The Sunshine Policy: More than a Flesh Wound
Do you suppose I’m the only commentator struggling with the loss of the words “fallout” and “bombshell” to describe North Korea’s nuclear declaration? Times like these certainly have a way of separating those who can live without their toolbox of cliches and those who cannot.
I confess that I love running around tossing frags into the chat rooms at OhMyNews, whose journalistic incompetence, easily-exposed errors and biases, and blissfully illogical loopiness make it the most entertaining publication in Korea.
Reading the Hankyoreh, however, requires as much discipline and dedication as reviewing mortgage paperwork during a taping of “Girls Gone Wild.” The Hani is a stultifying, self-righteously wrong party diktat, the official mouthpiece of the Korean left, a publication that takes itself as seriously as, well, North Korea. I read the Hani the way a juror looks at autopsy photographs. It is, on occasion, a solemn duty as your source of insight (for which my compensation thus far has been a whopping 17 cents; those ads really must go, I suppose). Anyway, that duty confronted me today, because I had to see, as did you, just exactly how North Korea’s nuclear declaration and diplomatic walkout is somehow America’s fault, since to the Hani, what isn’t?
Today, OhMyNews and the Hani await further instructions in stunned silence.
I’d add that I couldn’t find any reactions in their Korean editions, either, which was a welcome reprieve. The best pickings to be found are from the Hani’s editorial of 7 February, just before Kim Jong Il farted in the diplomatic elevator (which was headed for the loading dock in any event, if you want to torture an uncouth analogy a bit more).
The way Bush used very moderated comments about North Korea to avoid upsetting it is being interpreted as a desire on the part of the US to get a new round of talks started. The ball is now in the North’s court, and all that’s left now is the North’s final decision.
If the talks are truly work [sic] to resolve the North Korean nuclear issue, North Korea and the United States will each have to make mutual concessions in good faith. If the North is going to give up its nuclear program, the US must guarantee the North’s system and make appropriate compensation. There must not be a repeat of the same insincerity as in the past, where talks are opened only for there to be no substantial discussion.
Several reactions here, the first being–“compensation” for what? I wonder if the Hani boys are simply borrowing North Korea’s vocabulary, since my dictionary defines “compensation” as “[s]omething, such as money, given or received as payment or reparation, as for a service or loss.” Terms like reparation and loss suggest some wrongful U.S. conduct causing that loss, by which I can’t quite make out whether the Hani means our wrongful failure to let North Korea successfully complete (1) its conquest of South Korea, (2) its nuclear arsenal, or (3) its slaughter of its “excess” population. Another reaction is that the Hani telling Pyongyang that the ball is in Pyongyang’s court is like insisting that a cannibal to use the small fork for the salad. As Douglas Adams put it, “When the revolution comes, they’ll be the first ones against the wall.”
And of course, the Hani expects Bush to “guarantee the North’s system.” The “system” to which they refer is this one, lest we forget that repellent fact for even a moment.
Smarter Than He Looks
The soundtrack of a tragedy is not all a dirge, however. We can still enjoy wondering how the Hani will squirm out of saying that “Bush used very moderated comments about North Korea to avoid upsetting it,” which seems to put up a significant barrier, to say the least, to the Hani managing to blame W for the failure of the talks. They will find a way, of course. But when they do, you and I will extract that much more amusement from mapping it.
Three days ago, I could only have shaken my head at the idea that W’s statements about North Korea had been wimpy enough to draw approval from the Hankoryeh. Yet today, I’m starting to wonder if W wasn’t fairly shrewd about this. No doubt realizing that the six-nation talks were headed for the Bridge of No Return, W may have guessed that “moderate” statements would soon provide useful cover from turtlenecks, diplomats, and former allies who would again abandon all factual context to blame W’s own imprudent candor for the breakdown. Some of them appear to have been wrong-footed by it all, and it’s not just the Hani, either:
By heightening the stakes in a two-year standoff, North Korea has signaled it has little interest in giving up its nuclear programs for relatively minor upfront concessions from the Bush administration — and appears to be gambling that the United States and its allies will ultimately accept the idea of a nuclear North Korea.
At each step of the way in the crisis, the government in Pyongyang has carefully crossed once-unthinkable thresholds, with little apparent consequence.
This isn’t from Fox, either. When words like this come from two hard-core turtlenecks and Bush skeptics like the WaPo’s Glenn Kessler and Anthony Faiola, you know that North Korea has perplexed even those who would forgive it its tresspasses.
I’ve always believed that many of W’s opponents have misunderestimated him; in this case, it’s just possible that those of us who support him may have done so.
I heard somewhere–I think it was Saturday Night Live–that during a lunar eclipse, the ancients (Lothar of the Hill People, for one) believed that the moon god was devouring the sun god. There’s no astronomical analogy for a celestial event that devours both Moon (as in Ban-Ki) and Sunshine (as in policy), except for just plain old darkness, I suppose. Chalk it up to the temptation of eponymy. When it comes to a discussion of North Korea, here’s your analogy. Not very funny, just dark. And true.
Thus, South Korean Foreign Minister Ban Ki-Moon is already touching down in Washington for five days of pleading with the heavens to bring back the sunshine at midnight. Perhaps Mr. Moon fears that he will not be credited if the sun rises again according to its inevitable course. Specifically, he is meeting with Condi Rice, the NSC, and anyone he can find to plead for more concessions to North Korea to save the illusion that engagement can change the North Korean tyrant class from sociopaths into benevolently authoritarian capitalists. What concessions, you ask? The WaPo explains:
North Korea demanded a bilateral dialogue with the United States Friday, a day after it declared itself a nuclear power, but the Bush administration quickly rejected the demand and insisted that Pyongyang return to six-party talks on its nuclear program.
To be fair to Mr. Moon, I don’t know that he’s supporting the North Koreans’ specific demand, although I suppose I see it coming. Suggesting that the U.S. should make any signficant concessions at this point illustrates the cycle by which Pyongyang breaks its agreements, issues new demands, and waits for the turtlenecks and the South Koreans to demand that we unilaterally concede to them. W is having none of it, of course. To W and “hard-liners” such as your correspondent, North Korea’s announcement appears to have been wheeled in on a gilded dessert cart.
In South Korea, too, the point is taken. While the Hani’s editorial writers remain secluded, medicating their apoplexy with smelling salts, the conservative Chosun Ilbo, South Korea’s largest-circulation daily, all but declares the Sunshine policy dead. The neutered and tainted conservative opposition, the Grand National Party, appears to smell blood in the water and is making a political issue of the need for a tougher North Korea policy. Its parliamentary floor leader called the left-leaning ruling Uri Party’s North Korea policy “useless” and blamed Uri for alienating the United States.
Reactions in Japan and Elsewhere
Japan, surprisingly, is saying that it will hold off on imposing sanctions, perhaps predicting that U.N. sanctions are increasingly likely, and would offer Japan a politically inexpensive, “multilateral” way to impose them. The New York Times’s James Brooke offers another plausible explanation for Japan’s apparently restrained reaction:
Japan, meanwhile, performed a deft political kabuki today, urging his bellicose neighbor to join disarmament talks, while letting the clock run on a new law that will bar most North Korean ships from Japanese ports starting March 1.
“I understand calls for imposing sanctions are growing,” Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi told reporters in Sapporo, about 600 miles across the Sea of Japan from North Korea. “But we have to urge them to come to the talks in the first place.”
Don’t miss Brooke’s analysis of the specific impact those sanctions may have, particularly on the North Korean apparatchiks who like to dole out used Japanese consumer goods on the Great Leader’s birthday (and we’re all waiting to see who will step out onto the reviewing stand later this month), and on North Korea’s seafood industry.
More reactions here in the Korea Heraldand brace yourself for plenty of predicatable stupidity about how we ended up where we did. The one irrecoverable error in U.S. policy was to allow North Korea to keep its nuclear program intact, even after we knew they were cheating. In fact, North Korea’s possession of nukes–as contrasted with its brazen declaration of their possession–isn’t news and hasn’t been since the end of the Clinton Administration. If I fault Bush for anything, it’s for pursuing diplomacy long after it had become both pointless and dangerous, and although I can understand the diplomatic and political reasons why he stalled, history won’t view them kindly if we end up hosing North Korean uranium down the gutters in DuPont Circle.
I’m even prepared to be charitable to Jack Pritchard today, notwithstanding my previous criticism of himfor telling the North Koreans exactly where our newly contracted “red line” was drawn–at the issue of proliferation. In retrospect, the fact that even a guy like Pritchard laid it down in fluorescent enamel only served to give the red light camera’s images better resolution. Yet now that North Korea has apparently crossed it, the red line shows fresh signs of tampering. Here’s a final juicy morsel from the WaPo today:
[An unidentified offical from an Asian nation] said North Korea was running out of ways to draw attention to its nuclear program, having already said, with little effect, that it had a “nuclear deterrent.” Thursday’s declaration appeared intended to raise pressure on the United States without crossing a “red line” by conducting a nuclear test, he said.
“If they exploded a nuclear bomb, it would definitely go to the U.N. Security Council, and even the Chinese would not object,” the official said. “But without a nuclear explosion test, their credibility is doubtful. . . . We should not exaggerate the situation.”
Funny, I thought the red line extended a bit further than that. Red lines don’t work if the only way you prevent others from crossing them is by sweeping them up before the opponent plows through. This is football, not curling.