Bush-Roh: One Last Chance for North Korea?

The real news from the Roh-Bush meeting is starting to surface, after both administrations’ admirable job of slathering over all of the actual news with diplospeak. For the most part, this story seems to have gotten it right: Roh gets one more chance to convince KJI to come back to the table and negotiate in good faith. There may have been some ancillary agreements, too. Thus far, neither side is engaging in leaky angst to try to sabotage whatever deal was worked out. Nor has the “Bush is too hard-line” dog barked. It seems to suggest that Bush and Roh did in fact agree about the next few steps.

Initial Signs of a Roh-Bush Accord

The first hints about the tone of the meeting was the announcement by the Korean Defense Ministry that it was likely to ask for an extension of the Korean deployment in Iraq. Although the deployment has been a relatively quiet affair, with the unit hunkered down in a “safe” Kurdish area, it’s a move that won’t come without political costs to Roh among his America-loathing base. Politicians presumably don’t expend political capital when it’s unnecessary to do so, or without the expectation of some countervailing benefit. Given the timing of the announcement, one reasonable theory is that Roh seeks to use the Iraq deployment as an inducement to extract concessions from Bush on North Korea. The fact that such an inducement is considered necessary is telling.

The second indication was the relative lack of visible demagoguery or exploitation–so far–of the traffic accident that took the life of a Korean woman near Camp Casey. The next question will be the extent to which Roh controls his own Red Guards.

The Terms

UPI, among others, reports that Bush agreed to give Roh one more chance to induce North Korea back to meaningful talks. UPI’s take:

Friday’s summit between Presidents Roh Moo-hyun and George W. Bush has placed the ball in North Korea’s court, they said, noting the question now was how North Korea would respond. “It is high time for North Korea to make a decision,” Roh said Monday after returning home from Washington.

In the meeting, Roh and Bush agreed on offering North Korea a security guarantee and substantial aid in return for scrapping its nuclear programs, South Korean Foreign Minister Ban Ki-moon said. Bush also pledged to build “more normal relations” with Pyongyang if and when the nuclear standoff is resolved. South Korean officials described Bush’s offer of “normal” relations as meaning the establishment of diplomatic ties.
. . . .

Professor Jhe Seong-ho of Chung-Ang University in Seoul said the United States has given a “last chance” to North Korea to address international concerns about its nuclear ambitions. If North Korea fails to come up with corresponding steps, it could face tougher measures, he said.

Unless North Korea moves toward compliance, South Korea can suffer fallouts as Roh has pledged to use inter-Korean dialogue to persuade the North to return to talks. In their meeting, Bush told Roh he was expecting inter-Korean talks to serve as an effective channel to resolve the nuclear issue, South Korean officials said.

The last part almost suggests that Bush has handed it off to the South Koreans, preferring to stand back and let Chong Dong-Young bang his head against the wall or empty the South Korean treasury. The report also suggests that South Korea may soon to offer the North some sort of bold new proposal, which will no doubt be much like the bold old proposal.

Low Hopes

So how is the prognosis? Poor. First, the United States is obviously in no mood for considering the resumption of talks to be any sort of accomplishment, and again stressed the need for Pyongyang to come prepared to agree to something.

“When they do return to the talks, we want North Korea to be prepared to talk in a substantive and serious way about how to move forward on the proposal we have on the table. And that’s where our focus is,” McClellan told reporters.

See that? Whatever bold proposal South Korea may be considering, the United States doesn’t appear to be offering one of its own. After all, North Korea never responded to our last offer, which already gave away far too much.

And how has the North reacted? By reminding us that it’s building more nukes, and by issuing murky new demands, which it calls “creating conditions and an environment for their resumption. What conditions? The Asahi Shimbun thinks it knows–Pyongyang reportedly wants to be accepted as a nuclear power, like India and Pakistan. The Bush Administration appears certain to reject that. The North also wants George Bush to wear a ball gag and a feather boa to his next press conference:

The [U.S.] official ruled out a demand Washington state its willingness to live in peaceful coexistence with the North. “We don’t want to be reduced to a circus animal doing an act, being told to jump through various hoops or whatever at the behest of the North Koreans,” he said.

Does Rhetoric Tell Us Anything?

On that note, some would have us believe that rhetoric matters very much. The Chosun Ilbo, for example, is unjustifiably optimistic over Bush’s second use of “Mister” Kim, while it ignores the other signs. I’ve never been a fan of measuring rhetoric to gauge the diplomatic positions of conniving diplomats and politicians who concern themselves with tangibles rather than emotions, but the rhetorical atmosphere isn’t all that promising:

At the recent Asia Security Conference held in Singapore, Rumsfeld malignantly slandered the DPRK, asserting its regime is keen on the arms buildup only and it is a miserable country,” the spokesman said. “This clearly tells he is an imbecile quite ignorant of diplomacy, dialogue and negotiation. . . . The remarks made by Rumsfeld against this backdrop can be uttered only by a stupid who does not know what is politics.

Nice colorful language; it doesn’t appear to have come from here. No one has ever accused Rummy of being a diplomat, but Condi Rice isn’t exactly containing her thoughts about Kim Jong Il, either:

Asked if she thought Kim was sane during an interview with MSNBC’s “Hardball with Chris Matthews,” Rice replied: “I don’t know. I’ve never met the man.” The interview was taped on Monday and was to be broadcast on Tuesday.

It’s a fairly mild statement, but hardly in keeping with the obvious goal of the Administration, which is to dodge blame for the inevitable breakdown (and then again, what could she say?–that the man’s a model of stability?). It’s silly and superficial to believe that rhetoric makes a significant difference to tough, calculating negotiators like the North Koreans, but we happen to be stuck with silly and superficial leadership in South Korea.