WHISTLING PAST GALLUCCI GULCH: APPEASEMENT WILL ASSURE — NOT PREVENT — CONFLICT WITH PYONGYANG
(Washington, D.C.): History reserves a special infamy
for fatuous remarks that express the unfounded optimism
of world leaders bent on concealing rank — and
predictably futile — acts of appeasement. Neville
Chamberlain’s assurance at Munich in 1939 that his
abandonment of Czechoslovakia to Hitler would assure
“peace for our time” is one such statement.
Another is President Clinton’s assertion yesterday that a
just-completed deal with North Korea is “good for
the United States, good for our allies and good for the
safety of the entire world.”
In fact, the agreement completed last weekend by U.S.
special envoy Robert Gallucci and his North Korean
counterpart, Kang Sok-Ju, and blessed by President
Clinton on 18 October will not prove to be good for any
of the above. Neither will it fulfill another Clinton
claim — that it “will achieve…an end to the
threat of nuclear proliferation on the Korean
Peninsula.”
To the contrary, the North Korean deal invites deadly,
aggressive behavior around the globe by demonstrating
once again that the United States under President Clinton
is willing to reward the despotic members of the world’s
Radical Entente(1)
— folks like Somalia’s Aideed, Serbia’s Milosevic,
China’s gerontocracy, Russia’s imperialists and yes, in
due course, even Iraq’s Saddam Hussein — for their
misconduct.
What’s Wrong With This Picture?
The following are but a few of the reasons why the
North Koreans are correct in viewing this agreement as a
major victory for the man who has, until recently seemed
to have a tenuous hold on Kim Il Sung’s communist throne
— his son, Kim Jong Il:
- The agreement obliges the United States
and its allies to pony up untold billions —
funds that will wind up providing life
support for the repressive North Korean
regime. The total expenditure is unknown
at this time. It will depend upon the quantity
and price of the oil that will
be supplied for the ten years or so that it will
take to bring two new 1000-megawatt light water
reactors on line. Then there is the roughly $4
billion cost (probably conservative) associated
with the reactors themselves. In
addition, and as yet unmentioned by the Clinton
Administration, is the price tag for upgrading
North Korea’s obsolete power grid
so as to avoid a catastrophic overload when the
new reactors are plugged into it. - The easing — to say nothing of the
ending — of trade restrictions will also provide
new hard currency revenue streams for Pyongyang. 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. - The establishment of bilateral diplomatic
relations will similarly extend unprecedented
legitimacy to the North Korean regime. This
step will, in turn, facilitate North Korea’s
rehabilitation as a candidate for assistance from
international financial institutions.
All of these steps run directly contrary to the
largely unstated premise of the Gallucci Gulch agreement:
The United States hopes simply to outlast the Kim
dynasty — that it will quietly go away and with it will
disappear 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.
- The nuclear reactors to be provided by
the United States and its allies are not
immune to proliferation. Fully one-half
of the nuclear waste they produce is comprised of
Plutonium 239. And 1000 megawatt reactors produce
much more recoverable plutonium than does North
Korea’s present, relatively small 50 or 200
megawatt devices.(2)
Secretary of Energy Hazel O’Leary recently
recklessly declassified information that
establishes such material can be utilized to make
nuclear devices. And 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 — Plutonium 239 can be readily
utilized in radiological weapons. - The United States will not know for years
— if ever — the size of the nuclear arsenal
North Korea has already amassed. Secretary
Gallucci told the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour last
night that he did not believe that he had ever in
the course of the past 16-months of negotiating
with the North Koreans 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. - There is, evidently, no obligation on
North Korea to forego future exports of dangerous
military hardware — including ballistic missiles
and nuclear weapons. This is an
egregious and portentous oversight, given
Pyongyang’s cash-and-carry tradition. - It needs to be borne in mind that if,
against all odds, the North Koreans actually did
comply with the Gallucci agreement in the
short-run, they have retained the option to
reverse course at will by dint of being allowed
to leave intact for years and merely
“seal” their nuclear weapons
infrastructure (reactors, reprocessing facility,
cooling ponds). It is hard to comprehend
why dismantling such facilities was not linked
directly to the initiation of Western oil
supplies. - The effect of this agreement will be
further to exacerbate increasingly strained
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 response will
probably be further to reduce 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 with Pyongyang
militarily down the road.
What is more, the inspections — 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 likely 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. In short, Mr. Clinton may
ironically be right on one point when he declared
that the agreement “does not rely on
trust”; it relies on wishful thinking.
The Bottom Line
The Clinton Administration can and should be held
accountable for the diplomatic and strategic debacle the
Gallucci agreement constitutes. It is a mere
“framework agreement” — a devilishly
detail-free document that will inspire protracted and
problematic follow-on negotiations. These will, in turn,
prove to be vehicles for still more U.S. and Western
concessions. While it strains credulity that Secretary
Gallucci could conjure up accords that surpass this one
with respect to giving away up front the
benefits sought by Pyongyang and postponing for years the
expected quid pro quos, recent experience suggests that
neither he nor the Administration he serves should not be
underestimated.
Even if the vast taxpayer sums contemplated by this
accord were not at issue, congressional oversight and
action will be required. For example, statutory changes
will be necessary and North Korea must be removed from
the state sponsors of terrorism list. Is it an accident
that the Gallucci agreement was reached now,
when Congress is absent and foreign policy
accomplishments appear easier to buy than domestic
political momentum in the immediate run-up to the
mid-term congressional elections?
The Center for Security Policy believes that
congressional leaders should insist on an opportunity to
review the Gallucci Gulch agreement with care before
it is formally signed. Failing that, they must
immediately serve notice that it will require formal
congressional approval and ideally Senate advice and
consent. A failure to take such steps will allow the
Clinton Administration to spread the blame widely for the
resulting, dangerous repercussions — both on the Korean
peninsula and far beyond.
– 30 –
1. For more on the Radical
Entente, see, for example, the Center for Security
Policy’s Decision Briefs: ‘I.S.O.
Jimmy Carter’: Best Case, Saddam Expects to be Rewarded
for Not Invading Kuwait; Worst Case, It’s War (
the Senate Give Russia A Subsidy To Serve As the Radical
Entente’s ‘Fed-Ex’ Service? (
1993) and A Good Week for the ‘Radical
Entente’: Outlaw Nations Likely Emboldened By Ineffectual
Western Responses (
1993).
2. To be sure, the Plutonium 238
by-product of North Korea’s current graphite reactors can
be much more easily translated into nuclear devices than
can Pu 239.
3. For more on the President’s
desperate bid to recast his trouble-plagued record on
foreign policy, see the attached
column which appeared in today’s Washington Times
by the Center’s director, Frank J. Gaffney, Jr.
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