Monday, May 12, 2008
The government of Kim Jong Il is threatening to build more nuclear bombs, and its rhetoric is growing ever more impatient. The problem is that nobody knows what Kim really wants.
Jan 14, 2003 | While bellicose rhetoric about "World War III" and a "holy war" continues to pour out of North Korea, early tantalizing signs of a peaceful way out of the Asian crisis are also emerging by the day.
The past weekend was all fire and brimstone from the communist capital of Pyongyang, with eccentric leader Kim Jong Il and his secretive team moving in fast succession to abandon the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty on Friday and then hint they might fire up North Korea's ballistic missile testing program. Kim's current arsenal of 100-plus missiles can easily reach Japan, but the Pentagon fears he's developing an intercontinental missile, the Taepo Dong-2, that could one day target Alaska, Hawaii and possibly California.
More recently Kim, who kicked international weapons inspectors out of the country in December, even hinted he might reactivate the process of extracting weapons-grade plutonium from spent fuel rods at the nuclear reactor in Yongbyon. That dramatic move would completely alter the current crisis and mean North Korea could start producing 20 nuclear bombs annually.
"That's the real hang-up for the administration," says Bill Drennan, deputy director of research for the U.S. Institute of Peace. "North Korea still has another card to play -- the spent fuel rods."
At the same time, there's some optimism, at least outside the administration, that low-level talks between the two countries might soon begin at the United Nations. That according to New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, the former Clinton administration official who hosted North Korean representatives last week. For the first time since the crisis began, Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly on Monday let North Korea know that renewed energy assistance would be available from the U.S. if North Korea agreed to abandon its nuclear weapons programs.
Meanwhile, China and Russia seem to be inching their way toward a more central role in the drama, with Russia now working on the framework for a possible way out of the crisis. The problem with Russia's proposed solution -- that North Korea abandon its nuclear weapons program in exchange for international assistance that the impoverished country needs -- may be that it simply makes too much sense.
The Bush White House, like the Clinton one before it, has discovered the unique challenges of dealing with Kim, the master of mixed messages. That's why, as it stands right now, experts suggest the unfolding crisis could easily tip in either direction -- in favor of a diplomatic breakthrough, or a mad rush toward nuclear armament by North Korea.
The U.S. has most of the international community on its side, but the increasingly divided White House -- split along its now familiar hawk-dove divide -- really has no idea where it's all heading. The possibility of a military strike on the Korean Peninsula still seems remote, but the Bush administration, which would much rather be focusing on toppling Saddam Hussein right now, cannot simply hope Kim will come to his senses and extinguish the crisis.
Meanwhile, some Washington veterans must be struck with a sense of dij` vu, since the current North Korean showdown looks an awful lot like the one that unfolded 10 years ago during President Clinton's first term. That crisis, too, featured expelled weapons inspectors and threats of plutonium processing; the two countries came dangerously close to war until former President Jimmy Carter parachuted in and helped craft a diplomatic solution, which the North Koreans then proceeded to violate.
Then, as now, it wasn't easy to decipher what the North Koreans hoped to accomplishment from the crisis they manufactured.
"If anybody can figure out what North Korea wants, they win a prize," says Mitchell Reiss, dean of international affairs at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Va.
"North Koreans bring to mind the old saying, 'Even paranoids have real enemies,'" says Reiss, who was chief negotiator for the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization from 1995 to 1999. "They're isolated -- geographically, economically and psychologically. They literally don't get out much and don't quite understand how the world works."
"It's very hard to understand what they're trying to tell you," adds Joel Wit, the U.S. coordinator who put together the 1994 agreement with North Korea freezing its nuclear weapons program. "They're very cryptic in their language. You might sit through a three-hour presentation and just three or four lines were meant to be of real importance."
"Ultimately they're looking for security," suggests Drennan. Indeed, high on Kim's public wish list in the last week has been a nonaggression pact signed by the Bush administration. This seems to have replaced North Korea's long-held interest in signing a formal peace treaty with the U.S. to mark the end of the Korean War. Like that nonstarter, a nonaggression pact seems like a long shot, since the U.S., a member of the United Nations, simply does not do bilateral aggression agreements. The international assumption is that absent a just cause, all members of the U.N. will refrain from attacking other countries.
Of course, the swarming troop movements in the Gulf region, along with Bush's designation of North Korea last year as a member of the "axis of evil," may have prompted North Korea's latest bout of paranoia.
"They're pissed and confused," says George Lopez, director of Policy Studies at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. "You're dealing with a group for whom deception is the norm for foreign policy and they're particularly insecure regarding the United States. The axis of evil sent them over the top."
Kim's government also seems upset that two light-water nuclear reactors the U.S. agreed to help build in '94, in return for North Korea shutting downs its more dangerous Yongbyon nuclear facility, still have not been completed.
Angry that relations with the U.S. have not evolved as he hoped since '94, and anxious about the new Bush doctrine of preemption, Kim seems to be pursuing contradictory policies. "We need to force North Korea to make choices between being a significant nuclear actor, or having better relations with U.S. and the international community," Reiss says. "They want to have both."
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