No Way To Treat A Ruthless Totalitarian Regime: Appeasement on Food, Oil Emboldens North Korea, Postpones Reform

Washington, D.C.): Next month, the
Clinton Administration is scheduled to
hold preliminary talks with envoys from
the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea
(DPRK), the Republic of Korea and the
People’s Republic of China to set a date,
venue and agenda for the beginning of
Four-Party peace talks aimed at reducing
tensions on the Korean Peninsula.
Unfortunately, the Clinton team has paid
dearly for what may prove to be yet
another phyrric diplomatic
“breakthrough” in terms of U.S.
taxpayer resources, nuclear technology
with inherent military applications and
political capital.

Congress must seize the opportunity
presented by pending legislation to order
course corrections in Administration
policies that pose two significant
threats to U.S. security interests:

First, continued aid and
support to the current government in
North Korea serves only to perpetuate
that regime. It certainly has
not proven conducive to bringing about
real change in the North. If anything, by
helping the ruthless totalitarian regime
in Pyongyang stave off needed systemic
economic and political reforms,
such assistance may be setting the stage
for renewed conflict on the Korean
Peninsula.

Second, the North Korean
dictatorship’s ability to translate its
threats into concessions from the United
States and other Western nations can only
encourage aspiring or nascent nuclear
states to follow suit.

Pyongyang Spends Its Money
on Guns, Wants Others to Buy It Butter

Notwithstanding its ideology of juche
(self-reliance), the North Korean
economy depended critically throughout
the Cold War on trade subsidies and
foreign aid from the Soviet Union and
China. With the loss of much of that
assistance in the post-Cold War era,
North Korea’s economic performance has
become even more problematic. Unreformed
Stalinist policies keep industrial
production at a small fraction of
capacity and assure serious shortfalls in
agricultural output.

Severe floodings in 1995 and 1996
brought North Korea’s food production
capabilities to the point of collapse and
pushed its people to the brink of
starvation. In the current edition of Foreign
Affairs, Marcus Noland, a Senior
Fellow at the Institute for International
Economics, writes that: “A variety
of organizations and individuals have
analyzed the North Korean food situation,
and the consensus is that North Korea is
experiencing an annual grain shortfall of
roughly two millions tons.”

It needs to be borne in mind, however,
that, in the words of Noland, “The
shortfall is partly due to bad weather
and flooding, but its roots
are structural, and the provision of
food aid is only a short-run palliative
in the absence of fundamental economic
reforms.” He concluded,
“The North Korean economy is in bad
shape, and a famine of unknown magnitude
is under way in parts of the country, but
it appears that minimum survival
requirements can be maintained with
little or no external support.”
(Emphasis added.)

Unfortunately, such germane
self-reliance is precluded so long as the
Korean People’s Army (KPA) continues to
use valuable resources training its
soldiers, developing its military
infrastructure and producing lethal
weapons for export. In testimony on 8
July 1997 before the East Asian and
Pacific Affairs Subcommittee of the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Kurt
Campbell, Deputy Assistant
Secretary of Defense for East Asian and
Pacific Affairs, revealed that “This
year, beginning in January, for a
four-month period, [the U.S.] saw
extensive and intensive military training
in North Korea,” and noted
such exercises are “extremely
expensive, both in terms of food and
fuel.”

In fact, the North is diverting some
$5 billion — or 25% percent of its GNP
— to defense-related expenditures each
year. What is more, Pyongyang is also
squandering approximately 4% of the
country’s GNP — enough to
purchase over 2 million tons of rice, the
rough equivalent of the yearly grain
shortfall — for
propaganda and indoctrination programs
and monuments dedicated to the late Great
Leader, Kim Il Sung (of which there are
already some 30,000). In addition,
according to recent North Korean
defectors, in the Spring of 1997, the
government further undercut the country’s
agricultural production capabilities by
instituting a “massive”
military draft of young adults and
extending compulsory military service
from 10 to 13 years. ⁽¹⁾

What is clearly required is a
dramatic cutback in military
expenditures, reallocation of defense
funds to the civilian population, the
institution of economic reforms and
discontinuation of frivolous and
expensive “cultural” projects
to feed North Korea’s children.
According to the DPRK’s former chief
ideologist-turned-defector, Hwang
Jang-Yop, however, Kim Jong Il — Kim Il
Sung’s erratic son and chosen heir — is
frantically trying to consolidate his
claim to power by currying favor with the
military in an as-yet-unrealized bid to
consolidate his power. Consequently, all
other things being equal, significant
cuts in Pyongyang’s prodigious defense
expenditures are not in prospect.

Helping the North Avoid the
Hard Choices

Recent events offer fresh insights
into the North’s determination to
bait-and-switch the West into further,
unwarranted concessions. Despite public
denials. ⁽²⁾
the Clinton Administration’s announcement
on 15 July of its intent to donate an
additional $27 million in food aid to the
World Food Program for distribution in
North Korea was surely seen by Pyongyang
as a reward for the North’s declaration a
week before that it was willing to enter
four-party talks with the United States,
PRC and South Korea. Then, on 16 July,
DPRK forces entered the demilitarized
zone, provoking a 50-minute fire-fight,
including the use of artillery by both
sides.

This North Korean practice of
negotiating “at the brink” has
paid Pyongyang handsome dividends in the
past — most spectacularly, the 1994
U.S.-DPRK Agreed Framework. Under the
terms of this so-called “non-binding
political agreement,” the West is
obligated to provide $4 billion to pay
for the construction of two light water
nuclear reactors (LWRs). It is also
supposed to supply 500,000 tons of heavy
fuel oil per year, at an estimated cost
of $50 million per year, until the
reactors go on-line.

In exchange, North Korea was supposed
to: freeze its existing nuclear energy
program; assure the safe and
internationally monitored storage, and
subsequent disposal, of spent fuel from
the existing North Korean reactors; and
undertake a renewed and constructive
dialogue with South Korea. There are
serious concerns on all scores. Defector
Hwang has reportedly told his debriefers
that North Korea already has a small
number of nuclear weapons. Full access of
the sort needed to confirm North Korea’s
nuclear activities has not yet been
afforded. And the DPRK continues to
behave in a belligerent fashion toward
the Republic of Korea (e.g., last week’s
attack in the DMZ, the April suspension
of talks with the South unless and until
Seoul provided guarantees of food aid,
the failed submarine-borne intelligence
collection operation in September 1996,
etc.). On those occasions where the U.S.
or its partners in this venture complain,
the North threatens to resume its nuclear
weapons program and/or engage in other
hostile actions until the matter is
dropped — or otherwise resolved to
Pyongyang’s satisfaction.

The Bottom Line

Against this backdrop, it should come
as no surprise that, despite the scant
return on its diplomatic and financial
investment in North Korea, the Clinton
team maintains that it is “satisfied
with [the DPRK’s] performance,”
according to Charles Kartman,
Acting Assistant Secretary of State for
East Asian and Pacific Affairs. ⁽³⁾
Such a statement can only reinforce the
DPRK’s conviction that it can fend off
the need for systemic reform, continue
amassing offensive weaponry and euchre
the West into meeting its food,
humanitarian and energy requirements.

If North Korea is allowed to engage in
similar tactics to secure still further
concessions in the upcoming Four-Party
talks, the Clinton Administration will
bear responsibility for enabling
Pyongyang further to avoid systemic
reforms while building up its threatening
military capabilities. As the
Administration appears incapable of
resisting Pyongyang’s stratagems, it
behooves the Congress step into the
breach.

Congressman Chris Cox, chairman of the
House Republican Policy Committee and a
long time member of the Center’s Board of
Advisors, is expected shortly to offer
two amendments aimed at doing just that.
The first Cox amendment would modify the
FY1998 Agriculture appropriations bill so
as to prevent the use of U.S. funds for
the direct delivery of food aid to the
government of the Democratic Peoples
Republic of Korea (DPRK). It would,
however, allow assistance through the
World Food Program or private
organizations registered with AID. The
second would amend the Foreign Operations
appropriations bill, so as to prohibit a
$25 million appropriation for energy
assistance contemplated in the 1994
U.S.-DPRK Agreed Framework. Such an
expenditure cannot be justified as long
as the North Korean military is using
large quantities of fuel oil — some of
which has, in the past, reportedly been
diverted from provided supplies — to
conduct massive, offensively oriented
training exercises or other actions that
threaten to put at risk American or
allied forces in and the civilian
population of South Korea.

The Center for Security Policy
commends Representative Cox,
for amendments he has developed to
minimize the chances that food aid and
fuel oil to North Korea will wind up
strengthening and perpetuating its
despotic regime. While some argue that
the effect of such actions will be to
harm innocent North Korean civilians, as
a practical matter, the only prospect
those civilians have for real relief will
come when the policies and
practices of the present North Korean
government are changed once and for all.

– 30 –

1. “Does
Beijing Know Something,” Defense
& Foreign Affairs’ Strategic Policy
Monthly Report, May/June 1997.

2. See “U.S.
Says It Will Double Food Aid to North
Korea,” Washington Post, 15
July 1997.

3. In testimony
before the East Asian and Pacific Affairs
Subcommittee of the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee on 8 July 1997.