A Citizen’s Hell, but a Fool’s Paradise

Bill Richardson is the Governor of New Mexico, a former Secretary of Energy, a suspected presidential aspirant, and the latest of a series of highly intelligent men to make jaw-droppingly stupid pronouncements of diplomatic–and even humanitarian–optimism about North Korea. Richardson may well be a perfectly fine governor, but reasonable success at governance and bureaucracy in a society of laws and compromises does not necessarily qualify one to go eyeball-to-eyeball with bloody-minded sociopaths with nukes. Only in the foreign policy vacuum of the Clinton Administration could Bill Richardson have assumed so important a diplomatic role as negotiating the North Koreans out of their nuclear weapons. Only in the foreign policy vacuum of the Bush Administration could his role persist.

A political appointee to a low-profile cabinet position, Richardson rose beyond his modest position because he possessed something that Clinton’s entire foreign policy A-team–Christopher, Albright, Lake, Perry, and Berger–all lacked: the ability to hide a weak and gullible policy beneath a credibly strong and smart veneer. All qualifications are relative, and during the drought years of the Clinton Administration, Warren Christopher’s embalming fluid carried a particularly pale tint. The early 1990’s brought a pandemic of opportunistic mass killings: Kigali, Sarajevo, Mogadishu, Srebrenica, Chongjin. The sole standout in an otherwise uniformly feckless administration was Richard Holbrooke, the only Clinton foreign policy official of sufficient spine to negotiate with tyrants. Faced with his own set of recalcitrant murderers, Holbrooke walked out of Slobo’s parlor and called in airstrikes. It worked. Back in 1993, it might have worked on Pyongyang, too. Here, the Clinton Administration was the worst of all worlds: it invited miscalculation with weakness, and then nearly launched an extraordinarily risky military stike anyway. Then, at the last moment, it backed down and opted for any deal it could get.

The result? Clinton’s diplomacy with the North was partially subbed out to Richardson, who applied his affable, articulate credulity toward putting the best possible spin on Pyongyang’s lies, cheats, and outright provocations. The ambitious Richardson kept an unofficial channel open to Pyongyang long after the end of the Clinton Adminstration, thus allowing the governor of a small Western state to burnish his foreign policy credentials. Sadly, the policy vacuum also survived the change in administrations. What the Bush Administration gained by its realistic approach to the limitations of diplomacy with the North, it lost to internecine gridlock and indecisiveness. Enter an opportunistic Richardson, to whom The New York Times cocks an ear his way.

I’ll address Richardson’s comments on the Great Famine of 2006 first:

In the meetings, the North Koreans also agreed to allow most foreign aid workers to stay in the country. Last month, North Korea had given a Dec. 31 deadline for foreigners working for private aid groups to leave and had ordered the World Food Program to change its aid from “humanitarian” to “development.” “The North Koreans basically reversed their position on the aid issue, basically the date of expulsion is now not operational,” said Mr. Richardson. “I said, ‘You’ve got school lunches for kids.’ They said, ‘O.K., that’s development.’ ”

The World Food Program will be allowed to keep 30 foreign aid workers, slightly fewer than their current allotment. On Tuesday, Richard Ragan, the American who directs aid efforts for this United Nations agency, said the personnel cuts were forcing him to prepare to close all of the program’s 19 food-enrichment factories in North Korea. The program helps to feed about one-third of North Korea’s 22 million people.

Is this a great humanitarian victory? No. It is an illustration of how North Korea negotiates, and negotiates effectively, with gullible adversaries. Before Pyongyang announced the eviction of the aid workers and the food aid cutoff, there had been a rising chorus, including at this site, for stricter monitoring of food aid. I’ve already linked to Marcus Noland and Stephen Haggard’s comments on North Korea’s misallocation of food aid, and the reports by numerous international NGO’s that food was being used as a weapon against those outside the circle of political privlege, mainly those with “suspect” family backgrounds. Some, myself included, called for aid to be cut off unless Pyongyang allowed the kind of monitoring on which the WFP insists everywhere else on earth. In doing so, I weighed the risk that hungry people might lose the small amount of aid they were still receiving against the possibility that we could put a survival diet into the bellies of all of the hungry people in North Korea. What I couldn’t really know is how much–if any–unmonitored food aid most North Koreans ever receive, or the sudden loss of all food aid for privileged and marginalized citizens alike would pressure the regime into allowing monitoring.

By threatening to cut off all food aid itself, however, the North preempted all of that. It used its own citizens as hostages for its demand for even less monitoring. It took a calculated risk that the world outrage would be manageable, and although many newspapers did cover the story, it was manageable. The outrage was not enough, for example, to cause South Korea and China to give their aid through the WFP, which itself does a very limited and insufficient degree of monitoring. It was not even enough to cause the WFP to reject the new North Korean “development aid” scheme. Only the United States, via the courageous and knowledgeable Andrew Natsios, refused to go along.

Today, however, the new North Korean position will be contrasted favorably with its position of last week, not the one it held while 2 million of its own people starved to death. The papers will declare progress! openness! reform! Pyongyang Spring!–why, perestroika is positively breaking out all over Yodok!–even when it isn’t.

Private aid groups were guaranteed residency visas for 30 foreigners, said Mr. Richardson. “They have won breathing room for negotiations to take place to maintain a slightly reduced presence.”

Allowing the North to save face, on foreign aid and on the nuclear program, is a key to making progress with the proud and often isolated government, he said. Reflecting the North’s poverty, Mr. Richardson said, on Wednesday, during a 90-minute car drive north from the capital to the Yongbyon nuclear research center, he saw a “destitute” countryside with only “one very antiquated tractor.”

I am checking with some knowledgeable sources on the veracity of the latter claim, and I’ll report back what I learn. The main thrust of the story was the result of Richardson’s re-re-negotiation of the Living, Breathing Framework to which the North agreed (and which it promptly renounced). We are told that we must culturally sensitive in our expectations of compliance with the words, as written. We must relax our expectations of strict compliance, that is, so that the deal-breaker may save face:

“They showed me flexibility on the light-water reactor issue,” the envoy, Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico, said in an interview. Energy-poor North Korea has been seeking the reactor as the price for giving up its nuclear program. The North seems to want the reactor partly to save face for returning to international nuclear controls, Mr. Richardson said, adding, “In my opinion, it is an important issue, but not a deal breaker.”

To make nuclear power in North Korea palatable to Washington, Mr. Richardson said, “they would be willing to have the U.S. participate in the fuel cycle at the front and back end.” “What that basically means is that the U.S. could control it, as well as the six parties.” The talks also include China, Russia, South Korea and Japan.

Expect that to be the formal Chinese position by noon tomorrow. In other words, we will be back where we were ten years ago. Which is why we’ve felt so safe ever since.