Clinton Legacy Watch #39: Another Day, Another Fraudulent Deal
North Korea, Russia, Kosovo Accords Unlikely to Work Out
(Washington, D.C.): The Clinton Administration is frantically trying to brace up the
collapsing
facade that passes for its foreign policy. Toward this end, it is relying upon a favored tactic: Cut
a deal with people who are notoriously unreliable negotiating partners, lowball the price paid for
the latest agreement and pretend that the underlying problem has been solved — when, in fact, it
has not even been meaningfully addressed. The result is generally to buy more time for bad actors
bent on activities inimical to U.S. interests, often at considerable expense to those interests, the
national treasure and, possibly, the lives of American men and women in uniform.
Three Cases in Point
While examples of this Clinton practice abound, the past twenty-four hours have put it in
sharp
relief in three areas:
- Bailing Out North Korea
The Administration yesterday completed a new diplo-deal with Pyongyang. Ostensibly,
it
will provide access for U.S. inspectors to a large underground facility near Kumchang-ri. This
site is suspected of being used to continue a nuclear weapons program North Korea that the
North was supposed to have given up pursuant to a deal struck in 1994. No responsible
analyst
believes that the North has actually abandoned its nuclear ambitions — any more than it
will
give up its efforts to develop long-range missiles with which to deliver atomic, chemical and/or
biological weapons to targets throughout Asia and even in the United States.
No one should be under any illusion either that — in exchange for what have only been
broadly
described so far as American commitments to “improve political and economic relations” (a turn
of phrase that seems likely to go beyond the only identified initiative, i.e., encouraging private
U.S. investment in a potato farming project in North Korea) — Pyongyang is actually going to
allow itself to be caught red-handed. It has taken eight months to negotiate this access
agreement. It will take a further two months for the first visit to occur. It seems a safe
bet that
American inspectors will not be allowed to see all of the underground complex and that
what they do see will not reveal conclusive evidence of the covert purposes to which it is to
be put by North Korea. This is particularly true since, according to the
Washington Times,
“American officials believe North Korea has reconfigured the underground site to hide its
original purpose.” (Emphasis added.)
What is certain is that the practice of continuing to reward Pyongyang for its
malevolent
behavior — whether through nuclear technology and fuel oil as in the Clinton
Administration’s
1994 Agreed Framework, food aid and private investment as lubricants to the present agreement
or through political concessions (e.g., moves towards normalizing relations, easing U.S. economic
sanctions, etc.)
more North Korean blackmail in the future.
And its long-range missile program will greatly enhance the North’s ability to engage in such
blackmail in the future.
- Pretexts for Re-upping Russia’s Binge Borrowing at the IMF
On the eve of Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov’s visit to the United
States next week, the
Administration’s bazaar is clearly open in an effort to find ways to advance dubious Clinton
policies and to rationalize the squandering of additional billions of dollars in IMF loans to an
unreformed Moscow. Today’s New York Times reports that at least two deals seem
to in the
offing.
First, in exchange for a commitment that Russia will “curtail nuclear cooperation with
Iran…Washington [will] end sanctions against two leading Russian nuclear research
centers.” According to the Times: “[Yevgeny Adamov, the Atomic Energy
Minister,] said he
wanted to sign a document in Washington affirming that the [the Scientific Research and Design
Institute for Power Technology, also known as Nikiet] has cut off all contact with Iran. In return,
the United States would lift sanctions against the institute. A similar agreement, Adamov said,
could be worked out for Mendeleyev University.”
The Times account notes somewhat sardonically: “A procedure would be
established to discuss
future disputes about the provision of Russian nuclear technology to Iran, according to Adamov’s
proposal. But Russia would not abandon its plan to build reactors at Bushire.
Adamov said
he had already instructed the institute to sunder its ties with Iran. American officials said,
however, that there were signs the contacts were continuing.” (Emphasis
added.)
The second deal seems no less patently absurd: The Russians propose to address American
concerns about “16 advanced I.B.M. computers the Russians obtained in 1996 in violation of
American export controls. The Russians obtained the computers using Moscow-based middlemen
and installed them in the closed city of Arzamas-16, a design center for Russia’s nuclear arsenal.”
Again, the New York Times account suggests how transparently fraudulent is this
“compromise”:
“The Clinton Administration initially asked that the computers be returned.
Under the
compromise, the computers have quietly been moved from a military site to a
civilian site
within the city: a building used by Sberbank, a Government bank. The computers
are to be
used for civilian purposes like the development of commercial software, according to the new
arrangement.” (Emphasis added.)
Then there is the long-delayed START II Treaty, which it seems the
Russian Duma may just get
around to ratifying after all. The Clinton Administration is prepared to pay handsomely for this
“victory for arms control” — made all the more pyrrhic for the Administration’s earlier
renegotiation of START II’s terms so as to eliminate most of the provisions that commended this
accord to the United States. (For example, Russia is now able to retain its heavy and other
MIRVed missiles throughout the remainder of their useful life. The Clinton team has even gone
so far as to offer the Russians the right to add multiple warheads onto its successor generation of
road-mobile intercontinental ballistic missiles, the TOPOL-M,
II’s central purpose, namely eliminating land-based MIRVed missiles.)
Worse yet, as the Clinton Administration hopes, the Duma will certainly tie Russian
adherence
to START II to permanent U.S. compliance with the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.
Fortunately, this initiative seems likely to come too late to dissuade the Congress from
overwhelmingly endorsing legislation that would make it the policy of the U.S. government to
deploy a national missile defense impermissible under the ABM Treaty. As it happens, the
Administration has had to withdraw its threat to veto the Senate version of this legislation
in the
face of the virtual certainty that its veto would not be sustained.
The Clinton team suffered this reverse thanks to the wholesale defection of Democratic
legislators
from the no-defense camp. This development may make the Russian ABM gambit as irrelevant as
the negotiated strategic arms reduction process is to the reality that the Kremlin’s missile forces
are going to continue to decline with or without START II, III or IV — for the simple
reason that
Moscow cannot afford to do otherwise.
- The Illusion of a Diplomatic Solution to the Kosovo Crisis
Suffice it to say that the effort to cut yet another deal with
Slobodan Milosevic to end his
genocidal predations has not worked out. There is, at this writing, no prospect that he will agree
to the deployment of armed international forces on Serbian soil in Kosovo. And, thanks to his
calculated contempt for the previous Clinton accord fatuously negotiated last year by
Amb.
Richard Holbrooke,
soon be massacred by Serb military and police
units.
Even if the Kosovar delegation to the current French-sponsored negotiations
does finally sign the
Rambouillet accord, it seems unlikely that NATO will authorize bombing of Serbia. Even less
likely is the prospect that such bombing — if it were to occur — would do any good since it will
surely not be aimed at the only target set that makes any sense: Destroying the security
apparatus that permits the despotic Milosevic to remain in power and bringing his reign of
terror in the Balkans to a prompt end.
The Bottom Line
The Republican-led Congress is, at long last, recognizing that it must exercise the
checks-and-balance role that the Founding Fathers assigned the legislative branch in matters of
foreign affairs.
While the vote in the House of Representatives last week on Kosovo was about the wrong
question — it should have addressed the need to deal with the source of the problem,
Milosevic,
not with its symptoms (i.e., the authorization of a U.S. “peacekeeping” deployment) — at least it
marked a singular departure from the supine, reactive and generally feckless role legislators have
all-too-often played in the face of President Clinton’s appalling mismanagement of the security
policy portfolio.
The aforementioned deals are, unfortunately, not the only ones with which the Congress must
concern itself. For instance, in the run-up to the Chinese Prime Minister’s visit to Washington
next month, it is predictable that the Clinton team will be seeking more Potemkin
accords in
the hope of throwing legislators off the scent, not to say stench, arising from its previous
efforts to “engage” (read, appease) the PRC. But previous Clinton
Administration deals with
Beijing (e.g., granting Chinese espionage agents access to the Nation’s nuclear weapons
laboratories and their secrets in exchange for China’s accession to the unverifiable Comprehensive
Test Ban Treaty
Far from serving as an effective
instrument for dealing with crisis situations, diplomacy in the hands of U.S. officials who
are amateurs, incompetents or counterculture throw-backs can be an actual menace to
American security, sovereignty and vital interests.
who is currently serving as
President Clinton’s special envoy for North Korea and other problems in Asia, will be advocating
such additional concessions in a report he is expected to submit to the White House in the next
few weeks. See the Center’s National Security Alert (
and like-minded arms control
enthusiasts disavowed critics contentions that the TOPOL-M had the inherent capability to be a
MIRVed missile.
Moment of Truth: Senate To Decide Today Whether
To Deploy Missile Defenses As Soon As Possible (No.
99-D 34, 16 March 1999).
Balkans: As With Saddam, Appeasing — Rather than Resisting — Milosevic is a Formula for
Wider War (No. 98-D 45, 11 March 1998),
and Captain Holbrooke Heads for the Lifeboats —
but Fails to Sound the Alarm as the Dayton Ship Goes Down (
1996).
“Three P’s” — Reckless Policies, Practices
And Personnel Spell Trouble (No. 99-D 33, 15
March 1999); and China’s Nuclear Theft,
Strategic Build-Up Underscores Folly Of Clinton Denuclearization, C.T.B.
Campaigns (No.
99-D 31, 8 March 1999).
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