North Korea Neutered?

North Korea has become renowned for it's bizarre, incredibly short statured leader with a taste for hilariously awful haircuts and an unhealthy obsession with film making that led to his kidnapping of some prominent Asian movie business personalities. On the political front Kim is characterized by blustery rhetoric and military saber rattling. His nuclear aspirations have been far from secret, and while CIA estimates believe that Kim is already in possession of several nukes with the capacity to create several more, and a single test already confirmed. So the US, along with China, Japan, Russia and South Korea has been involved in a six-way diplomatic session with North Korea for several years now in an attempt to placate Kim in a fashion that would get him to stop making more. It seems that some progress on that front has finally been made.

Now Bush has signed off on a deal that accepts North Korea's original position -- a "freeze" of its Yongbyon nuclear facility -- and requires Washington to move first by unfreezing some North Korean bank accounts. The agreement leaves until later dealing with such vexing issues as the dismantlement of the facility, North Korea's stash of weapons-grade plutonium and even North Korea's admission of the nuclear program that started the crisis in the first place.

As a result, the agreement came under attack yesterday, with conservatives labeling it a betrayal and Democrats charging that Bush allowed North Korea to become a nuclear-weapon state without gaining much improvement over a Clinton-era deal that collapsed during Bush's first term. But Bush pronounced himself "pleased" with the accord, and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, a prime architect of the accord, said it is just the beginning of a long process. "This is not the end of the story," she said, calling it the result of "patient, creative and tough diplomacy."
This is one area where I'm inclined to give the Bush administration the benefit of the doubt. Certainly the "axis of evil" comments made by Bush shortly after 9/11 aggravated an already tense situation with North Korea (by somewhat bizarrely aligning it with Iran and Iraq, three countries with very little in common at the time, let alone any sort of diplomatic "axis") but North Korea has not proven to be the most cooperative diplomatic partner. An earlier agreement between the US and North Korea forged under Bill Clinton granted North Korea economic concessions provided it adhere to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and while the US held up its end of the bargain Kim continued to develop his nuclear weapons program, a revelation that has tainted all negotiations with the country since its discovery. Kim's endless threats and missile tests, particularly those designed to antagonize both the US and Japan, have further complicated discussion. So the fact that any progress has been made at all is a good sign.

"All of us have been arguing -- engage, engage, engage," said John W. Lewis, a Stanford University professor who has repeatedly visited North Korea, most recently in November. "It had to begin with something like this, and it has gone far beyond what any one expected. It is really quite astonishing."

At the conservative Heritage Foundation, analyst Bruce Klingner said in a report that "the Bush Administration will be vulnerable to criticism that it has not only abandoned its principles, but that it did so while allowing North Korea to augment its nuclear weapons inventory." North Korean leader Kim Jong Il "used his characteristic mixture of military provocations, brinksmanship and crisis diplomacy to gain benefits for a return to the status quo ante and promises of future steps," Klingner wrote.
It's not clear what steps conservatives like Klinger would prefer the US in dealing with the volatile and unpredictable Kim. Well actually, that's not true, it's entirely clear, as Bill Kristol outlined in an earlier memo where he made sure to definitively state that "regime change in North Korea and reunification of the Korean peninsula are our ultimate policy goals." Right, because "regime change" has been such an effective diplomatic approach so far.

Everyone should breathe a sign of relief that apparently the Bush team decided not to listen to the wingnuts on this one.

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