Author Archive E-mail Author Send to a Friend <% dim printurl printurl = Request.ServerVariables("URL")%> Version

September 3, 2003, 9:00 a.m. The Art of No Deal Processing with North Korea.

ne of the first unofficial acts of the Six Party talks in Beijing was an agreement among the participants that they should all do it again sometime. Next time in Moscow? Perhaps it took some of the pressure off. But as I noted the last time I addressed this issue, some people in this country are in a hurry to get a deal signed with the North Koreans. Take, for example, the argument in "Talking is Better Than Fighting," which appeared in the New York Times Tuesday. It laid out a situation in which the president has two options: the "hard line" and "engagement" (which could also be called the "soft line" for the sake of symmetry, but I will be polite.). Hard liners seek to delay resolution of the issue in order to force a military confrontation later. Proponents of engagement say we have little choice but to bite the bullet (so to speak) and parlay fairly and promptly if we expect North Korean concessions. Given the approaching election, and the anxiety of other states in the region, not to mention the potentially dire consequences of war, the president has to get this issue off the table. The authors state that "engagement — backed by deterrence — is the only realistic option."

This seems to me to be a specimen of the school of thought that believes that the aim of negotiations is to reach a deal, and failure to do so means the talks were a flop. The classic example is Reykjavik in 1986. To the orthodox arms-control crowd, Reagan's great sin at was his unwillingness to take Mikhail Gorbachev up on his surprise arms deal, which would have necessitated the United States abandoning missile defense. This was a concession the president wisely chose not to grant, and he walked away, to the consternation of the diplomats, and astonishment of the press. (We forget how dreadful it was in the pre-cable days.) It seemed incomprehensible. What was Reagan's problem; didn't he understand what he was being offered? For those who see deals as the necessary outcome of talks, Reagan blew it. However, Gorbachev's proposal was a bad bargain. Reagan displayed both vision and courage when he turned it down. The SDI program — and the inability of the Soviet Union to spend enough to match it — was one of the essential factors in bringing about the U.S. victory in the Cold War. It, in turn, ushered in the greatest era of nuclear-arms reduction in history.

So reaching a deal is not a good in itself. Besides, agreements are only as dependable as the people who make them and the North Koreans have not demonstrated much creditability. They are particularly shameless about it. When faced with evidence they were violating the provisions of the deal concluded with the ever-optimistic Clinton administration in 1994, the North Koreans simply abrogated it. When accused of violating the terms of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, they pulled out. A new agreement might contain stringent verification and inspection provisions (under the rubric "don't trust but verify"), but if the history of arms control teaches anything it is that the "hiders" have a huge advantage over the "finders;" and if the balance begins to tip the other way, North Korea will say game over and demand a new agreement on more favorable terms. This instrumentalist view of international agreements may not come as a surprise to students of Soviet history, but if there are any of them in the State Department, they were probably reading Lenin for the wrong reasons.

The DPRK negotiating posture is hard to nail down. They decry U.S. emphasis on dismantling their "nonexistent" nuclear program, but vow to continue it if economic sanctions are not lifted. They threaten nuclear retaliation against any use of force with hundreds of weapons, then claim to have none (and to have never said they did), nor any means of making any, but they will test their nuclear weapons if we don't believe they have them, or not. Yet, they have stood fast on their primary demand — that no issue can be resolved except in a bilateral framework, beginning with a nonaggression pact between the two countries. Their insistence on the pact is puzzling. Nonaggression is an explicit obligation under international law and requires no bilateral treaties to bring it into force. Furthermore the history of such agreements is not auspicious — the Molotov/Ribbentropp Pact of 1939, for example, simply established the line of scrimmage for the approaching Nazi/Soviet war down the middle of Poland. But the emphasis on bilateralism is easy to understand. The North Koreans are fearful of the involvement of the United Nations, not only because of the precedent of Iraq, but the precedent of 1950. North Korea was the first country the U.N. ever invaded.

In some respects, it is in North Korea's interest not to reach a deal, at least not in this venue. They could be happy with establishing a "process," that is a series of institutionalized talks within an agreed and limited framework. A process does not commit any government to anything more than maintaining the process itself, which again is usually seen as an unqualified good by traditional negotiators. "To jaw-jaw is better than to war-war," the otherwise levelheaded Winston Churchill famously said. He made the comment in 1954 during negotiations over ending the Korean War, which were only concluded by Eisenhower's threat of nuclear compellence. This raises the question of exactly who is deterring whom these days. The North Koreans are threatening war at every opportunity and attempting to instill fear lest the U.S. seek more deliberate ways of achieving arms control — i.e., engagement by other means. And the longer the process continues, the greater the North's potential nuclear capabilities, hence the greater capability to deter.

The North Korean question is much greater than the nuclear threat, though clearly the proliferation issue engenders the greatest risks. The nightmare scenario is North Korea becoming the center of a nuclear black market, helping other states attempting to achieve atomic-power status, and, more worrisome, supplying weapons to terrorist groups and other non-state actors with grudges against the United States. (I can hear the counterargument now — al Qaeda would never deal with North Korea because they are ideologically incompatible. Wake up people.) But North Korea is also involved in all the vogue rogue-nation activities — narcotics production and distribution, smuggling, counterfeiting, piracy, kidnapping, and slavery. North Korea styles itself a sovereign state, but is really a vast criminal enterprise. It is a Stalinist totalitarian system without the idealism. Rather than focusing solely on the nuclear issue, the United States should be fashioning a comprehensive Korean strategy, one that takes in all the issues of our relationship with the two Koreas and seeks to reach lasting solutions based on something more than scraps of paper.