Defectors Spare US Further, Ill Advised Appeasement of North Korea– At Least Temporarily

(Washington, D.C.): The
Administration’s decision to grant asylum
to two North Korean diplomats following
their defection last weekend has
prevented the U.S. government — for the
moment, at least — from the latest
exercise of what might be called the
Clinton Doctrine: trading
tangible American political, economic,
technological or other strategic
concessions in exchange for
“assurances” by regimes with
well-documented records of breaching such
commitments.

According to today’s Washington
Post, “During three days of
talks that were due to begin yesterday in
New York, U.S. officials were prepared to
tell officials of the [North Korean]
communist regime that if [Pyongyang’s]
provocative missile [proliferation]
activities were halted, Washington would
seek to lift some long-standing economic
sanctions that are now hampering the
country’s economy and contributing to its
food shortages.” This willingness is
all the more extraordinary insofar as,
according to the Post,
“Some [of these] measures would be
taken by President Clinton, while
others would require congressional
approval” (emphasis added). Such
approval should not be assumed
to be forthcoming, given
profound (and fully warranted) skepticism
about North Korea that abounds on Capitol
Hill — particularly in the aftermath of
the recent visit there by a delegation
led by House Intelligence Committee
Chairman Porter Goss (R-FL).

In other words, but for the North
Koreans’ last-minute plug-pulling on the
New York discussions, the Clinton
team was poised once again to commit the
United States to actions that amount to
life-support — in the case of food aid,
literally — for the world’s most
repressive and arguably most dangerous
regime. While the exact terms of
the quid pro quo it would demand
can only be speculated about at this
point, if past experience is any guide,
Pyongyang would be obliged in return
simply to make promises that cannot be
verified and that it will in any event
not respect.

A Case in Point

For example, lost in the
self-congratulation concerning this
month’s launch of a joint U.S.-South
Korean-Japanese initiative worth roughly
$5 billion to build North Korea two
nuclear power plants — plants capable of
producing vastly larger quantities of
plutonium useable in nuclear weapons than
the Soviet-supplied reactors they are
replacing — is the fact that Pyongyang
continues to obstruct inspections
required by the so-called Agreed
Framework. As the Center for
Security Policy observed on 19 August:

On 13 August, the Clinton
Administration issued a report on
compliance with arms control
agreements that notes that North
Korea “has not allowed
‘special inspections’ pursuant to
the Nuclear Non-Proliferation
Treaty” and continues to
“obstruct the full
implementation” of
safeguards required by that
accord.⁽¹⁾

Such behavior puts into a harsh light the
delusional behavior or cognitive
dissonance that generally accompanies
application of the Clinton Doctrine —
persistent denials or excuse-mongering by
official U.S. spokesmen in the face of
evidence that “assurances”
given by the other party are being
violated. Take, for example, State
Department mouthpiece Jamie Rubin’s
statements on 18 August: “We have
stopped the possibility of a major
nuclear program breaking out in the
dangerous Korean Peninsula.”

The prospects that North Korea will actually
stop selling its weapons abroad are no
better than the chances that Rubin will
be proven correct about its nuclear
ambitions. Indeed, the words of U.S.
officials cited today by the Washington
Post are instructive: “North
Korea has ‘stepped up its marketing’
efforts for various missiles and
demonstrated its willingness to sell
‘indiscriminately’ to any nation with
sufficient cash….On 6 August, for
example, the Administration disclosed
that particular U.S. trade sanctions had
been imposed against two North Korean
government-owned firms for
missile-related proliferation but did not
disclose where the equipment was sent.
One official yesterday said it had been
sent to Pakistan and Iran,
but declined to provide details.”

Small Favors

Given its previous experience with the
Clinton Administration, North
Korea doubtless expects that its
intensified efforts to proliferate
missiles — and other weapons of mass
destruction-related technology — and its
balk at the latest round of negotiations
will panic the U.S. government into
offering still further concessions as an
inducement to resume a dialogue.
This will be particularly true if
Pyongyang sticks to the position
disclosed to the Washington Times
yesterday by a spokesman for the North’s
UN mission, namely that its anger over
the defecting Chang brothers is so great
as to prevent it from participating in
the next round of Four Party talks. These
involve China and South Korea, as well as
the North Koreans and Americans, and are
scheduled to resume on 15 September.

According North Korea such
leverage would be a serious mistake.
If the concern is comprehending the
magnitude of the North’s proliferation
practices, the United States is, as a
practical matter, likely to learn more
about North Korea’s proliferation
activities from Ambassador Chang — a top
diplomat in the region that is
Pyongyang’s principal arms market — than
it would from the functionaries
dispatched for the talks in New York.
This is true whether or not, as some
analysts believe, that the paranoid
regime he represented would not have
given even someone in Chang’s position
access to compartmented information
concerning sensitive sales in the Middle
East. Assuming the Ambassador knows very
little, it will still probably amount to
more useful data than is
provided by the highly disciplined and
thoroughly dishonest apparatchiks from
Pyongyang.

As to the idea of using the
discussions actually to persuade North
Korea to stop proliferating weapons of
mass destruction and their delivery
systems, there is little reason to
believe — even if the United States
agreed to what one American official
quoted by the Post called the
“‘barterization of North Korea’s
foreign policy’ in which the country
repeatedly suggests it will curtail its
noxious activities in exchange for
cash” — that the North will pass up
the opportunity to get paid twice,
once by the U.S. and a second time by
those of its fellow international rogue
states interested in buying Pyongyang’s
wares.

The Sky’s the Limit on
‘Peace Processes’

While the Clinton Doctrine
holds that temporizing measures like
“peace processes” are basically
without down-side risks, the truth is
that there are real costs, costs
that go far beyond the immediate outlays
associated with U.S. concessions offered
as diplomatic lubricants. In
this case, the bilateral talks with North
Korea advance one of the North’s most
long-standing objectives: forging an
independent relationship with the United
States, at the expense and/or to the
discomfiture of the South. Given the
volatile nature of Kim Jong-Il and the
rest of the ruling clique in Pyongyang
and the hair-trigger possibilities for
conflict on the Korean peninsula, it is
hard to imagine a more reckless step than
to encourage in any way North Korean
ambitions of driving a wedge between the
U.S. and South Korea.

In addition, the mere fact that a
“dialogue” is underway is
incessantly used by the Clinton team to
justify further concessions. Food aid,
increased energy assistance and other
measures that can be rationalized as
humanitarian gestures are far more
expensive than they appear to the extent
that they have the effect of staving off
the collapse of the world’s last
Stalinist regime⁽²⁾
Such steps offer no guarantee that that
long-sought moment will be marked by an
implosion, rather than an explosion. If
anything, the passage of time allows Kim
Jong-Il and his ilk the opportunity and
resources to increase the cataclysmic
quality of that melt-down when it
ultimately comes.

The Bottom Line

The American people — and their
elected representatives in Congress —
should thank their lucky stars that the
Chang brothers’ defection occurred in
time to impede the scheduled next
application of the Clinton Doctrine.
Hearings should promptly be convened
after Labor Day to examine the
Administration’s strategy towards North
Korea and to impress upon both the
executive branch and Pyongyang that there
is no inclination on Capitol Hill to
reward North Korea for more of its empty
promises of good behavior.

– 30 –

1. See the
Center’s Decision Brief
entitled Damage Limitation in
the Wake of the New Press Mispokesman
(2. See the Center’s
Decision Brief entitled No
Way To Treat A Ruthless Totalitarian
Regime: Appeasement On Food, Oil
Emboldens North Korea, Postpones Needed
Reform ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=
97-D103″>No. 97-D 103, 22
July 1997).