OFK Interview with Nicholas Eberstadt: After the Talks

My deepest thanks to Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute for agreeing to a telephone interview for OFK readers. Eberstadt is one of Washington’s most highly regarded Korea experts. The interview ended up lasting a full hour. Nothing has been edited out save one abortive “I don’t know” answer, although I may have I missed a few words because I’m no stenographer. Still, this is pretty close to a verbatim transcript. Nick Eberstadt is one of those rare individuals who speaks in complete sentences.

All comments in brackets and hyperlinks are my own. My questions focused on what may well be the terminal phase of the six-party talks, clarifying questions Eberstadt raised in his latest piece for The American Enterprise, and discussing the question that everyone’s assiduously avoided thus far: just exactly what are we to do if the talks demonstrably fail?

OFK: I have a wager going that North Korea will not even show up for the talks scheduled for August 29th, give or take a day. Care to join the pool? There’s a $20 house minimum.

NE: I always lose at bets, so I’ll decline. But the DPRK has a good reason to return if it chooses to do so. Its posture has already opened, still further, the wound in the ROK-US alliance. The ROK Foreign Minister declared last week that his government in principle had no problem with a peaceful nuclear program in North Korea. I suppose that program would proceed in tandem with [North Korea’s] peaceful chemical weapons program, and its peaceful biological weapons program. If I were a North Korean diplomat, I’d come back to the table just to see the U.S. and ROK diplomats eat each other alive over that difference. I can’t predict if the North Koreans will return, but if they do, they will have fun watching us squirm.

OFK: Say I lose. We all know you have a stock ticker in your office that tells you what the Administration is thinking. So just how patient is this Administration willing to be?

NE: [Laughs] I would have guessed that the Administration’s patience would have limits. Here’s my reasoning: a lot of the Administration’s patience since January, during the second Bush term, has revolved around trying to get the [American] North Korea diplomatic team all in place. The obvious missing piece through most of 2005 was the appointment of a U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. That appointment would be indispensable for any recommendation of sanctions to the U.N. Security Council. With the recess appointment of John Bolton, the entire U.S. roster is now in place. With the latest talks, I would have thought that the Administration is not only probing the North Koreans’ intentions, but laying the groundwork for alternatives–demonstrating that further talks would be fruitless, and pulling together allies and interlocutors for a further pressure campaign. But [implicitly denying the presence of the stock ticker] that would just be my guess.

OFK: You’ve suggested that we should declare the talks a failure now. But given the importance of making this someone else’s fault in the eyes of as many people as possible, what’s the harm in waiting another week or two, since this has become a charade anyway?

NE: I’m not privy to the U.S. government’s playbook on dealing with the North Korean nuclear crisis. If the U.S. government’s playbook runs along lines you’ve just laid out, that seems entirely unobjectionable. The important point is that U.S. diplomats and policy-makers be under no illusions that failure can be turned to triumph by describing black as white such a sufficient number of times.

OFK: In your June piece for The American Enterprise, you urged the administration to define failure for the talks and be prepared to declare failure when we get there. So this is going to be a multi-parter. . . . First, help us with your definition of failure.

NE: I would define failure as a refusal by the DPRK government to agree to the objective of complete denuclearization, and/or refusal to engage in forthcoming and cooperative disclosure on the entire past history of the DPRK nuclear effort.

OFK: Ambassador Chris Hill has talked about North Korea having to make a fundamental decision about giving up its nuclear programs. Does that, or anything else, suggest that the Administration finally gets it?

NE: I don’t know Ambassador Hill well, I’ve only met him. People talk highly of his skills and acumen. That’s promising language. It’s necessary but not sufficient to show that people in U.S. government get the problem, but it doesn’t reveal his innermost thoughts about the U.S. government’s game plan.

OFK: How does Chung Dong-Young’s latest affect the odds of any success at the talks?

NE: It does affect the success. It affects the North Korean chance for success. He’s helped those out quite considerably. Almost every time he’s opened his mouth, he’s strengthened the North Korean position [pauses to think]. I can’t think of one exception off-hand.

OFK: How has the State Department’s outlook changed since Secretary Rice replaced Secretary Powell?

NE: This is a little bit of Kremlinology–looking at an organization from afar. My distant observer’s perception is that an untrusted team has been replaced by a trusted team, from the White House perspective. The Powell team was kept on a two-foot leash, mainly because of a lack of White House confidence, I would guess. We now have a transmission belt of Bush loyalists on North Korea policy. Secretary Rice, John Bolton, Robert Zoellick, and Ambassador Hill are all people who enjoy the trust of the White House, and the President personally. I surmise that a second-term Bush Administration diplomatic team will have more lee-way on making initiatives in [of?] consequence.

OFK: Did The Korea Times ever clarify its misstatements about your position on the alliance to your satisfaction?

NE: [Laughs] Oh, you read that, did you? Well, they published my letter, which was very gracious, and also I got a very gracious and sincere apology from the author. It was an honest mistake. I think that the author simply confused my position with that of one of the other authors from the June TAE issue.

OFK: You oppose a complete USFK withdrawal, but then, just what level of alliance with South Korea do you think serves long-term US interests? What mix, for example, of air, naval, and ground assets should we be aiming for?

NE: That’s a very important, deep, and complicated question. I am in principle in favor of a long-term U.S.-ROK alliance, because I’m convinced it can serve interests of both nations and those of peace and prosperity in Northeast Asia. That said, both sides must be in favor of the underlying principles and objectives of the alliance. It is possible to imagine circumstances under which the alliance would no longer be viable. I think Northeast Asia would be a much more dangerous place if we get to that juncture. I hope we don’t get there, but the momentum right now is not favorable.

NE: That said, I’m not a military specialist, and I should emphasize that I’m a newspaper reader when it comes to military operations and requirements. My general impression is that we have an immediate task of deterring a North Korea threat. Over the long term, we have the challenge of maintaining peace in Northeast Asia. At the very least, that will require U.S. air and naval power in the region.

OFK: Chris Nelson [author of the now-infamous Nelson Report] said that in addition to being funny and well-liked, you’re “rigid, didactic, and unwilling to admit that [your] frequent predictions about very specific actions or motives of Kim Jong-il turn out to be totally wrong.” Several questions based on this. First, has anyone spotted Chris Nelson recently? Second, what does “didactic” mean? Care to touch anything else in there?

[A slightly longer-than-expected pause preceded the awkward laughter I was anticipating]

NE: I don’t believe I’ve ever actually met Chris Nelson. “Didactic” means pedantic [OFK: well, that was no help, but click here and here] and schoolmasterish [oh].

NE: As for the rest of what he says, it’s certainly true that North Korea has not collapsed. I would have been one of the people laying odds on North Korea not being here today. There are reasons North Korea has managed to survive that I could not have even fantasized about ten years ago, such as the international rescue program that happened under Sunshine. I’d also note that I was one of the few people in the U.S. who argued that Roh Moo Hyun was electable, and that Sunshine was driving at the heart of the U.S.-ROK alliance. I haven’t heard many people disputing those arguments lately.

OFK: I want to move to the “what next” question, in the event the six-nation talks fail. In your latest piece, you said, “Washington should impose real-time penalties on Pyongyang. Can you elaborate on what you mean here?

NE: What we have to begin to do is penalize North Korea economically. The United States can increase North Korea’s economic penalties more or less unilaterially thru the Proliferation Security Initiative–working, of course, with those nations that have joined the PSI, and leading that coalition. We should be doing that anyhow. That’s just police work.

NE: We should also insist on a more humanitarian food aid program, which is to say a more intrusive and accountable food program, versus the one the World Food Program and others are kicking in for now. The current program feeds the North Korea government better than it feeds North Korea people. We should change that immediately.

NE: One other issue here is the need to confer more effectively with our European allies on international aid flows to the DPRK. Europe professes great concern for human rights in principle. North Korea is the worst human rights disaster on earth.

NE: The most important and difficult areas in aid flow are with South Korea and China. The U.S. needs to be much more effective in making its case to the South Korean public that aiding the North Korean state means endangering the South Korean state. The South Korean government is almost unconditionally supporting North Korea through its aid programs. That unconditional aid does not reflect the actual state of public opinion in South Korea; in fact, the South Korean public is deeply divided on the question of unconditional aid to the North. Making the case against unconditional aid to the North in various venues would be very helpful changing South Korean policies in this regard.

NE: China is another source of unconditional aid to the North. As long as Seoul is completely off the reservation on supporting North Korea through aid, China has much less reason to make hard choices on North Korea. The road to a stricter Chinese aid policy leads through Seoul. If we can convince South Korea to have a more rational, less emotional and ideological policy about aid to North Korea, we are more likely to succeed with China as well.

OFK: Did you see the story in this morning’s Chosun Ilbo on the survey of Korean youth?

NE: Yes.

OFK: What’s your reaction to that?

NE: Depending on how you phrase a question, you can get really imbalanced responses in one direction or other, particularly in South Korean polls. I think this is one of those cases, where the results have been exaggerated by the way the question was posed. That said, the point that many people in South Korea now look at the U.S. as a security problem and North Korea as a partner cannot be denied, and that’s a big problem for the alliance.

OFK: In your last piece in TAE, you said that “[t]he country [North Korea] is highly vulnerable to economic pressure . . . . Others would argue that a country as poor as North Korea is actually less vulnerable to economic pressure.

NE: I think that is empirically incorrect. I think it was last fall, I published an article called “The Persistence of North Korea. What I tried to show in that study is that North Korea’s unidentified foreign sources of funding had increased very substantially since 1998, since the Sunshine era commenced. In the mid-1990s, the DPRK was in famine, the regime was describing its situation as an “arduous march. That period ended precisely when this upswing in foreign funding commenced. North Korean economy is a bizarre, distorted, jack-assed contraption. I agree that if you study history, coercive economic diplomacy seldom achieves its objectives. But North Korea is so economically vulnerable that North Korea is an unusually promising candidate for economic pressure.

OFK: Why would China help us in the U.N.?

NE: We can’t know until we try, but my hunch is that Chinese leadership, in the final analysis, will have to be rational about its own interests in Northeast Asia, and an aggressive nuclear North Korea is even more subversive of Beijing’s interests than a pressure campaign against the DPRK that may involve Chinese risks.

NE: The reason I say this is that China’s exposure to North Korean brinksmanship entails the possibility of very real costs in China’s strategic situation and China’s domestic stability. If the DPRK emerges as an aggressive nuclear power, the nuclear disposition of Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan cannot be presumed to remain constant. Our ambassador in Japan has made this point. An aggressive nuclear North Korea will also invite responses in missile defense in South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan. None of these results is in china’s interest.

NE: I also mention that there’s a domestic concern for China. An aggressive nuclear North Korea could cause a business crisis in Northeast Asia–I don’t think it’s difficult to imagine how–leading to a downturn in trade, investment, and economic growth in region. It would only take a matter of months for this to lead to higher urban unemployment rates in china. If I read the newspapers correctly, China’s leaders are very concerned about stability these days. Rising unemployment is not the way to improve stability and reduce social tensions.