Archive for Six-Party Talks

Agreed Framework III Watch

January 19, 2012 Diplomacy, Famine & Food Aid, Six-Party Talks 2 comments

There isn’t much to say about this that I haven’t already said so many times that I’m tired of saying it:

North Korea on Wednesday signaled a willingness to freeze its uranium enrichment program in exchange for “confidence-building” incentives from the United States such as a suspension of sanctions and a resumption of food aid.

The statement, carried by North Korea’s state-run news agency and attributed to a foreign ministry spokesman, was the first sign that North Korean heir Kim Jong Eun might be open a deal discussed last year, and then put on hold following the death of leader Kim Jong Il. [WaPo]

For extra irony, North Korea is accusing us of politicizing food aid and demanding that we earn their trust. It’s the little things like this that sustain me.

So what we learn from this is that Jang Song Thaek is receptive to taking our money, which I’m sure plenty of people will want to confuse with openness to reform or actual disarmament. Really, if the Obama Administration wants to make this kind of deal, I wish it would hurry up and do it now, in time for it to be an issue in the presidential election. But for the record, I strongly doubt that we’ll see an Agreed Framework III this year, for reasons of domestic politics in the U.S. and North Korea (South Korea’s government might have an interest in looking conciliatory right now).

Up until now, Obama’s North Korea policy has been notable for its absence of awfulness, but his placement of the likes of Wendy Sherman, Sung Kim, and Glyn Davies in the State Department’s top Korea policy-making roles is profoundly disturbing and suggests a pre-positioning of people who are inclined to execute a hard turn toward appeasement once the presidential election is over. All of the “insider” accounts I’ve heard tell me that Obama came into office fully prepared to appease, even on the very heels of the collapse of Agreed Framework II. It was only Kim Jong Il’s awful behavior during the next two years that shifted him toward sanctions (however imperfectly implemented) and “strategic patience.” Assuming no colossal provocation intervenes, my guess is that the patience will run out in December of 2012.

Christopher Hill making sense

December 21, 2011 China, Diplomacy, Six-Party Talks 2 comments

No, really. You’ll be as amazed as I was.

Sung Kim Through the Retrospectoscope

June 6, 2011 Appeasement, Diplomacy, Six-Party Talks, U.S. & Korea 6 comments

kimsung-photo_150_1.jpgThe announcement that Sung Kim will be our new U.S. Ambassador to South Korea suggests continuity if a comparison of his background to Kathleen Stephens’s tells us anything. Like Stephens, Kim is a protege of Chris Hill* and comes from the State Department’s Korea Desk, which has long favored appeasement, agreed frameworks, and a peace treaty with North Korea, and had previously been caught trying to water down language in the State Department’s annual human rights report.

My own fears about Stephens — who had been a strong advocate of a peace treaty with the North during the Roh years — went largely unrealized because of North Korea’s recent aggressive behavior, and because of the profound influence South Korean elections have on U.S. policy toward North Korea. Like Stephens, you can expect Sung Kim to represent the State Department’s desire for Agreed Framework III, and you can expect that desire to remain latent absent a major change in North Korea’s behavior or South Korea’s government.

It is disturbing, nonetheless, that Sung Kim’s entire rise to policy prominence arises from the flawed and failed Agreed Framework II, and that Kim increasingly became the public face of the agreement as it collapsed. As of June 2005, Sung Kim was a virtual unknown in Korea policy circles in Washington, and the brevity of his official bio reflects this. The Dong Ilbo reports that his Korean name is Kim Sung-Yong, is a graduate of Loyola Law, attended the London School of Economics, and served briefly as a prosecutor in Pennsylvania before joining the State Department as a career foreign service officer. (In Washington, you’ll sometimes hear talk that the Ambassador to Korea should be a political appointee, as is the case with most higher-profile diplomatic posts.)

Here, in brief, is a chronology of Sung Kim’s role in Agreed Framework II. As you read this, ask yourself if this is merely the work of a civil servant doing the work assigned to him or whether this represents something more like the obsessive pursuit of a fantasy. Read more

Huzzah, I’m finally a moderate!

December 3, 2010 Diplomacy, Six-Party Talks, Washington Views, Yeonpyeong Attack 2 comments

Not being a frequent reader of Foreign Policy, I don’t know much about the leanings of the particular bloggers there, although most would call that publication a stalwart of the “realist” view that had so recently become fashionable in Washington, before Al Qaeda in Iraq was squeezed down to a small nub of its former self, and before it became evident that North Korea, Iran, and China weren’t prospective negotiating partners after all. This week, we read one FP contributor calling for us to give up on the six-party talks, and another, Will Inboden, coming to the realization that we need leverage against North Korea to have any prospect of productive negotiations:

In the case of North Korea, the lead officials in the Obama administration realize that they have little leverage, in part as a result of the concessions made in the last two years of the Bush administration (such as removal of the DPRK from the state sponsor of terror list, and lifting of the Banco Delta Asia sanction along with returning Kim Jong Il’s $25 million of ill-gotten gains) that failed to secure a meaningful improvement in North Korea’s behavior. Refusing to negotiate from the current posture is a good starting point and helps turn North Korea’s (possible) desire for talks into a source of some small leverage. To gain more leverage, reimposing the financial market sanctions on the private accounts of the regime’s leaders would help, as would revisiting the state sponsor of terrorism list. Equally important will be exploring ways to change China’s cost/benefit calculation for its support of the DPRK. Perhaps after these kinds of steps are taken, it will be time to talk again.

I knew that if I waited long enough I could be a moderate, too! The consensus, it seems, has washed right past the self-professed Militant Wing of the Korea blogosphere, and we are all neocons again. I don’t mean to pick on these gentlemen, by the way, for their delayed arrival at the idea that negotiation alone is no way to deal with people like the North Koreans. Words like these from Inboden are especially welcome in wresting this debate from the shrill voices who dominated it for too long:

Let me be clear — I support the White House on this aspect of their North Korea policy. But I also think this might be a good occasion for reflection by commentators on all sides, myself included. It seems that the same voices that so indignantly condemned the Bush administration for its occasional refusal to engage in unconditional negotiations with unsavory regimes (such as Iran) now fall silent when the Obama administration does the same thing. Perhaps this is another example of what Ross Douthat perceptively described earlier this week as the “partisan mind” at work.

It is also a reminder to partisans and observers on all sides to resist caricaturing each other’s positions. I hope this latest impasse with North Korea at least helps elevate the policy debate beyond the hackneyed and simplistic “negotiate or not” rut. As any serious policymaker knows, in practice negotiations are one tool in the policy arsenal.

I’ve been as guilty as caricaturing as anyone. It’s fun, and some people just insist on making caricatures of themselves. But to expand on what I said here, I’ve never been a fan of Americans who blame each other for Kim Jong Il’s outrages (here’s a particularly discredited example). I believe those Americans vastly overestimate our influence over Kim Jong Il. Kim Jong Il’s perceptions of President Obama or Lee Myung Bak may or may not have played a role in his recent decisions, but it’s more likely that once he correctly dismissed our long-lost capacity to deter him, he made his own decisions for domestic reasons. Or, maybe because he’s just not all there anymore.

Actually, I think the administration is playing the talks issue exactly right — refusing to talk when North Korea makes war on its neighbors, but displaying some willingness to talk in the future should talks ever show real promise. I doubt that talks with North Korea will show any promise as long as the Kim Dynasty persists, but if the six-party talks become five-party talks, they might become a useful forum for pressuring China, and for doing the important diplomatic business of averting conflict over North Korea in the event of a sudden or “rolling” collapse of the regime’s authority.

China’s conduct is more rational (if malicious) to us, and more responsive to diplomatic and economic stimuli. In China’s case, there may be more that all of our recent presidents might have done to present an image of an America willing to attach consequences to China’s support for Kim Jong Il. For those Koreans that this regime hasn’t yet killed, there is still time for America to learn that.

Meanwhile, it’s heartening to see conservatives again taking up the idea that (lacking real military or diplomatic options) we should try to undermine the regime from within. Michael Gerson has been particularly persist about this:

There is, however, a third possible outcome that has not been considered seriously enough – an option other than possible war or strategic humiliation. South Korea, America and Japan, employing their technology and vast wealth, could attempt to undermine the North Korean regime from within. An aggressive, sustained campaign to break the North Korean information embargo, expose the barbarity and corruption of the regime to its own people, promote the work of dissidents and defectors, and encourage disloyalty among North Korean elites may or may not work. But the alternatives are increasingly unattractive.

Hat tip to Theresa.

Update: A better-informed reader tells me that I’ve quoted the more conservative “Shadow Government” blog, as opposed to FP’s “The Cable,” which represents a view I’d tend to associate with that publication. That certainly weakens my case that these posts prove that Washington is moving my way, although I do believe that that is the case, for many other reasons. The most important of those is Kim Jong Il’s behavior, but a close second is the Obama Administration’s admirable refusal to reward it. I hope that by now, they’re thinking hard about ways to deter it.

Obama: Bush Wimped Out on Kim Jong Il

November 12, 2010 Appeasement, Diplomacy, Six-Party Talks, U.S. Politics 4 comments

Just how weak does your diplomacy have to be for Barack Obama, recipient of the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize, to call you out for it? I do not mean to imply that the answer to this question is an obvious one. I ask it because of this statement by President Obama, at a joint news conference with President Lee Myung Bak, after this Veterans’ Day speech at my former duty station:

After delivering his remarks, Obama met with South Korean President Lee Myung-Bak. Appearing at a joint press conference with the South Korean leader, Obama said that the six-party talks, which were first launched in 2003 to address North Korea’s nuclear program, had degenerated in 2005 when they became “talk for the sake of talking.” Obama did not appear eager to restart the talks under the current circumstances.

“President Lee and I have discussed this extensively and our belief is that there will be an appropriate time and place to re-enter into six-party talks,” Obama said. “But we have to see a seriousness of purpose by the North Koreans in order to spend the extraordinary time and energy that’s involved in these talks. We’re not interested in just going through the motions with the same result.” [Real Clear Politics, Scott Conroy]

My, my, how times have changed. President Obama’s reversal on North Korea has to be the most amazing policy shift since . . . President Bush’s reversal on North Korea. No regular reader here will be surprised that I agree with the President’s criticism, but I think we all share some astonishment at the source.

George W. Bush’s North Korea legacy is to leave the Republicans outflanked on North Korea, where President Obama’s policy is, on paper, far tougher than Bush’s, even if it’s still insufficient in many important ways. The new House Republicans now find themselves in a place where they first have to repudiate President Bush’s weakness before they can criticize some of President Obama’s legitimate shortcomings on the list of state sponsors of terrorism, on human rights, and on the administration’s displays of weakness toward China, which have only aroused China’s predatory nature. One way the House Republicans are likely to do this is to move to have North Korea put back on the terror-sponsor list, though they realize that their bill will die on John Kerry’s desk. Another rumor on Capitol Hill has it that when Ileana Ros-Lehtinen becomes Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, Chris Hill will be called before the Congress to explain his broken promises to, deceptions of, and withholding of critical information from those in attendance. But of course, Chris Hill wasn’t the President. In the end, the President is responsible for letting Chris Hill do what comes naturally to Chris Hill.

Some Republican-leaning snarks have even begun asking, while referring to President Bush, “Miss me yet?” You can put me down for “not yet.” I didn’t care for the overheated, conspiratorial fulminations against President Bush either the far left or the far right. I don’t care for its polar opposite against President Obama. I believe that Bush and Obama both make their decisions with a higher ratio of good faith to self-interest than, say, Clinton or Nixon might have. Rather than seeing Obama as inflexibly ideological, I see him as a typically pliable politician who is moving away from his left-leaning origins, because he sees those origins for what they are — an obstacle to his re-election. In doing so, he has redeemed many of President Bush’s most controversial decisions on national security, including many he criticized as a candidate. I suspect that this part of Bush’s legacy is already shifting in the public consciousness.

This doesn’t mean most people will soon consider Bush a successful president. Bush probably did the best job he could with the intellect and charisma God gave him. But it was his stubbornness in sticking with his decisions that made the most outsized mark on his legacy, with mixed results. Bush tended to select mediocre people — Powell, Rice, Hill, Harriet Miers, and many of his top generals during the first years in Iraq — and would stick with them even after they performed poorly. But at one exceptionally consequential moment, that stubbornness was redeemed when Bush ignored the collective advice of our vastly overrated foreign policy brain trust and implemented The Surge.

The Reaper Comes for Cho Myong Rok

November 7, 2010 Appeasement, Diplomacy, Media Criticism, Six-Party Talks 3 comments

cho-myong-rok.jpg

Top North Korean military official Jo Myong Rok, a longtime confidant of leader Kim Jong Il who traveled to Washington in 2000 on a then-unprecedented goodwill mission, has died. He was 82. Jo, who was vice marshal of the Korean People’s Army and held the No. 2 post on the powerful National Defense Commission behind Kim, died Saturday of heart disease, the official Korean Central News Agency reported from Pyongyang. [AP, Hyun Jin Kim]

Other experienced Asia hands will tell you that this “unprecedented goodwill mission” could also be seen as a calculated snub of President Clinton, by which Kim Jong Il showed his higher “place” by sending a lower-ranking official to meet with him as an apparent equal, afforded a status many heads of state don’t get. The matter of just who was showing the good will here is only the first inaccuracy in the AP’s report.

It was later that day, at a banquet in his honor hosted by Albright, that Jo invited the secretary of state to visit Pyongyang, and, in her return toast, Albright accepted. However, the reconciliatory mood between the wartime foes shifted dramatically after former President George W. Bush took office, taking a tougher line against North Korea. Relations have also been strained over North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, and Pyongyang and Washington still do not have formal diplomatic ties.

But the report’s description of the meeting’s diplomatic context is skewed and riddled with half-truths. In fact, the meeting came as North Korea’s cheating on the first Agreed Framework became so impossible for even President Clinton to deny that he couldn’t certify to the Congress that North Korea was in compliance with the agreement. Consequently, Congress wouldn’t appropriate funds to finish building the light water reactors that were also part of the agreement. In due course, this became a suitable excuse for North Korea to stop even pretending to abide by the agreement, though the North Korean custom is to repudiate diplomatic agreements early in American presidencies and then string each administration along for its full duration.

Reading the AP report and knowing little else, you could be forgiven for thinking we wouldn’t be in the mess we are now if only we’d had superior Manbearpig Awareness in 2000. But there’s a hole in this narrative that can be measured in kilotons. By 2007, a weary President Bush finally gave in and signed the second Agreed Framework. It wasn’t much different from Clinton’s deal, and the results weren’t much different, either. Two years later, four months after President Obama’s inauguration, and five months after Barack Obama gave his acceptance speech for his Nobel Peace Prize, North Korea took us right back at Square Zero, though it now says it wants to return to the six-party talks for the right price. Today, the uranium enrichment program that supporters of Clinton’s North Korea policy spent a decade in denial about is progressing as fast as the centrifuges can spin.

Anyway, as a small public service, I thought I’d step in to mention what Hyun Jin Kim didn’t think you really needed to know. Granted, I don’t necessarily expect the wire service that gave us Charles J. Hanley to describe the predictable sequence of North Korea’s playbook in an obit for some bloody-handed apparatchik, but wouldn’t the AP have written a more accurate report if it didn’t feel compelled to shoehorn in so many excess adjectives and half-truths?

Hat tip: Theresa

Good Riddance, Chris Hill

August 19, 2010 Appeasement, Six-Party Talks No comments

Regular readers already know that Christopher Hill is one of the few career civil servants I write about here whom I loathe almost unreservedly. The first job of an American diplomat is to represent American interests and values. Hill did neither. In his parting remarks before heading off into obscurity — if history is kind to him — Hill encapsulates in one statement what made him the best diplomat North Korea ever had:

“We know the Iraqis don’t have nuclear weapons,” Hill said. “It’s a good thing. Probably Iraq is easier because at the end of the day what can you say about North Korea? You really can’t ask them to reform because asking them to reform is asking them to be destroyed. So what will be the future there? Whereas, in Iraq, I can see the future.” [Yonhap]

And by “reform,” he might as well mean “disarmament.” Indeed, it’s pretty evident he did mean disarmament, if you recount Hill’s oily salesmanship of Agreed Framework II even as the North Koreans steadily reneged on it. Hill’s belated concession that he “can’t see” North Korea’s future is really a concession that he has no vision of a North Korea that ceases to brutalize its people, attack its neighbors, and arm terrorists. But this is the vision that Hill was ostensibly charged with realizing, and it’s the vision he aggressively sold to President Bush in accumulating his power to give away so much in his negotiations with North Korea.

Of course, Hill is absolutely correct when he says that North Korea doesn’t dare to reform … or disarm. I don’t fault him for perceiving the truth. I fault him for concealing it from everyone from President Bush down to his adoring media harem who were largely too stupid to grasp that on their own. Was Hill’s perception of North Korea’s interests that much more acute than his perception of America’s interests, or did Hill simply conclude that appeasing North Korea’s interests aligned more closely with his own than advancing America’s interests? I’ll leave that question to others. What’s evident to me is that for Chris Hill, having a deal — any deal — was the object that eclipsed all others. Stated differently, Chris Hill’s diplomacy certainly seemed to be all about Chris Hill’s ambition. I’ve met plenty of people who would say the same in private, but Senator Sam Brownback was the only person with the spine to act on it.

Despite the lack of any competent reporting on why Hill left Baghdad barely a year after a difficult confirmation, I can’t bring myself to believe that someone this ambitious would be retiring to an academic job in the outer provinces if he’d been seen as an effective ambassador in Iraq. In the end, the best service Hill gave to his country was to demonstrate the futility and dishonesty of everything he advocated.

Just don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Another Nuke Test in North Korea?

April 20, 2010 Six-Party Talks, WMD 3 comments

North Korea is preparing for a third atomic test that may come in May or June, South Korean broadcaster YTN reported on Tuesday, an act that could further isolate Pyongyang and complicate already troubled nuclear diplomacy.

South Korean Foreign Minister Yu Myung-hwan dismissed the report, saying Seoul had seen no evidence, and the U.S. State Department also voiced doubts about its accuracy.

“If North Korea was making such preparations, there would be related circumstances that can be detected … there is no intelligence on such circumstances,” Yu told a news briefing.

“We are skeptical of that report,” State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley told reporters in Washington. [Reuters, Jack Kim and Jon Herskovitz]

Translation: we prefer not to believe this.

I don’t know how strong the evidence is, but it certainly would fit with North Korea’s recent behavior. But every bomb they test is one less they can use. Or sell.

A Bulb Comes on at The Washington Post

April 13, 2010 Diplomacy, Media Criticism, Six-Party Talks One comment

There’s debate over whether such Chinese aid would be useful in restarting diplomacy or unhelpful in easing the pressure that alone might someday spur a deal. What’s most likely is that it doesn’t matter: that the North Korean regime will never give up its nuclear weapons, because it has nothing else — no legitimacy at home or abroad. As in Iran, the problem is the regime more than the weapons. That’s not an argument against engagement with Kim Jong Il any more than with the mullahs. It is an argument for clear-eyed engagement, though — with a recognition that in the long run only a change in the nature of North Korea’s government is likely to solve this problem. [Washington Post Editorial]

Give yourself a smug pat on the back if it didn’t take you 20 years to figure this out.

North Korea and China Feast Amid Famine

April 9, 2010 Appeasement, China & Korea, Famine & Food Aid, Six-Party Talks 3 comments

As the food situation in North Korea continues to deteriorate for its most vulnerable, a South Korean NGO is sending 300 tons of flour and other supplies to help feed 12,000 “marginalized” people, including kids in 50 orphanages. The article mentions nothing about monitoring or nutritional surveys, so pray to a God they can’t that there will be a few dollops of gruel left for their begging bowls after all of the theft, diversion, and corruption.

Note, by the way, this seemingly significant fact near the bottom of AFP’s article: “Pyongyang has also rejected some aid.” It’s too bad the reporter doesn’t tell her readers whose aid was rejected (America’s), why the regime rejected it (its aversion to monitoring), and how many kids it might have fed.

Still, the leader of the world’s most egalitarian society can’t let a little famine interrupt his feast, so he’s throwing a banquet for the Chinese Ambassador to thank his government for helping him undermine U.N. proliferation sanctions. China is not only doing this by funding Kim Jong Il’s regime directly; it is also using its considerable influence in Washington, asking that “sanctions enforcement be dropped as a precondition for their return to multilateral talks.” If past experience is any guide, the State Department and the Washington think tank chorus would be ebullient about this, since few of them see any higher purpose than talking, even if North Korea sees no higher purpose than stalling and obfuscation. Kim Jong Il finds talks to be just one useful vehicle to achieve this.

Unfortunately, China might get its way even as the sanctions start to put real pressure on the regime. Amid North Korea’s obscene coexistence of feast and famine, President Obama may be preparing to offer North Korea an aid-for-talks deal, that is, food aid in exchange for simply returning to six-party talks. Marcus Noland, who is more concerned about feeding the hungry, doesn’t like where this is headed:

Noland warned such deals to bring the North back to the table could have a negative effect in the long run and that rejoining the talks may simply be aimed at securing external support in order to control the shaky internal situation.

“Unfortunately, this kind of linkage is likely to degrade the humanitarian aid program as well as provide North Korea an opportunity to parlay self-created disputes in one arena into concessions in another, as well as undercutting (South Korea, which has) acted with admirable restraint,” he said. [Korea Times]

Not only do I share Noland’s distaste for linking humanitarian aid to nuclear diplomacy, the more time passes, the more I doubt that the humanitarian benefit of food aid is really doing much good for the North Korean people. Having watched North Korea’s food situation closely for the last six years, I’ve seen far more linkage between the food situation for ordinary North Koreans and the functioning of markets than to the arrival of food aid, which we’ve always suspected the regime of diverting, whether at the macro or the micro level. Not only do I have little confidence that aid would feed those who really need it, I have little confidence that the State Department would demand effective monitoring, such as nutritional surveys that ensure that the recipients are regaining health and weight as the aid program continues. North Korea has always rejected effective forms of monitoring as a condition of U.N. or U.S. food aid programs. Why should we think that North Korea will be more flexible when we’re also linking this negotiation to our demands for talks and disarmament?

If we accept that food aid has receded as a significant part of North Korea’s food supply, Open News delivers some rare good news: North Korea’s resilient markets have largely recovered from the Great Confiscation, and for the time being, the price of rice is even falling. I tend to suspect that these reports are more reflective of local and temporary conditions, they’re still a very good sign that Kim Jong Eun won’t repeat his father’s performance by causing an inaugural famine.

For what it’s worth, at least some in the Administration continue to signal their intent to adhere to a hard line on sanctioning the regime that has created all of this misery:

The United States will continue to take a tough line on North Korea at a time when the latter is a “broken state,” John Hamre, former U.S. deputy secretary of defense and now leader of a Washington-based think tank, said Wednesday.

“The posture (of the United States) is we’re happy to negotiate with North Korea if North Korea agrees that its current strategy is wrong,” said Hamre, president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), at a forum in Seoul. “It continues to rely on nuclear intimidation and that’s not a solution, it’s not a strategy and we will not accept it.” [....]

“We do not need to beg the North to work with us. We need to just be very confident,” he said, adding that perhaps the best tactic would be to hold up South Korea’s success for those in the North to see. [Korea Times]

It would be unfortunate if Noland is right that the Administration will let State seize defeat from the jaws of victory again. It’s probably too soon to assess the deal or its full significance unless and until we see the details and scale. Still, I often suspect that the East Asia Bureau is so obsessed with making a deal with Kim Jong Il and redeeming all of the effort it has invested in failure that it can’t stand the thought of North Korea simply ceasing to exist.

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