Checking Kim: The awful question of what to do

National Review, Jan 27, 2003 by Adam Garfinkle

The Bush administration is not being apocalyptic over North Korea -- but that doesn't indicate a lack of seriousness on the subject. This is not the Clinton administration, after all; these guys know how to think strategically, how not to leak, and how to focus their foreign-policy activity on something other than the frenzied daily news cycle. What, then, are they thinking?

Administration principals seem to be starting from four core assumptions. The first is that the North Korean regime seeks a crisis atmosphere, the better to extort lucre from feckless (or clueless) South Koreans and Japanese, and to divide the U.S. from these two traditional allies. Second, Pyongyang wishes to turn what is and ought to be managed as a regional problem into a bilateral U.S.-North Korean affair. They wish this because only the U.S. can supply what the North Korean regime most wants: a guarantee against the twin nightmare of becoming East Germany and the Ceausescu family. Third, while the evidence is imperfect, it is prudent to assume that North Korea has two nuclear devices that can be delivered against both South Korean and Japanese targets. Fourth, the North Korean rulers are exactly who they say they are: Communists. This means -- or have we already forgotten? - - that they can be trusted to lie and deceive as required, and not care particularly about the welfare of their citizenry.

Certain policy implications flow from these assumptions. From the first two comes the U.S. determination not to let North Korea define the terms of the present tension. This, plus the need to wait for the results of the recent South Korean election, fully explains the administration's restrained rhetoric. There is no need to invoke Iraq, or the administration's supposed obtuseness, or presumed internal divisions, or anything else to account for it; to do so violates Occam's Razor in spades.

From the third assumption flows the conclusion that the U.S. does not have any military option worth the risks of implementation. (Whether it was wise to say this out loud is another matter.) This does not mean, as some commentators have assumed, that the administration sees no differences between a North Korea stalled at two weapons and an active proliferation effort aimed at many more warheads and fissile exports. Nor does it mean that the administration is being inconsistent in the application of a preemption policy. Nor does it mean that the administration thinks that Iraq is more dangerous than North Korea, as if such judgments can even be made devoid of context. All such accusations miss the most basic point: that a rogue state's passing the nuclear threshold is a big deal. It dramatically raises the stakes even as it constrains U.S. options. The example of North Korea thus makes the case for stopping Iraqi nuclearization stronger, lest we suddenly find ourselves with the paucity of options in the Persian Gulf that we now face in Korea.

From the fourth assumption comes the conclusion that even if the North Koreans were once again to swear off nuclear weapons in return for a U.S. pledge of non-aggression and normal relations, they could be trusted not to keep their word.

There are, however, two other basic points to remember. The first is that the North Koreans want a larger, more fearsome nuclear-weapons arsenal and will falsely promise anything to get it. They understood the advice of that Indian general at the end of the Gulf War, when he summed up its basic lesson as follows: Don't tangle with the Americans unless you have nuclear weapons. This means, in turn, that standard diplomacy of the sort that produced the 1994 deal with North Korea cannot stop North Korean proliferation (and never could). At best it can slow it down, as the North Koreans tend to the episodic international shakedowns required to keep their country from imploding.

The second point is that the U.S. has no business recognizing the sovereignty of North Korea, an illegitimate Communist government utterly indifferent to the welfare of its own people. The longer we pretend that the North Korean regime can ultimately be conciliated or reformed, the longer its people will starve and suffer.

The U.S. finds itself in an unenviable situation: one in which it has no military options, yet normal diplomacy is futile. Diplomacy of the sort being pressed upon the U.S. by South Korea amounts to paying North Koreans for acting temporarily less scary until the next occasion for extortion. I have argued that the only way to solve the problem is to transcend it: to think not like a diplomat, who is paid to manage, but like a statesman, who is paid to transform basic circumstances. I proposed last October that the major powers -- the U.S., Japan, Russia, and China -- unite to condition aid to North Korea in such a way as ultimately to undermine North Korean sovereignty. This proposal stood at least a chance of getting at the real source of the problem, which is the nature of the North Korean regime; and it could provide benefits to all the major powers that they could not otherwise achieve for themselves. I also acknowledged its drawbacks: that North Korea would not easily allow itself to be managed into oblivion and might lash out (which might happen anyway); and that the degree of cooperation we required, especially from China, might not be forthcoming.