Sunday Perspective: What North Korea wants

0 Comments | Oakland Tribune, Jun 21, 2009 | by Victor Cha

"The Americans are serious," the head of the Russian delegation told the North Koreans in a meeting in Beijing in September 2005. "You see this? This is called a negative security assurance. We tried to get this from them throughout the Cold War and were unsuccessful."

We'd been negotiating since 2004 -- the famous "six-party" talks featuring the United States, China, Japan, Russia, South Korea and, of course, North Korea -- trying to hammer out an agreement that would end Pyongyang's nuclear program. The issue of the moment was a clause that had just been approved in Washington, stating that the United States "would not attack North Korea with nuclear or conventional weapons."

It was a big step for the Americans, and the Russians, at least, recognized that. It meant that Kim Jong Il had finally received the security guarantee -- and the end to alleged American hostility -- that he'd always sought. But when the North Korean delegates later brushed off the clause as a mere piece of paper that did nothing to truly assure North Korean security, it dawned on me that things that seem exquisitely important to the North Koreans at one moment can suddenly become unimportant the next. Their demands and their desires can diverge considerably.

For years we've debated whether North Korea is willing to trade nukes for security, or whether it considers nuclear weapons the ultimate security guarantee. But that misses the point. North Korea's aims, as I've come to understand them through my years studying the country and negotiating with its diplomats, are much bigger than that. We need to grasp them if we're going to break through the current crisis.

Take the regime's nuclear ambitions. Even after long insisting that their nuclear program was ultimately peaceful and intended for energy, the North Koreans would tell Ambassador Christopher Hill, our lead negotiator, that the United States should accept North Korea as a nuclear weapons state, like India or Pakistan. When we told them that this was not likely to happen, one official countered that denuclearizing North Korea unilaterally was tantamount to "stripping us naked." Real talks, the official told us, should focus on mutual nuclear arms reductions between two established nuclear powers, "you know, like you used to have with the Soviet Union during the Cold War."

North Korea doesn't just want the bomb. It wants to be accorded the status and prestige of a nuclear power. It doesn't just want a security guarantee against a U.S. attack. It wants a promise that Washington will help prop up the current regime -- even in a post- Kim Jong Il incarnation -- should it start to crumble.

These goals help explain North Korea's rhetoric and provocations, which have culminated in a recent second nuclear test and June 8's sentencing of two American journalists. But understanding North Korea's core goals also reveals how spectacularly unsuccessful Kim has been as he prepares to step down and transfer power to his son. Finally, it highlights the challenge and the opportunity facing the Obama administration. What the world sees as Kim's successful second nuclear test -- and our failure to stop him -- are actually the last gasps of a dying regime, materially and ideologically bankrupt.

It is easy for analysts to blame North Korea's belligerence on U.S. inconsistency. Pyongyang has dealt with wild swings from Washington, from Bill Clinton's affinity for bilateral negotiations in 1994 to George W. Bush's wholesale rejection of them in his first term to the hard-charging deal making of his second term. Sure, a consistent U.S. approach would help, but shifts from Washington are not what drive Kim to take the peninsula periodically to the brink of war.

Other observers consider Pyongyang's recent nuclear and missile tests to be an effort by the ailing Dear Leader (who suffered a stroke last year) to establish the North's nuclear status before he transfers power to his son and to secure his own place in Korean history, bequeathing to the nation the ultimate weapon against future enemies. Even dictators need to polish their legacies.

Yet I don't think that Kim's recent actions represent the final jewels in the crown he will hand his son. Instead, they reflect a desperate attempt to achieve a greatly scaled-back version of more ambitious objectives. Diplomatically, Kim's true goal may indeed be a deal with the West, not through six-party talks, but through a bilateral U.S.-North Korean agreement in which Pyongyang is treated as a nuclear weapons state.

The ideal outcome of this negotiation, in the North's view, is a situation similar to India's; that is, an agreement in which North Korea accepts safeguards and monitoring under the International Atomic Energy Agency but is also assured of a civilian nuclear energy program. Most important, Pyongyang would want to keep part of its nuclear program beyond the reach of international inspectors, serving, in the North's eyes, as a nuclear deterrent. The regime would certainly also want energy and economic assistance, normalized relations with the United States and a treaty ending the Korean War. But on the nuclear side of the equation, they want the global rules rewritten for them, much as they were for India.