to make ourselves into the bigger threat South Korea, and that’s the sort of ruthless realpolitik that the American public frowns on.