Rolling blunder: how the Bush administration let North Korea get nukes

Washington Monthly, May, 2004 by Fred Kaplan

The fallacy, of course, is that, although the North Korean people are hungry (a famine in the mid '90s killed as many as two million of them), Kim Jong Il personally eats quite well. He doesn't care about the welfare of his people, only about the survival of his regime. And since he has sealed of this country as hermetically as the 21st century allows, he could sustain a crisis far longer than other leaders might.

Kim Jong-il's father, Kim Il Sung, had risen to power through guerrilla warfare and conducted governance in the same manner. As an ancient national proverb has it, Korea is "a shrimp among whales," and both Kims--the only two leaders in North Korea's history--mastered the art of playing the large countries around them off one another. Their approach to diplomacy is to foster an atmosphere of "drama and catastrophe" as the scholar Scott Snyder puts it in his book Negotiating on the Edge: a prolonged cycle of crisis, intimidation, and brinkmanship.

In the game of highway chicken, North Korea is the shrewd lunatic who very visibly throws his steering wheel out the window, forcing the other, more responsible driver to veer off the road.

At first glance, Bush might be excused for refusing to play this game. At second glance, though, what choice does he have? The whole world travels on that road. And the game can be played--has been played, as the Clinton administration showed. Indeed, by April 2003, Bush realized he had to convey at the least the appearance of talking with the North Koreans. It is not entirely clear what brought this on: a brief bureaucratic victory for Colin Powell or diplomatic pressure from the major powers in the region--Japan, China, and South Korea. Either way, Kelly was sent to Beijing to engage in preparatory talks. However, according to Pritchard, who also attended, Kelly was under strict instructions not to hold even informal chats with the North Korean delegate unless the other countries' delegates were present.

During this meeting, Li Gun, North Korea's very experienced deputy foreign minister, announced that his country now had nuclear weapons--he referred to them as a "deterrent"--and said the weapons would not be given up unless the United States dropped its "hostile attitude" toward the regime. Kelly returned from this trip, saying the North Koreans had offered a "bold, new proposal." Its gist: North Korea would drop its nuclear weapons program if Washington signed a non-aggression pact. But President Bush reacted dismissively, telling one reporter, "They're back to the old blackmail game." This was the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld line: As long as the North Koreans were pursuing nuclear weapons, even to sit down with them would be "appeasement," succumbing to "blackmail," and "rewarding bad behavior."

By August, it was becoming clear that efforts to destabilize North Korea were not succeeding. Nor were North Korea's efforts to lure the United States into bilateral negotiations. In a compromise, both sides agreed to attend "six-party" talks in Beijing, involving the United States, China, Russia, Japan, and the two Koreas. Pritchard says that at these talks, Kelly was permitted for the first time to meet one-on-one with his North Korean counterpart--but only for 20 minutes and only as long as delegates from the other four powers were in the same room. (Kelly and Li could chat alone in a corner.) Kelly was also forbidden from making any offers or suggesting even the possibility of direct negotiations. Pritchard recalls that Kelly was under instructions to start the private chat by saying, "This is not a negotiating session. This is not an official meeting."