Two Cheers for Tom Lantos
He’d get three if he’d said it three years ago, and four if he offered a few more specifics, but Tom Lantos (D, Cal.) sounds at least as tough here as Jim Leach (R, Ia.) might have:
The Bush administration’s policy toward North Korea has failed and a new approach must be tried, including punishing the North’s leaders and sending a U.S. envoy to Pyongyang for talks, a key Democrat said on Wednesday.
Rep. Tom Lantos of California, who is expected to head the U.S. House of Representatives International Relations Committee when Democrats take over Congress in January, said North Korean leaders, through sanctions, “must feel personal pain” for testing a nuclear weapon last month.
But tough steps against North Korea are not a substitute for an effective new approach toward Pyongyang and heightened diplomacy, including new bilateral overtures must be part of a new bold approach, he told a hearing.
Lantos also said that U.S. envoy Chris Hill must be dispatched to the next round of six-country talks “with the authority to negotiate a comprehensive and verifiable deal” and should stop over in Pyongyang “to demonstrate our peaceful interests.”
My first thought was that we could simultaneously send an envoy and inflict personal anguish on Kim Jong Il by sending Ted Turner back there.
My second thought was that this is a perfect illustration of why the messenger is such an important part of the message. Terms like “comprehensive approach” and “bilateral overtures” would scare the hell out of me if they came from a man made of squishier stuff than Tom Lantos. That’s how I’d assess a good share of the next Senate Foreign Relations Committee, by the way: Biden, Kennedy, Cardin, Kerry, Lugar, and Dodd, to name a few. Adding their names to the goulash means you tend to taste less paprika.
But Lantos, a co-sponsor of the North Korean Human Rights Act and the ADVANCE Democracy Act, quacks like a classically liberal Scoop Jackson Democrat. He is the single individual most responsible for getting all of the House Dems to either vote in favor of the NKHRA, or at least not vote against it. As a direct consequence, the bill passed unanimously. If the Tom Lantos policy would back its velvet glove with an iron fist, I really don’t care if we talk bilaterally (read: stab South Korea and China in the back; it’s not as if they don’t do the same to us at every opportunity, defy two U.N. resolutions, and then have the balls to call us unilateralists). As long as bilateral talks don’t turn into a euphemism for America paying up while everyone else squirms away, they’d be fine. Unfortunately, I’m not sure even Tom Lantos could prevent bilateral talks from becoming just that. Would the Lantos policy mean that we forget human rights? Had identical words come from the insufferable, sonorous maw of John Feckless Kerry, I’d say yes. From Tom Lantos, I think not.
(I was less impressed with Lantos in September, when he spoke in forceful opposition to reimposing trade sanctions. As Amb. Chris Hill reminded him, we had lifted those sanctions to thank the North for its missile moratorium — the one it violated last July.)
As with Iraq, if the Dems ever specify exactly what pressures, incentives, and conditions they’d add or subtract from the current policy, I reckon we’d see some interesting policy differences among Democrats in the House and in the Senate. “Comprehensive approach?” I guess that depends on just how comprehensive we’re all willing to be, doesn’t it? It could pave the road to Dane Geld, and then again, it could also be a death trap for the North Koreans. They’re never shy about adding new demands, so why not add a few of our own? A few come to mind: the elimination of chemical and biological weapons, conventional forces reduction, Red Cross inspections at the concentration camps, food and medical care for those who truly need it. For those intaglio printing presses and their entire supply of cotton-linen paper, we could relax financial measures. For real progress on human rights, they could get trade. For transparency and monitoring, they’d get food aid. The key is, it all has to be transparent, verifiable, and reciprocal. We have to be serious enough about reciprocity and verification to go back in and clamp down hard if the North Koreans cheat (since they always do). We’d have to be hard-headed enough to know when we were being jerked around (which we should have known by 1992). Hey, we might even see fit to withdraw U.S. ground forces from South Korea if the North Koreans would cut up a few thousand artillery tubes (I wonder if the South Koreans would call an offer like that … unilateralist?).
As great as this whole reciprocity thing sounds, of course, none of it gets beyond a wispy diplomatic hypothesis if the North Koreans aren’t serious about making any concessions. And they aren’t.
I have a couple of other gripes: (1) I wish Lantos had said this in 2003, when the Bush administration was a year into a prolonged factional paralysis, and (2) too few of Lantos’s co-partisans have the spine to scare the North Koreans into negotiating in good faith. As for the first concern, the Bush administration’s paralysis appears to have finally given way to something leading in a meaningful direction in August 2005, with the Smoking Dragon arrests, the Banco Delta sanctions that followed, and further efforts by Treasury to pursue North Korea’s illicit funds. Those sanctions seem to be biting hard now, meaning that our diplomacy is finally backed with some steel. Even the six-party format — of which I’ve been skeptical — seems to have paid off: would China and Russia have voted for U.N. Resolutions 1695 and 1718 if they hadn’t been shackled next to North Korea’s obnoxious excuse for diplomacy? I doubt it. Lantos isn’t suggesting that we abandon multilateralism (right?), but adding bilateral talks takes a lot of the relevance out of multilateral talks. He’s saying that we need to make Kim Jong Il feel personal pain, but that’s one area where the Bush Administration can finally claim some success. What other pain would Lantos add to this?
Take for granted that Lantos is doing what all politicians do — score some points against the other team. They all do that. What, specifically, is the part of Bush’s policy that has failed? Answer: the part I wish Lantos had complained about when Bush’s policy really was adrift (and when Clinton’s policy, for that matter, did far worse). It’s harder to guess what Lantos would do differently, since he has told us so little. In reality, I’m not sure what specific changes he could or would make. Still, at least the rhetoric, in contrast to the Clinton Administration’s history, doesn’t give Kim Jong Il reason to think he’ll get a better deal from the Dems. That is a good thing by itself.