Frostbrain
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A snag in what is probably the easiest phase of the North Korea nuclear agreement has sparked new criticism of the Bush administration but U.S. officials appear committed to pursuing a solution, even if it reverses previous policy.
More than a month after Pyongyang was due to shut down its Yongbyon nuclear complex under a Feb 13 deal, it has not done so, insisting it first receive $25 million in once-frozen accounts.
“It’s tricky but I think some way forward will be found because everybody has such an interest in getting this issue stabilized,” said Gary Samore, a non-proliferation expert and vice president at the Council on Foreign Relations. [Reuters, Carol Giacomo]
If you can call one side’s complete non-performance and the addition of absurd, non-agreed demands “a snag,” then this story will no doubt lull you in the manner Carol Giacomo transparently intended. For the rest of us, it’s just depressingly predictable to see us betraying every actual and potential ally to sustain those who mean us harm.
There isn’t much of interest I can say about this kind of stupidity that I haven’t already said dozens of times, and it’s pretty depressing to see just how low the collective IQ of our diplomatic brain trust really is. To hear people straining to break law and logic to preserve a deal that does nothing for us but decorate the display cases of presidential libraries has a cauterizing effect on one’s frontal lobe. Life supplies that sort of thing in ample quantity as it is; why fill your spare time with it, too? It makes for exceedingly dull blogging for you to read, and for me to write, with the occasional exception:
It is “perplexing to see the U.S. now take a series of unilateral steps to unravel this policy (of U.N. sanctions and related actions) and reward North Korea for doing … well nothing,” Michael Green, a former White House Asia adviser during the period when Bush refused to talk to Pyongyang, wrote in the Financial Times.
Plus, I’ve already told you what the plan is and in general terms, how it will turn out. The Administration will succeed at burying this story through the remainder of its duration. The real problem issues — uranium, human rights, inspection, and verification — are being delegated to “working groups” that not even the wire services will care about during an election year. Perhaps, then, what I have to say for now might be better said to a wider audience, so I’m going to focus on writing pieces for publication for a while. Whenever this story becomes interesting again, I’ll have more to say here.
In the end, of course, the only people who can save North Korea are the North Koreans themselves. We can steepen the odds against them for a while, but inevitably, a change is coming, for better or for worse, because the current system isn’t sustainable and can’t be reformed without releasing the whirlwind. Just as inevitably, people will eventually wonder why the Agreed Framework of 2007 didn’t stop the North Koreans from building, testing, and selling extremely dangerous things, and we’ll be right back to a much scarier redux of where we stood in 2001 — wondering what we were thinking.
See also: Rep. Ed Royce on the State Department’s money laundering deal.
Welcome back!
Joshua said, ‘… change is coming, for better or for worse, because the current system isn’t sustainable …’
I disagree.
The current system IS sustainable. The last 10+ years have certainly shown this to be the case.
Beijing isn’t having any problems with the status quo. You don’t hear any complaints coming from them, do you?
Seoul, after tumbling to the realization of the actual costs associated with that delusional ‘hana nara’ campaign, thinks that bank-rolling Pyongyang at a paltry couple of billion a year is a bargain.
Washington has since gone ‘belly up’ and apparently has no compunctions about cutting Tokyo off at the knees in the process.
The Only Fat Man in North Korea (Registered TM) isn’t hurting at all. The fact that at least 5% of his compatriots starved to death during the ‘Arduous March’ doesn’t seem to have altered that calculus … ‘HE’ isn’t hungry (or am I missing something here?).
The only parties seeming to have a problem with this situation are the elements of the ‘lunatic fringe’ who believe that some things, like simple human rights, should have a place on the agenda.
Well … I’ve got bad news … that bus left the station a while back.
I agree with OneFreeKorea. But it is a question of time.
The regime as is can’t go on forever. If it collapsed tomorrow, it should not be a surprise, but it won’t be if it lasts another 20 years either.
The fact is, however, that it is a broken system that will one day collapse.
It made it through to the early 1990s because the Soviet Union was willing to bankroll it. The Soviet dumped incredible amounts of resources into the North, China pumped some in too, and the Soviets also favored the North Korean economy by having it do business with the Communist Bloc nations.
That day is gone and will never return. Never.
And as soon as that massive support was removed, the society collapsed in remarkable fashion.
Under the Soviet protection, the North Korean people were just miserable. Without it, they have become desperate and the society has changed (it seems from afar). Just look at the defection and refugee numbers.
It can’t go on like this forever. At some point, some element(s) of the society are going to crack at the right time and the whole house of cards will come down.
For example, what happens when Kim Jong Il dies?
I just hope when the end comes, the US isn’t sucked into a fight and then occupation of the North thanks to the USFK tripwire or tripwire-lite….
While the regime can’t go on forever, it doesn’t help that our State Department is, for all intents and purposes, providing life support. Former ambassador John Bolton puts it better than I can:
Un-frickin’-believable.
I give it at least a non-insignificant chance that the reversal by the Bush administration is based on intelligence guesses that the North is going to make a run toward collapse – and these new deals are exactly designed to keep it on life support.
We know China and South Korea base their NK policy ultimately on regime survival. They might be pressured into putting pressure on the North, but if it seems such moves will lead to a tipping point toward collapse, they will reverse course 180 degrees back to propping the regime up as much as they believe it needs at the moment and near future.
That is exactly what the US has just done.
This is, was, and will always be influencial forces not just in the State Department, but the Pentagon and CIA and elsewhere, who will remain mesmerised by the status quo —– and fear of the unknown — just reference Colin Powell and others in Iraq War I who thought leaving Hussein in power was a swell idea.
At least with North Korea, fear of the unknown (what happens when the regime crumbles for good) is more tangible – NK isn’t Iraq. We know it has the WMDs without a tiny doubt, and even without the WMDs, we know its conventional forces could rain destruction down on Seoul, the whole of South Korea, and strike at Japan (and thus the US in both nations) even if the collapse is complete and the guns and missile launchers silenced soon after their first volley…
Which means, we basically can accept the horrific treatment of the NK people —- and the increasing body count which is over 3,000,000 since the early 1990s —– more than we can accept the risk of non-North Korean lives if Pyongyang falls —– or economic hardship for South Korea, China, and Japan due to “refugee masses” flowing out of the North….
The body count fear has some influence on me. The refugee masses crisis does not. If we can mobilize to handle a major tsunami, we can manage potential North Korean refugees after Kim Jong Il’s regime dies….