Getting
back to square one
with North korea
By
Jonathan
Power
TFF Associate
since 1991
Comments to JonatPower@aol.com
September 28,
2005
LONDON - Perhaps you need to be a
long-range meteorologist to understand U.S.-North Korean
diplomacy on nuclear weapons. The scene changes as
swiftly as the sky over the ocean on a windy, autumnal
day. Small white clouds chase big dark ones. The sea,
ruffled by waves, changes from green to dark blue to
almost black and soon the observer is lost in the shades
of color, unable to discern whether the day will turn out
good or bad.
One thing we should all agree on:
the weather is worse than a decade ago when President
Bill Clinton, aided by the intervention of former
President Jimmy Carter, manage to negotiate with the late
President Kim Il Sung a nuclear freeze that has probably
stopped the North building a good 30 nuclear weapons; and
South Korea embarked on its so-called "sunshine" policy
of political reconciliation.
Early in its tenure, the Bush
Administration decided to throw the Clinton agreement out
of the window, and North Korea followed suit. Still,
despite all the posturing by both sides since then, a
nuclear winter has been avoided. It seemed all along that
both North Korea and the U.S. have wanted an agreement.
But macho politics trumped common sense, until last week
when the outlines of a new deal appeared to take
shape.
But one key issue is holding up a
final accord. The Administration is balking at the North
Korean demand to build it two modern,
non-plutonium-producing, nuclear power plants. This is
just nonsensical. This was part of the original
Clinton/Carter deal. Indeed, soon after the
Administration came to power, it proudly sent a deputy
assistant secretary of state to be photographed standing
by the half-built reactors. But at that time it looked as
if Secretary of State Colin Powell had a fair chance of
winning the internal battle with vice president Dick
Cheney not to abort the Clinton deal.
The Republicans from the beginning
have had a powerful internal lobby out to sabotage all
deals. A Republican controlled Congress made it often
impossible for the Clinton Administration to honor the
deal in the way it was conceived. Promised oil deliveries
and food supplies were repeatedly delayed at Congress'
instigation.
The Republicans forced Clinton to
break his promise to end sanctions, delaying action on
this until 1999 when they were only partially lifted.
There was the blockage on talking about ways to help the
North with outside electricity supplies from the South,
to tide it over until the new reactors were built. Not
least there was a slowdown on the building of the new
reactors. By 2002 construction was five years behind
schedule.
The slowdowns persuaded North Korea
to ratchet up confrontation. Confrontation, they
obviously decided, was the only way to get results.
Whether it was digging an enormous hole than convinced
the CIA the North was about to test nuclear triggers
(wrongly as it turned out, after paying a huge sum to be
allowed to inspect it). Or test flying a long-range
rocket over Japan, which was what persuaded Congress
finally to ease the economic embargo.
All these delaying tactics of the
Republican Congress in Clinton's time were then subsumed
into the active hostility of the Cheney-John
Bolton-George Bush policy of the "axis of evil". Powell
was pushed aside and Washington leant on Seoul to slow
down its policy of political reconciliation and
prohibited it from keeping a promise to send electricity
to the North.
For those few who watched the
changing weather pattern in the North it came as no big
surprise that in 2002 Pyongyang decided to abrogate the
1994 agreement and take its plutonium-producing plant out
of mothballs, in order, it said, to provide much needed
electricity from its own resources. It is also argued -
though this is disputed - that the North threatened to
build as well an enriching plant capable of producing
weapons-grade uranium. In September last year Pyongyang
told the UN that it had built a number of nuclear
weapons.
It has taken us all this time to
get back to square two. Thanks to some clever Chinese
diplomacy both sides have agreed on the framework of a
new deal. But still Washington demands that it will only
take a new look at the building of civilian nuclear power
generating plants once Pyongyang agrees to return to
membership of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty and
agree to the safeguards of the International Atomic
Agency.
To get to square one Washington
will have to take one more jump and join each side's
demands as a package deal, and quickly too. So much time
has been wasted in useless and unproductive posturing.
What has been gained? Nothing, except that the even more
complicated negotiations with Iran, a potentially much
more dangerous adversary, has been made more difficult.
Copyright © 2005 By
JONATHAN POWER
I can be reached by
phone +44 7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
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