In Case You Weren’t Listening for the Last 20 Years: North Korea Swears Never to Disarm

The North Korean regime seldom makes a promise, in my opinion, that it really intends to keep. For instance, I don’t think it has the slightest intention of spending all that confiscated cash on meat soup instead of yachts and other goodies of that sort for The Great Fishwife. But I think, for once, they’re sincere when they say this:

North Korea vowed Friday (February 19) not to give up nuclear arms for “petty economic aid”, claiming it has only developed them to counter what it called US nuclear threats, according to South Korea’s Yonhap News. The North’s official Korean Central News Agency said the reason the communist country pursued nuclear arms is not to bargain them for economic benefits but to counter “the deepening US nuclear threats.”

“We have tightened our belts, braved various difficulties and spent countless (amounts of) money to obtain a nuclear deterrent as a self-defense measure against US nuclear threats,” the KCNA said in an editorial monitored in Seoul. “We never meant to seek ‘economic benefits’ from someone or threaten others.” [….] “Only fools will entertain the delusion that we will trade our nuclear deterrent for petty economic aid,” the KCNA said. [Korea Herald]

Fortunately for Kim Jong Il, Washington in general and the State Department in particular are densely populated with delusional fools. Some of them would still extend a lifeline to Kim Jong Il’s regime for nothing more than returning to six-party talks, despite the fact that North Korea’s return to the talks by itself is of no consequence if it’s determined to concede nothing, or to abide by nothing it concedes.

I seize on statements like this, while engagement-minded analysts have seized on occasional statements that disarmament was Kim Il Sung’s dying wish. Who’s right? Me, of course! First, Kim Il Sung is dead; second, the wording of those statements is consistent with preconditions that make them completely meaningless; and third, I have two decades of well-documented insincerity going for my side of this argument.

Despite some very naive-sounding rhetoric from Candidate Obama, the Obama Administration’s policy, unlike Bush’s, has been consistent with a growing acceptance that North Korea has no intention of disarming. I have several working theories for this, which aren’t mutually exclusive: (a) President Obama really doesn’t care enough about North Korea policy or foreign policy in general for the Christine Ahn types to have any influence over him; (b) just as Roh Moo Hyun exerted undue influence on Bush’s Korea policy, Lee Myung Bak’s manifestly more competent diplomacy may have undue influence over Obama’s; (c) North Korea’s own behavior in early 2009 made further concessions politically toxic; and (d) a fairly hard-headed group, probably in the NSC, has dominated the making of policy toward North Korea.

The real test will be what the Administration decides to do as its affirmative policy once they accept that diplomacy alone will get us nowhere. That will require an epiphany that the regime itself is the problem, that China is not helping us, and that it would be better for China to deal with some unrest on its border than for North Korea to continue exporting weapons and WMD technology to terrorists and their state sponsors (the latter risk being one that China’s rulers gleefully accept).