February 11, 2005, 9:41 a.m.
The Pyongyang Puzzle
What should the U.S. do about North Korea’s latest announcement?

North Korea's abrupt announcement yesterday that it has manufactured nuclear weapons and that it would not return to the U.S.-sponsored six-nation talks intended to prevent the isolated nation from developing such weapons is quite puzzling — at least initially. Making one or the two announcements would have made great sense. But not both.

It seems, after all, that the current negotiations need have no more effect than previous ones, if the North Koreans simply used them as a PR device and holding action while forging ahead with weapons development on the sly, as they have quite evidently done in the past. The only thing to prevent such a course of action would be if China told the North Korean ruling party otherwise.

The Chinese, however, appear to be genuinely surprised by the latest action of its unpredictable client state. Clearly, they cannot and will not be pleased by this turn of events.

And if the North Koreans were to enter negotiations after announcing that they had developed working nuclear weapons it would surely strengthen their hand. The talks would then focus on what to do about the weapons, not whether to allow them to be developed.

Their action of yesterday fails to accomplish either of those things, and it isolates North Korea further from other nations. In particular, it is sure to infuriate the United States and Japan, two of the three major powers in the region. After hearing the statement by the North Korean foreign ministry, the governor of Tokyo scoffed and openly dared Pyongyang to fire a missile at Japan.

A possible interpretation of North Korea's action, and one that I suspect will receive much attention in the United States and other interested nations, is that the notoriously flaky Kim Jong-Il and his coadjutors have simply flown off the handle and done something stupid. It is certainly possible.

Nonetheless, I doubt that this is all there is. If there is a calculation by which North Korea's action makes sense, the law of Occam's Razor suggests we should apply it. I believe there is such a possibility.

It is unlikely mere coincidence that North Korea made this announcement and pulled out of talks just a few days after the elections in Iraq. In fact, it seems quite plausible that the Kim regime saw the recent comments by Secretary of State Rice as a warning that the United States was going to come after North Korea, and sooner than anyone might think.

The statement by the North Korean foreign ministry said Pyongyang has "manufactured nukes for self-defense to cope with the Bush administration's undisguised policy to isolate and stifle" the nation. Thursday's New York Times reported that Pyongyang's statement "zeroed in on Dr. Rice's testimony last month in her Senate confirmation hearings, where she lumped North Korea with five other dictatorships, calling them 'outposts of tyranny.'"

It seems plausible, then, that Pyongyang came to the conclusion that the United States and a coalition of other nations was about to do something that would ultimately lead to the fall of the Kim regime and a reunification of Korea on terms determined entirely by South Korea and its powerful allies. Today's statement, then, was Pyongyang's way of forestalling such action by raising the stakes radically, in suggesting that any U.S. move to impose its will on North Korea would lead to the use, however inefficient and elementary, of nuclear weapons by Pyongyang.

It is not difficult to imagine what possible steps by a U.S.-led coalition North Korea was worried about — starting with economic sanctions and going on from there. With Iraq potentially out of the way, the United States would be free to turn its attention toward North Korea, and the numerous statements by U.S. government leaders, including President Bush himself, criticizing the Kim regime over the years must surely have made that a plausible notion in Pyongyang's estimation.

And where did Pyongyang think China fit into this scenario? Evidently it envisioned Beijing's protesting mightily but ultimately sitting on the sidelines, reluctant to endanger its enormous and lucrative foreign trade with the West by siding with North Korea.

If this is indeed something like the thought process that led to Thursday's announcement, the implications for the U.S.-led response are murky. America can ill afford to let this pass without some form of action. Of course, anything substantive, including measures as apparently mild as a call for economic sanctions, will only assure Pyongyang that its interpretation of recent U.S. statements has been exactly correct. But without some sort of sanctions it will be impossible to get North Korea to even participate in talks, much less push the Kim regime to enact internal reforms and lessen its bellicosity toward the rest of the world.

The U.S. must simultaneously assure Pyongyang that we have no intention whatever of bringing down their government but that if North Korea does not suspend development of nuclear weapons we will indeed bring down their government. Squaring that circle is the first great test for President Bush's second term and Rice's tenure as secretary of state. If there is an answer short of eventual war, it is by no means clear at this point what it could be.

— S. T. Karnick is senior editor for the Heartland Institute, associate fellow of the Sagamore Institute for Policy Research, and coeditor of The Reform Club.

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