Chris Hill Screws Up North Korea Diplomacy, Demands Promotion

A recent consensus has formed around the collapse of the latest round of denuclearization talks for North Korea: that the U.S. State Department’s North Korea policy, formulated by Christopher R. Hill, assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, had a disturbing lack of concern for human rights and had been largely ineffective in obtaining any substantial security concessions from the North Korean regime.

The Kim Jong-il-run enclave saw right through the past months of talks as a final push by the George W. Bush administration to enhance its foreign policy legacy. In fact, policy in the past few years has been marked by a lack of understanding of the nature of the totalitarian regime. [Joseph Hong in the Korea Times]

In any meritocracy, Chris Hill would be off to stamp passports in Bamako, but in the U.S. State Department, it is possible to be an abject failure at promoting the vital interests and values of your nation and still be a raging success at promoting yourself:

“Hill was recently approached with the offer to serve as a ranking envoy to North Korea. But my understanding is that he declined it,” a well-placed diplomatic source said. RFA said it had sent an email to Hill for confirmation, but has yet to receive his reply as of Friday.

As for the reasons for Hill’s lukewarm attitude for the offer, another diplomatic source said it is because the post is lower in ranking than what Hill holds now. “Hill currently holds Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs and chief U.S. unclear envoy. He doesn’t have a reason to seek a lower position. [Korea Times]

Hong’s article, by the way, is well worth reading in full. He also does a good job of explaining the current issues surrounding the supposed elevation of the Special Envoy for human rights issues, which may in fact be a thinly veiled scheme to subsume the position into the job of the nuclear negotiator.