Out With a Whimper: Scholars and Policymakers on Bush’s Legacy of Indecision and Weakness on North Korea

Last week, I attended a program at the American Enterprise Institute about Bush’s new North Korea policy, in which we are reduced to negotiating against our positions of last year, while the North Koreans observe with a mixture of arrogance and befuddlement.  The sum total:  the Administration has lost all will and all backbone.  Don’t expect any policy changes toward accountability or reciprocity.  Instead, expect the lesson to be that you can proliferate nukes to anyone and not just get away with it, but be rewarded for it.

Nicholas Eberstadt

Eberstadt patiently explained all of the reasons why Kim Jong Il thinks that nuclear weapons are necessary to the achievement of his strategic objectives ““ regime survival, getting the USFK out, hegemony over the peninsula.  He also asserted that nuclear proliferation supports North Korea’s goals, too, because of its tendency to disrupt U.S. counterproliferation efforts worldwide, and, he seemed to suggest, to make the United States more vulnerable to more of its enemies.

After years of mostly empty rhetoric, the Administration now seems to understand North Korean less than it did in 2001. 

Caroline Leddy

Caroline Leddy, whose work you previously read herehere, accused the Administration of allowing North Korea to test nukes and proliferate with impunity, a fact most aptly demonstrated by its failure to implement U.N. Security Council Resolution 1718 and its abandonment of financial pressure when it was working.  As a result, the Administration has made the world safer for proliferation, and all of its rhetoric about that subject has been rendered hollow.  Another example Leddy cited was what she described as North Korea’s “ongoing” uranium enrichment program, which North Korea has successfully gotten swept under the rug.  Leddy thinks there was a window ““ a narrow window ““ during with the six-party talks might have achieved something tangible.  By abandoning its pressure, Leddy thinks the Administration blew that chance.  She also made the point that you can only blame the State Department for so much of this.  In the end, the buck stops on the President’s desk.

The lesson?  Proliferation pays.

David Asher

I expected David Asher to look like a stodgy old banker in a tweed vest and a pince-nez.  Instead, Asher was a young, affable fellow with a  short military-regulation haircut.  Formerly a senior official in State’s East Asia Bureau, Asher is now semi-retired as a Korea wonk (he referred to himself as a “former regime element”).  Asher had a lot to get off his chest and a limited amount of time to say it, and hardly a soul could keep up with him. 

Asher claimed credit as an originator of the six-party concept, but freely states that the concept has failed to meet its intended objectives because it wasn’t used as directed.  To Asher, the idea behind the talks was to change not the regime itself, but its fundamentally hostile world view.  To work, that concept required more than addicting the North to aid ““ as he characterized South Korea’s “moonshine” policy ““ it required pressure on the hostile and often criminal things that North Korea was doing for profit.  This was the idea behind the Illicit Activities Initiative, of which Asher was a key architect, and the Proliferation Security Initiative, which failed because the Administration never implemented a cooperation regime among the member states.  As a result, medium-range North Korean missiles were shipped to Iran via the Persian Gulf ““ right under our noses ““ and components intended for North Korea’s uranium enrichment program were transshipped though the territory of our friends, the Chinese.

Yet today, State stands ready to lift sanctions under the Trading with the Enemy Act, despite the fact that North Korea still hasn’t withdrawn any of the guns or missiles that are aimed at the South.  Asher said that the Administration was “emasculated” by a fear of adverse diplomatic consequences.  In response, Asher noted that the exposure of A.Q. Khan didn’t destroy our ability to cooperate with the Pakistanis.  Nonetheless, says Asher, sanctioned North Korean entities we know to be trafficking in WMD components are still listed in telephone directories in Middle Eastern capitals.  There are financial countermeasures we could take against them, but have chosen not to.  Asher’s proposal is to simply give the North Koreans 90 days to have those entities suspend operations, or else lower the financial boom on them.

Asher suggested ““ and asked the audience not to ask him to elaborate — that the State Department may be coaching the North Koreans about what to put in their declaration (which hardly seems necessary if we’re essentially writing it for them).  He notes, however, that the East Asia Bureau wasn’t always the villain here.  Back when Asher was there, it was the National Security Council that often blocked initiatives or investigations to pressure North Korea’s crimes and proliferation — all of which points to Condi Rice as the problem.  As a result of this, Asher thinks that Bush’s legacy will have been to send the message that the United States will do little or nothing in response to the most dangerous kind of proliferation.

The final speaker, Marcus Noland, spoke about different subject matter, and since I’ve covered his remarks in  a previous  post, I won’t repeat them here.