As N. Korea Reverts to Form, Hill Warns Kim Jong Il
The U.S. envoy to the North Korea nuclear talks said Monday that Pyongyang needs to meet international standards, especially in human rights, in order to have relations with Washington. “It’s a price of admission to the international community,” Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill said. [Yonhap]
Does this encourage me? I’m not sure. It’s not a bad thing that Chris Hill is tipping his hat comb-over in this direction, although “international standards, especially in human rights” are a wee bit harder to define than “shut down and seal for the purpose of eventual abandonment” and “all of its nuclear programs.” If Hill can stand behind a consistent and straightforward definition of those latter terms, I’ll have more faith in his willingess to define “human rights” honestly, too.
Now, this discussion is about to enter the land of vanishing hypotheticals (because Kim Jong Il will never agree to any of this), but I recognize that this can’t mean making North Korea into a Jeffersonian democracy overnight. No society I’m aware of has done so successfully. It means a timeline for meaningful progress, starting with easing the worst of the abuses up front: opening the camps to the Red Cross, and allowing the World Food Program to set up and operate its own feeding stations throughout North Korea.
Here is the part that encouraged me more:
The U.S. envoy urged Pyongyang to embrace the Feb. 13 deal, with a warning that if North Korea rejects it, there is “another path.”
“I think we have enough on the table to make it clear to the North Koreans that with denuclearization, there will be a good day indeed in their history,” Hill said.
“If they turn down this process, we can try another path.”
The U.S. won’t be alone when it decides to try this other path, said Hill.
“We will be with a lot of other countries that have seen that we have done all we can do,” he said.
In other words, Hill says, we’re prepared to reapply pressure (I’m not a fan of Hill, but he’s no fool; he understands the connection between pressure and successful diplomacy, at least to a degree). And in fact, there is a lot more we can do to pressure Kim Jong Il. We could apply PATRIOT 311 or Executive Order 13,382 to North Korea’s sources of South Korean and Chinese support, or to, say, Bureau 39 of the Korean Workers’ Party, an entity swimming in the proceeds of crime. We could begin increasingly aggressive inspections of North Korean ships under UNSCR 1695 and 1718. We could probe for political vulnerabilities within the North Korean population by increasing broadcasts, accepting more refugees, and training them in the skills needed to reconstruct North Korea after Kim Jong Il’s departure from our world. We could craft new legal tools to allow North Korean forced laborers to sue investors in the North for compensation, or apply civil RICO statutes to the regime’s criminal activities, or promulgate an executive order similar to 13,382, but which would freeze assets of entities that use forced labor. We could attach significant financial consequences to China by linking its trade benefits to its support for Kim Jong Il and its repatriation of North Korean refugees to his gulag. Finally, we could reimpose the trade sanctions President Clinton lifted in 1999, to reward North Korea for the missile moratorium it violated last July. All the while, we should be saying, in very clear terms, that we’re prepared to provide generous but carefully monitored humanitarian assistance whenever the regime accepts it. And we should tell the North Korean people that, too.
And then again, this could all be noise to mollify the loud chorus of disapproval that this deal, by surrendering pressure we had built, insures its own failure at the bargaining table. If nothing else, Hill is an expert at sustaining multiple, mutually incompatible interpretations of an agreement. But as I explained here, capital is still a coward, and the pressure isn’t irrevocably lost. Even now, Treasury still can’t find a bank that will touch Kim Jong Il’s money with a ten-foot pole.