Clinton as the Anti-Reagan: Appeasement of North Korea Would ‘End the Cold War’ by Capitulation, Not Roll-Back

(Washington, D.C.): Amidst the many, pathetic explanations served up by Clinton
Administration spokesmen to rationalize, if not explain, its latest act of appeasement toward
North Korea, perhaps the most telling was an unidentified U.S. official’s assertion reported in
today’s Washington Times that “changing, reforming or undermining the
North Korean
regime would be impossible, take too long or risk war.” Therefore, to end what another
official called “the last vestige of the Cold War,” the Administration proposes to implement a
“roadmap” of successive U.S. concessions leading towards normalized relations with an
abidingly unreformed, malevolent Pyongyang. Had Ronald Reagan adopted a similar
defeatist attitude toward the Evil Empire, it is a safe bet that the Cold War would have
ended far less satisfactorily.

The first step in that roadmap was unveiled earlier this week with the announcement that
another
“interim agreement” had been reached with the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DRPK).
Pursuant to this verbal agreement, the U.S. would ease trade restrictions and open
the door for
certain financial and investment flows, and eventually full-fledged diplomatic relations. All
these benefits would begin to be available to Pyongyang based on what State
Department
spokesman James Rubin labels an “understanding” that the DPRK “will refrain from
testing
long-range missile tests while negotiations on improving relations continue. So it is an interim
situation….There will be an interim freeze….”

It is more than a little disturbing that Rubin emphasized that Ambassador Charles
Kartman
was able to decipher this “understanding” because of his intimate knowledge of “the difficult
nuances in talking to the North Koreans.” This suggests that someone not versed in
such
“nuances” might not be able to understand that the DPRK has actually committed itself even to
the modest step of not launching on an “interim” basis the Taepo Dong II missile currently
sitting on a pad, apparently ready to go.

Worse yet, Amb. Kartman may simply be the most recent American envoy to fall for
a North
Korean negotiating strategy that is less nuanced than nefarious. As one scholar of the
subject, former Defense Department official Chuck Downs, put it in Over the Line: North
Korea’s Negotiating Strategy — an insightful review of the dismal record of Western
negotiations.
with the North over the past forty years:

North Korea…used the four-way talks [between the U.S., South Korea, China and the
DPRK] the same way it had used every previous negotiation: to extract concessions
that filled gaps in its economic performance, to provide a pretext for domestic
political purges and increased political oppression, and to build up its military
capabilities.

This was the same, tested strategy that North Korea had pursued time and time
again. It used this strategy to take territory during the armistice talks, to build up
its military in defiance of armistice constraints, to gain international recognition
through terrorist attacks, to intervene in South Korea’s politics while promoting
dialogue, to win concessions by denying inspections, and, in this most recent
instance, to perfect its weaponry while it pursued peace talks. For the North
Koreans…the talks were merely the next step in its strategy of negotiating for
survival. ¹

Failed Framework Agreement

Just how effective this approach is for the DPRK can be seen in the Clinton Administration’s
insistence that the Agreed Framework of 1994 has served its declared purpose of preventing the
North from pursuing its nuclear program. This is perhaps understandable, given the prestige and
over half-billion dollars in aid — making North Korea the largest U.S. foreign assistance recipient
in Asia — that the Administration has sunk in Pyongyang since 1995.

Jamie Rubin has even gone so far as to say that, but for the ’94 accord “there would have
been
many tens of nuclear weapons that North Korea could have produced by now.” There is
nothing wrong with such assertions except that they are unproven, unprovable and highly
unlikely to be correct.

The Agreed Framework never had a comprehensive verification and inspection mechanism;
neither did it require the elimination of the DPRK’s nuclear complex, program or extant
weaponized material. The North long ago learned that for the United States agreement is
everything; abundant evidence of non-compliance — even egregious violations — matter not at
all. It also knows that weapons of mass destruction represent the only way to assure victory over
South Korea and its American and UN allies. They are also a means to secure the North’s other
key goals of international recognition outside of the peninsula, enhanced political and economic
support from the United States and a modicum of internal regime legitimation.

The truth, therefore, is that Kim Jong-Il’s regime will never eliminate its nuclear
weapons
program — the fruit of a 30 year effort — until either it falls from power or is forced to do so
by a resolute West led by the United States. Neither will it cease export sales of
weapons,
even if offered cash offsets, because such deals are the currency of its diplomatic strategy with
countries from Asia to the Middle East.

U.S. officials misrepresent these realities at our national peril. But, in a forward to
Over the Line,
former CIA operative and U.S. Ambassador to both South Korea and China James
Lilley warns:

American diplomats…persuade the American people to support policy
outcomes
that are little more than concoctions of how things should work out with the
North Koreans….The North Koreans are happy to play this game — they are more
than willing to subscribe to deception if it means they benefit — so they temper or
escalate their actions to lend credence to misconceptions that serve their purposes.

Enter Secretary Perry

At the moment, the chief promoter of such wishful thinking and cat’s-paw for the North
Koreans’ strategems is former Defense Secretary William Perry, who has over the past two days
presented to Congress a still-classified report laying out the roadmap for normalized relations
with Pyongyang. Ominously, an administration spokesman says the report marks a path future
administrations could follow “with steadiness and persistence even in the face of
provocations” —
in other words, a program of appeasement, no matter what the North does.

Reality Check

Even if one believes that North Korea will not flight test its Taepo Dong II missile
— or sell
it to Pakistan or Iran to test launch for it, the DPRK is hardly the kind of state with whom
the U.S. can safely cultivate friendly relations. It remains in a state of war with South
Korea,
kept at bay over the past 47 year primarily by the armed presence of nearly 40,000 U.S. troops.
North Korea remains on the U.S. State Department list of state sponsor’s of terrorism and
continues to equip itself with advanced weapons from Russia and China, both of whom are
publically committed to fomenting whatever difficulty they can with a view to unseating the U.S.
from its status as the sole-superpower. North Korea manufactures nuclear, biological and
chemical weapons (the latter being especially well-integrated into their force structure and
war-planning) and the systems necessary for their delivery. Pyongyang sells all of these to
countries
hostile to the United States and its interests including Iran, Syria and Iraq.

In fact, the unclassified version of the CIA’s latest National Intelligence Estimate (NIE),
Foreign
Ballistic Missile Development and the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States through
2015,
cites North Korea as one of leading engines of missile advances around the world. “The
proliferation of medium-range ballistic missiles (MRBMs) — driven primarily by North
Korean No Dong sales — has created an immediate, serious, and growing threat to
US
forces, interest and allies, and has significantly altered the strategic balances in the Middle
East and Asia.”

North Korea currently has missiles capable of reaching all U.S. forces and allies in East Asia,
as
well as Israel, Saudi Arabia and Turkey. And last August, it surprised everyone by firing a
three-stage rocket over Japan — a capability the CIA had only months before dismissed as
between two
and five years away. The CIA now estimates that, after Russia and China, North Korea
is the
next most likely to develop ICBMs capable of reaching the United States.

The Bottom Line

The time has come for a Reaganesque alternative to the path of appeasement of North Korea
to
which President Clinton and Secretary Perry would commit the United States under both present
and future administrations. Earlier this year, House International Relations Committee Chairman
Ben Gilman outlined the basic principles of such a policy based on: “conditional reciprocity;
strengthened conventional deterrence and theater missile defense” including the creation of a
Northeast Asian Defense Organization including at least Japan and South Korea and, most
importantly, “a willingness to undertake tough measures in the name of national security.”

The Clinton-Perry proposal for “peace for our time” on the Korean Peninsula should
be
rejected by Congress in favor of an approach that would “end the Cold War” there on
terms conducive to a genuine and durable peace, i.e., one aimed at rolling back and
changing the North Korean regime.

As Fred Ikl, former Undersecretary of Defense, has pointed out in an important
op.ed. article in
the Wall Street Journal in October 1998, it is past time for the U.S. to stop
repurchasing 45 years
of North Korea’s broken promises, while obscuring the violations and loopholes in the
Framework and undermining our allies’ confidence. Otherwise “the day may come when
continuing U.S. appeasement will have nullified the deterrent that has prevented a second Korean
War for 45 years.”

Congress should also make clear that the Administration has no business
considering
diplomatic recognition at the consular or embassy levels with what is commonly referred to
as the “World’s last Stalinist regime” while denying the people of a democratic Taiwan
(Republic of China) such status. Taiwan is, like the DPRK, a nation of 21 million. In
virtually
every other respect it is different: For fifty-years it has been an ally and friend of the United
States. In recent years, the ROC has become a vibrant democracy with perhaps the freest people
in Asia, and our 14th largest trading partner. Particularly relevant is the fact that Taiwan
voluntarily ceased its nuclear weapons program over a decade ago at the United States’ urging.
Recognition of North Korea under present circumstances — combined with the sorry U.S.
response to Beijing’s recent threats to Taiwan — seem likely to prompt the ROC to reconsider its
decision to remain a non-nuclear state, something an American administration so concerned
about preventing nuclear proliferation would surely want to avoid.

¹ The DPRK learned these techniques from the masters: the
Communist Chinese. As Downs
notes: “North Korea has made a science out of the Chinese notion that crisis has two attributes:
danger and opportunity.” Pyongyang learned during the Korean War that the Chinese policy of
brinksmanship policy can effectively offset the United States’ objective strategic advantages
because there are political and public-opinion constraints on the Americans’ willingness to
escalate beyond a certain level (e.g., preemptive strikes on North Korean nuclear sites, as was so
successfully done by Israel against Iraq in 1981).