Chronology of a Capitulation: Why Nothing Will Be Solved in 60 Days

Kyodo News has a very distressing report about just what the United States came to Beijing prepared to give up, and give up almost immediately:

North Korea’s abandonment of nuclear weapons was stated in a first draft of an agreement document for the six-party talks held earlier this month, but was dropped in a second draft drawn up by the United States after the North Korean side rejected it, negotiation sources said Sunday.

Given that North Korea giving up nuclear development with highly enriched uranium was also reportedly removed from the document, experts said the focus of the six-party talks has apparently shifted from denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula to nonproliferation of nuclear materials led by those based on plutonium.

Replacing language that is clear with language that is vague can only be read one way by the North Koreans:  as a license.  It’s difficult to imagine that our negotiating team dropped those terms without the specific authority to do so.

The first draft included North Korea’s abandonment of nuclear weapons and its production facilities as part of “initial” steps to be taken for Pyongyang to receive energy aid worth 300,000 tons of fuel oil.  But North Korea rejected it, arguing the six parties need to discuss reduction of their nuclear weapons if they are to talk about its abandonment of nuclear weapons, the sources said.  Against this backdrop, North Korea’s abandonment of nuclear weapons was conditionally dropped in a second draft drawn up with the lead of the United States.

Meanwhile, Japanese citizens are reading how the United States abandoned them by running away from a common position their governments had once closely coordinated. 

The sources said Japan strongly insisted on keeping the weapons abandonment in the document but its voice “was limited” in influencing the talks because of its hard-line position over the issue of Japanese nationals abducted by North Korea in the past.

Japan maintained it would not join energy aid unless progress is made in resolving the abduction issue.

With the exception of Japan, whose eminently reasonable demand to get its citizens back went unaddressed,  everyone  seems mainly to have negotiated for the ability to pop smoke,  retreat, hide North Korea’s noncompliance in a cloud of working groups and opaque U.N. bureaucracy, and  pretend for a few months that this agreement means what  their constituent citizens want it to mean. 

In the end, the final document referred to North Korea’s nuclear weapons just indirectly by stating the six parties “reiterated that they would earnestly fulfill their commitments in the joint statement” they adopted in September 2005. The joint statement commits Pyongyang to abandoning all its existing nuclear weapons and programs in exchange for economic and diplomatic benefits and security assurances.

Let’s  look at the agreement (full text here) in  some closer detail.   Virtually everything in it is  delegated to the “working groups” and the IAEA with a few listed exceptions that must be done within 60 days.  On closer examination, not much is going to be resolved even then, except that this Administration will have stalled for two more months:

1. The DPRK will shut down and seal for the purpose of eventual abandonment the Yongbyon nuclear facility, including the reprocessing facility and invite back IAEA personnel to conduct all necessary monitoring and verifications as agreed between IAEA and the DPRK.

This is a freeze, not the dismantlement, of one of North Korea’s programs.  North Korea is already insisting that there is no uranium program, and therefore nothing to inspect at any number of suspect sites.  They will continue to stall inspectors.  Life imitates “Team America.” 

2. The DPRK will discuss with other parties a list of all its nuclear programs as described in the Joint Statement, including plutonium extracted from used fuel rods, that would be abandoned pursuant to the Joint Statement. 

“Discuss” and “disclose” are two different things, so for the record, I don’t think the text of this agreement strictly requires the North Koreans to admit that they have a uranium program in 60 days, or  else.  I predict that 60 days from now, the North Koreans will be discussing uranium by denying it.  Later in the agreement, it says that all of this compliance is to be “coordinated,” meaning that if the North Koreans are dissatisfied with the speed with which we  fill our store shelves with slave-made products or  pony up the fuel oil, they’ll lock the  inspectors down in the Koryo Hotel or ship them to Beijing. 

3. The DPRK and the US will start bilateral talks aimed at resolving pending bilateral issues and moving toward full diplomatic relations. The US will begin the process of removing the designation of the DPRK as a state-sponsor of terrorism and advance the process of terminating the application of the Trading with the Enemy Act with respect to the DPRK. 

This Administration spent  a  year and a half  paralyzed by infighting, five years proclaiming the superiority of multilateral talks, and it has now given up and  agreed to discuss all of the difficult issues bilaterally.  And here are the payoffs that North Korea can now demand directly from the United States, or else it will publicly renege on the deal and blame the United States.

4. The DPRK and Japan will start bilateral talks aimed at taking steps to normalize their relations in accordance with the Pyongyang Declaration, on the basis of the settlement of unfortunate past and the outstanding issues of concern. 

You have to love diplomatic euphemism.  Calling the kidnapping of innocent people off the streets of their home towns an “issue of concern” is right up there with Kim Jong Chol’s “hormonal imbalance.”  Japan, too, will be held up, and I certainly hope Japan, whose leaders were elected on the strength of the abduction issue, show more spine than we have.  Both Koreas will villify Japan anyway, because it’s in their cynical political interest to villify them (and us).  But if the Japanese are feeling that they’re all alone now, I can understand why.  Not to personalize what is really based on a unity of interests, but as a matter of principle, I don’t believe in betraying allies that behave like allies. 

5. Recalling Section 1 and 3 of the Joint Statement of 19 September 2005, the Parties agreed to cooperate in economic, energy and humanitarian assistance to the DPRK. In this regard, the Parties agreed to the provision of emergency energy assistance to the DPRK in the initial phase. The initial shipment of emergency energy assistance equivalent to 50,000 tons of heavy fuel oil (HFO) will commence within next 60 days. 

This, too, is just a beginning, but as with the North Koreans’ approach to every other set of obligations,  they will demand what is theirs, and they will  perpetually renegotiate what is ours.  After that, all of the really hard issues will go to “working groups,” where they will be forgotten until Chris Hill is safely ensconsed at Brookings, where he can safely lament all of the reasons why this “good start” never went anywhere.   You can already assume that most fingers won’t be pointed toward Pyongyang.  And given how predictably mendacious North Korea is, some blame belongs right here.  We walked in ready to give up everything that mattered.  It was only  the price of this highway robbery we continued to contest for a few more days.

Also worth noting is a survey of foreign diplomats and business leaders in South Korea — so-called  “opinion leaders” — skepticism of this deal is running high.  The science behind such surveys’ sampling is iffy, but I suspect that skepticism about this deal right now is simply overwhelming.  That skepticism, if it forces the Administration’s hand enough, may be the only way  we keep the pressure on this regime and continue pursuing a real resolution of all of the issues that were on the table, along with those that should have been.