BRAVO: NEW MAJORITY MAKES CONGRESSIONAL OVERSIGHT ON NORTH KOREA DEAL THE FIRST ORDER OF BUSINESS
(Washington, D.C.): Tomorrow, the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee will hold what amounts to the first
hearing by the new congressional majority. The specific
focus of this hearing will be to review the terms and
implications of the Clinton Administration’s hastily
consummated and fatally flawed pre-election agreement
with North Korea. As important, however, will be the
backdrop for this Committee review: President
Clinton’s serious mismanagement of the foreign policy
portfolio and its likely repercussions.
To be sure, the hearing will be run by the outgoing
Democratic chairman and his staff. As a result, the
questioning about the damage done to vital U.S. interests
by the North Korean deal — which is of a piece with the
Clinton Administration’s wheeling-and-dealing with
despots from Beijing to Belgrade — may be less pointed
than it will be after the 104th Congress is sworn in.
Even so, the Foreign Relations Committee’s decision to
take up the North Korean deal at the first possible
opportunity suggests that the Administration must already
reckon with the new reality: The executive branch
can no longer assume that Congress will rubber-stamp its
dubious international initiatives, that it will passively
acquiesce in diplomatic faits accomplis and
dutifully agree to pay whatever bills come due as a
result.
What the Hearing Should Examine
In recent months, the Center for Security Policy has
repeatedly warned about the alarming strategic
implications of North Korea’s determination to acquire
nuclear weapons and the ballistic missiles with which to
deliver them.(1)
It has also identified a number of critically flawed
aspects of the Clinton Administration’s deal with
Pyongyang. It respectfully suggests that these concerns
should be examined with care in the course of tomorrow’s
hearing. Specifically, the following issues are among
those that ought to be reviewed with Ambassador Robert
Gallucci, who negotiated the agreement with North Korea,
and with the other, non-government witnesses:
- Precisely how many billions of dollars
has the United States taxpayer been committed to
providing up front to North Korea —
funds that will unquestionably constitute life
support for its repressive communist regime? The
price tag should reflect the total not only for
the two new 1,000 megawatt nuclear power
plants promised under this deal
(estimated to be worth $4 billion by themselves);
it should also take into account the cost of the nuclear
fuel for those reactors (estimated to
have a value of $2 billion), ten years
worth of oil (easily hundreds of
millions more), and the cost of upgrading North
Korea’s obsolete power grid so
as to avoid a catastrophic overload when the new
reactors are plugged into it (perhaps another
billion or more). - Why has President Clinton formally
pledged that he would try to ensure the U.S. will
pick up the whole tab for these goodies if our
Allies (e.g., Japan, South Korea, the Europeans,
etc.) refuse to go along? - What will be the strategic and monetary
value to Pyongyang of easing — to say nothing of
ending — U.S. trade restrictions against North
Korea? At a minimum, this will provide
questionable new hard currency revenue streams
for the North. Official encouragement for Western
investment there will doubtless be accompanied,
at least over time, with OPIC insurance,
multilateral lending and other inducements that
will also entail costs to the U.S. taxpayer. Have
these costs been estimated? - What are the benefits to the U.S. and its
Pacific Allies of offering the early
establishment of bilateral diplomatic relations
— a step that will also have the effect of
legitimizing the North Korean regime and of
facilitating its rehabilitation as a candidate
for assistance from international financial
institutions? - Is the Administration, in making all
these concessions long before it can be
established that North Korea really is out of the
nuclear weapons business, actually expecting that
the Kim dynasty will shortly collapse — taking
with it the threat of nuclear terrorism and
aggression from the North? If this is
indeed the Clinton Administration’s plan, it is
hard to imagine a more counterproductive strategy
since the effect of this agreement
will be to prop up, perpetuate and empower that
regime. - Does the Clinton Administration
appreciate that the nuclear reactors it proposes
to provided to North Korea are not
immune to proliferation? In fact, those
1,000 megawatt reactors can produce much more
recoverable plutonium than does North Korea’s
present, 5 megawatt reactor. Secretary of Energy
Hazel O’Leary recently recklessly declassified
information that establishes that the by-products
of such reactors can be utilized to make nuclear
devices. This is certainly true if one is content
with using such materials for terroristic
purposes — an activity in which the North
Koreans have long indulged — such as laying down
deadly radioactive contamination on populations
or territory. - How is it that Secretary Gallucci seems
so indifferent to the size of the nuclear arsenal
North Korea has already amassed? On 18
October, he said on the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour
that he did not believe that, in the course
of the previous 16-months of negotiating with the
North Koreans, he had ever inquired
whether they had acquired nuclear weapons.
Indeed, the Clinton Administration seems fixedly
disinterested in this point, perhaps because it
highlights Mr. Clinton’s complete abandonment of
his previous position that the North must not be
allowed to obtain any nuclear weapons. - It is predictable that the inspections
contemplated by this agreement — even if
permitted to occur and even if competently
performed by the International Atomic Energy
Agency (or, alternatively, a special team
commissioned by the U.N. Security Council) —
will prove so circumscribed, so tardy and so
incomplete as to render them of minimal value in
terms of monitoring North Korea’s future
bomb-building activities. They certainly
will not give high confidence assessments about
the number of nuclear weapons North Korea will
actually produce from the weapons grade material
it has already diverted. - What precisely is the nature of the
constraints imposed on North Korea by this
agreement — if any — with respect to preventing
Pyongyang’s future exports of dangerous military
hardware, including but not limited to ballistic
missiles and nuclear weapons? A failure
to achieve effective constraints in this area
would be particularly worrisome given Pyongyang’s
well-established willingness to sell anything in
its arsenal to anyone with cash. - How easily can the North Koreans reverse
course even if they (against all odds) actually
do comply with the agreement? It would
appear that this option will remain available for
years since the agreement allows them merely to
“seal” but otherwise leave intact their
nuclear weapons infrastructure (reactors,
reprocessing facility, cooling ponds). It is hard
to comprehend why dismantling of such
facilities was not linked directly to the
initiation of Western oil supplies. - What will be the effect of this agreement
on already strained U.S. defense ties with
critical regional allies? Although Japan
and South Korea have been reluctantly implicated
in it, both appreciate the folly of the Clinton
approach. Their probable response will be to
reduce further their reliance on Washington for
security — perhaps by seeking their own nuclear
weapons capabilities — while hedging their bets
through trade and other ties with North Korea in
ways that will greatly inhibit Western freedom of
action when it becomes necessary to deal
militarily with Pyongyang down the road.
The Bottom Line
The Center for Security Policy welcomes tomorrow’s
Foreign Relations Committee hearing as the first evidence
of what will surely be more serious future congressional
oversight of the Clinton conduct of U.S. foreign and
defense policy. It is long overdue.
Had such oversight been conducted more rigorously
heretofore, a number of costly — and portentous —
Clinton missteps might have been avoided or swiftly
corrected (e.g., the commitment of U.S. forces to an
open-ended nation-building commitment in Haiti; the
impoverishment of Ukraine in order to compel its
denuclearization; the wholesale transfer of strategically
sensitive technologies to communist China; the
perpetuation of the deplorable arms embargo against the
Bosnian government; etc.) At the very least, it would
seem that this new reality assures that the Clinton
Administration will have to think twice in the future
about ignoring, or cavalierly preempting, congressional
opposition to such executive branch initiatives as the
deployment of American troops on the Golan Heights or
negotiating away U.S. options to deploy effective theater
(to say nothing of strategic) missile defenses.
– 30 –
1. See for example the Center’s Decision
Briefs entitled, Whistling Past
Gallucci Gulch: Appeasement Will Assure — Not Prevent —
Conflict With Pyongyang (
Back In North Korea: Defector’s Warnings A Reminder That
Nuclear Crisis Is Intensifying (
The North Korean Nuclear Problem Won’t Be Solved By More
Talking (No. 94-D 61,
16 June 1994).
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