Nicholas Eberstadt on ‘Peace in Our Time!’
Nicholas Eberstadt is no fan of the “breakthrough” agreed statement with North Korea:
Contrary to conventional wisdom, which holds the North Korean state to be an unremittingly hostile “negotiating partner,” history actually demonstrates that Pyongyang can be a highly obliging interlocutor under certain very specific conditions. All that is necessary to “get to yes” with the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) is to concede every important point demanded by the North Korean side while sacrificing vital interests of one’s own.
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A careful reading of the September 19 joint statement suggests instead that North Korean negotiators have just achieved a stunning advance in their government’s quest to “normalize” its nuclear weapons program. There has also been equally momentous progress in Pyongyang’s longstanding campaign to sunder the U.S.-South Korean military alliance. Wittingly or otherwise, the U.S. negotiating team has executed an apparent cave-in–embracing precepts crucial to North Korean objectives but inimical to Washington’s own.
To appreciate the full significance of this joint statement, one need only dwell on two of its precepts: the first is North Korea’s now internationally ratified “peaceful right to the uses of nuclear energy,” and the second is the purportedly common “goal of . . . verifiable denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. According to the joint statement, North Korea “stated that it has the right to peaceful uses of nuclear energy. The other parties expressed their respect and agreed to discuss at an appropriate time the subject of the provision of [a] light-water reactor to the DPRK. There is a problem with this declaration, though. Pyongyang’s “peaceful nuclear energy program” is, as almost everyone knows, an entirely imaginary animal–akin to the unicorn.
Eberstadt thinks the U.S. side all but surrendered the legitimacy of the U.S.-South Korean alliance:
Pyongyang’s rhetorical syllogism depends entirely upon the existence of the U.S.-Seoul military alliance. So long as the United States is treaty-bound to South Korea’s defense, Pyongyang maintains that any and all means of American security protections–including nuclear guarantees–naturally cover the South. In this logic, the only way by which the southern portion of the Korean peninsula can be “denuclearized” is by severing the U.S.-South Korean military alliance, by withdrawing all U.S. forces from South Korea, and by leaving South Korea outside the U.S. security perimeter (as it seemed to be in early 1950).
Not being a fan of the alliance in its current state is not the same thing as saying that we should surrender the option of intervening in some form, if we find it to be in our interests. That being said, it would take North Korean logic to infer this. That wouldn’t bother me if so many weren’t so willing to follow North Korean logic for the sake of this deal already. In the end, Eberstadt is ready to conclude that the Bush Administration has gone for another Agreed Framework, thus forgetting everything we should have learned in the last decade.
If this is the best we could do, Bush’s critics suddenly have a point: what took us so damned long to get here? Of course, we are still at a very preliminary stage, and many tests remain. Will North Korea continue to deny its HEU program, or balk at inspections? An agreed statement is not an Agreed Framework. Let us hope it will never become one.