5/26/09

North Korea reinserted itself at the top of the global security agenda with a nuclear test and missile launches this weekend. While the machinations and motivations behind the Hermit Kingdom’s decision-making have always been opaque, these latest actions come in the midst of growing uncertainty over the state of the North Korean regime – with Kim Jung-il looking increasingly feeble and speculation growing about power-jockeying among relatives and military leaders.   The nuclear test comes on the heels of Pyongyang’s failed ballistic missile launch, and South Korea’s announcement that in response it would join the Proliferation Security Initiative, a web of 90 countries pledging to intercept nuclear materials being illicitly shipped by sea.  But some of the problem’s roots lie in the failed approach of the Bush administration. While the Clinton administration had used carrot-and-stick negotiations to ensure that North Korea did not develop nuclear weapons, the Bush administration abandoned direct diplomatic engagement and adopted a bluster-based approach centered on the pledge that North Korea would not go nuclear on their watch. However, it was not long before  North Korea evicted inspectors and went nuclear on the Bush administration’s watch. The Bush administration, like its Republican and Democratic predecessors, was then forced to recognize the lack of good military options – when one North Korean launch can kill millions in South Korea or Japan – and seek diplomatic talks. The Obama Administration has matched pledges to “stand up” to North Korea with success in rebuilding international unity and offers of direct diplomatic engagement. But with North Korea already isolated from the international community, there are few satisfying policy options. In another indication that conservatives have gone off the deep end, leaders such as Newt Gingrich, talk of sending in “a small team” or “lasers” to take out North Korea’s nuclear program, while others call for broader military action, which experts agree would trigger a land war in Asia.  The only responsible policy options center around heightening China and Russia’s role in containing the North, while maintaining the possibility of direct talks.

Amidst signs of regime’s growing unease, North Korea takes provocative action, with missile launches and nuclear test.  In a show of force that drew widespread international criticism, North Korea conducted its second nuclear test on Monday and “reportedly fired two more short-range missiles into waters off its east coast Tuesday, undeterred by the strong international condemnation that followed its detonation of a nuclear device and test-firing of three missiles a day earlier,” according to the Washington Post.  The New York Times attributed North Korea’s second round of missile launches to “South Korea’s long-delayed participation in the Proliferation Security Initiative,” which came after Monday’s nuclear test.  More generally, North Korea’s actions seemed motivated by a range of factors, including a desire to improve its nuclear capabilities through testing, a perceived need to draw attention from the Obama administration, and most strikingly, by domestic uncertainty.  “When North Korea suddenly announced Monday that it had conducted a second nuclear test, the initial view across the region was that this had been yet another defiant gambit by the North to extract more concessions from Washington,” said the New York Times.  But as the Times went on to report, “Monday’s test is the culmination of a shift toward a more assertive foreign policy, which some analysts say seems to have begun not long after the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il, is believed to have suffered a stroke in August. Speculation about a successor has focused on his youngest son, Kim Jong-un, which would continue the family dynasty to the third generation — one unique among Communist nations...‘Kim Jong-il wants to show that he has given his nation mighty nuclear power,’ said Yoon Deok-min, a senior researcher at the Institute of Foreign Affairs and National Security, a Seoul-based research organization. ‘This test was absolutely a domestic demonstration.’” [Washington Post, 5/26/09. NY Times, 5/27/09. NY Times, 5/25/09]

Failures of the Bush administration have compounded the challenge from North Korea.  
The nuclear problem in particular is partially traceable to the Bush administration’s willingness to undermine global efforts to fight proliferation and its specific policy failure in North Korea. The Washington Post notes that “When Bush became president in 2000, Pyongyang's reactor was frozen under a 1994 agreement with the United States. Clinton administration officials thought they were so close to a deal limiting North Korean missiles that in the days before he left office, Bill Clinton seriously considered making the first visit to Pyongyang by a U.S. president.  But conservatives had long been deeply skeptical of the deal freezing North Korea's program --known as the Agreed Framework -- in part because it called for building two light-water nuclear reactors (largely funded by the Japanese and South Koreans). When then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell publicly said in early 2001 that he favored continuing Clinton's approach, Bush rebuked him.” During the first 6 years of his administration, President Bush reversed the Clinton-era policy of engaging directly with North Korea – in favor of an approach the New York Times described as an effort “to push the country to collapse and then to try to seize its leaders’ assets.”  By the time the Bush administration had belatedly opted to re-engage, North Korea had developed enough material for approximately 10 nuclear bombs and even tested a device in 2006. According to the Times, “A C.I.A. assessment concluded that North Korea had built one or two nuclear weapons during the administration of the first President Bush, and in the spring of 2003, while the United States was focused on Iraq, the North expelled inspectors and harvested the fuel for six or more weapons. The second Bush administration said it would never ‘tolerate’ a nuclear North Korea, but by the time it left office, none of that fissile material had been recovered.” [Washington Post, 10/09/06. NY Times, 5/26/09]

North Korea presents a challenge with few good options – but some clearly bad ones.  With tens of millions of people living in range the autocratic and opaque  regime’s weapons, bipartisan experts have long concluded that there are no good military options for confronting Pyongyang.  “Despite the fact that the world powers seem to be pulling together to condemn North Korea's actions, administration officials readily acknowledge that they have limited options in how to proceed,” writes Slate.  David Sanger of the New York Times reports, “as they had meetings every few hours — including a lengthy session in the Situation Room on Monday evening — some of Mr. Obama’s aides acknowledged that the administration’s options were limited.”  And Britain's ambassador to the U.N., John Sawers, told the AP, "I agree that the North Koreans are recalcitrant and very difficult to hold to any agreement that they sign up to. But there is a limited range of options here.” Conservative attempts to evade this reality have drifted into the absurd.  When North Korea launched a missile last month, Newt Gingrich invented a non-existent laser capacity and ignored concerns of a retaliatory attack: “I don't think North Korea should be allowed to launch missiles. I think we should take whatever preemptive actions are necessary... We in the West, in the democracies, have a propensity to lie to ourselves, just like we did in the 1930’s about Adolph Hitler and Nazism... I would use whatever methods were necessary for the missile never to be launched... If I can’t find a way to find to bribe somebody to blow it up, I’d find a way to have either a small team to go in or a way to deliver a laser or another kind of device.”  But as Victor Cha of CSIS says, “While a strike would indeed set back the North’s missile program, the two to three years gained from a strike pales in comparison to the potential wider fallout from such an action. The retaliation could be artillery launched on Seoul, or the firing of a Nodong missile on a city in Japan. Then what? Does the United States fulfill its treaty commitments and go to war?” Instead, as David Sanger reports, “Much depends, they said, on the new president’s ability to persuade Russia and China to go significantly beyond the strong condemnations that they issued Monday against North Korea, their former ally and a vestige of cold-war communism... To devise a common response, administration officials began planning to meet with Asian leaders, and eventually with the central player in the diplomatic drama: China.” [Slate, 5/26/09. New York Times, 5/26/09.  AP, 5/26/09. Newt Gingrich, 4/02/09. Victor Cha, 3/09/09]

What We’re Reading

North Korea fired more missiles following its nuclear and missile test this weekend.

Bombings killed three Americans in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

Pakistan lifted the election ban on opposition leader Nawaz Sharif.

Defense Secretary Gates says that the Taliban has momentum in Afghanistan.

Testifying in court, Burmese pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi denied the charges against her.

Israel will propose a settlement compromise: it will stop building and dismantle over two dozen “wildcat” settlements in the West Bank in the next two weeks if the U.S. drops its objection to continued building in existing government-sanctioned settlements.

Iranian moderate candidate Mir Hussein Moussavi drew huge crowds at a campaign stop in northern Iran.

Riots erupted in India after the killing of a Sikh leader in Vienna on Sunday.

A report from a group of Chinese scholars challenges the government line on Tibet.

Russia plans to sell low-enriched uranium to the United States.

Commentary of the Day

The New York Times argues against protectionism and for foreign trade to help the economy.

Gideon Rachman analyzes the U.S. resistance to austerity.

Eugene Robinson describes the differences between Obama World and Cheney World.

Anne Applebaum discusses the British MP expenses row.