North Korea’s Next Tantrum

A  shoe is about to drop, but  which shoe?  Among Washington’s Korea-watching klatsch, there’s a popular parlor game that goes like this:

DOVE:  The North Koreans are proud, fanatical, and emotional.  You have to be careful not to antagonize them with idle talk about human rights and  intrusive verification or you’ll spoil the negotiations.  And we’re this close (thumb and index finger a milimeter apart) to a breakthrough.

HAWK:  The North Koreans are calculating and react  with malice aforethought.  Their reactions seem emotional, but they’re  carefully contrived to manipulate you, to keep indefensible issues off the table, and to string you along with the idea that I’m the only thing standing between you and that breakthrough (arms spread widely).

Those positions, of course, are  oversimplifations.  They don’t get much more hawkish than me when it comes to North Korea, but I believe that there is (though not in equal shares) truth in both views.  For the most part, I think the North Koreans’ outbursts are calculated, but it’s not that simple.  I sometimes imagine that the internecine politics  in Pyongyang today must  have much in common with  those in the  Japanese war cabinet of  the 1930’s and 1940’s, when failing to cultivate a sufficiently strident image could get you  assassinated.  In such an environment, it can be  unhealthy not to feign uncontrollable outrage and dangerously overconfident bluster  when, say,  Lee Myung Bak disses His Porcine Majesty.

Several days ago, seasoned Korea watcher Don Kirk, apparently subscribing to the first theory,  seemed to suggest that a Kumgang-quality blow-up has been  imminent since  President Bush and Chris Hill mentioned North Korea’s abyssimal human rights record.   So why  hasn’t that  happened yet?   Perhaps the State Department  privately reassured  the North Koreans that these were mere token words spoken under the duress of one fastidious senator who still believes what the administration once seemed to.  On balance, however, it’s more likely that Kim Jong Il, whose regime  is said to be moving people it can’t afford to feed out of Pyongyang,  made a calculated decision not to stomp away as long as the Bush administration  kept giving it  valuable concessions without demanding  much in return. 

This is where you can find the confluence  between followers of  both theories.   I, too, think  a  tantrum is coming, but only because the North Koreans  may just  decide  that President Bush  is a dry tit. 

For reasons that  aren’t completely  clear to me, Bush has paused, for now,  the granting of  unconditional concessions, most significantly on de-listing North Korea as a state sponsor of terrorism.  Maybe he’s finally  come to his senses, but my best guess is that he’s run out of political capital.  The key  causes of that political bankruptcy were  (a)  the delayed revelations about the al-Kibar reactor and North Korea’s role in it,  (b) the “Singapore Surrender” in which Hill and Rice agreed not to press for answers on uranium, proliferation, or actual nuclear weapons,  and (c) what seemed very much like the imminent removal of North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism and the lifting of other key sanctions, as early as yesterday.  Now the administration says that’s not going to happen … yet:       

“Our requirement for moving forward on delisting is a rigorous verification regime and a verification protocol, and until we get there I think we’ve been clear that delisting can’t go forward,” said White House spokesman Tony Fratto. [AFP]

“At this point it is reasonable to say that  [August 11th]  probably will come and go without that happening,” Dennis Wilder, the National Security Council director for Asia, told reporters in Beijing today. “We are in discussions with the North. We continue to try to work with them on this question of a robust verification regime.”   [….]

“As the president said in Seoul, we need to have a strong verification regime before we can take action on removing the North Koreans from the state sponsors of terrorism list,” Wilder said.   [Bloomberg, Michael Forsythe]

Washington has promised North Korea it could be removed from a U.S. list of terrorism-sponsoring nations as early as Monday if a robust verification plan were in  place.  But U.S. officials have asserted this was a “minimum timeline” rather than a fixed date and had already cast doubt on the likelihood of Pyongyang’s meeting  it. 

“We continue to try to work with them on this question of a robust verification regime, but we aren’t at the point where we are satisfied with what they have put on the table thus far, so these discussions will continue,” Wilder  said.  [Reuters]

Since events (a), (b), and (c) transpired,  but especially after  Bush’s acceptance of North Korea’s incomplete June 26 “declaration,” he has come under  withering criticism from foreign policy conservatives,  including in both houses of Congress.   Yet until very recently, none of this seemed quite  sufficient to deter Bush from — I’ll just  quote Chris Hill here — the “stupidity” of  “giving away all our leverage” by lifting most of our sanctions on North Korea. 

The specific  reactions that are most likely to have given Bush pause were the  almost equally skeptical statements from both John  McCain and Barack  Obama  after Bush announced his terror de-listing decision in late June.  McCain adviser  Dan Blumenthal later emphasized the shortcomings of the unfolding accord on verification  in  a piece for  the Weekly Standard. 

Thus, Hill and Rice had pushed Bush to the left of both presidential candidates in an election year in which foreign policy and national security issues are likely to play an important role.  That is not how any politician aspires to be “a uniter.”   By August 3rd, the administration was saying that the lifting of sanctions would depend on North Korea cooperating on verification.  That’s  not what Rice was telling us last April, but  don’t interpret that as a complaint.

Since then, North Koreans have been saying, again  and again  and again,  that they’re not going to give up their nukes, period.  The State Department spat venom at Jack Pritchard for conveying the first of these statements to a reporter, but that strategy made great copy for the Washington Post.  They mostly ignored the other two statements, at least publicly:

According to a copy of the draft obtained by The Yomiuri Shimbun, Washington demanded that Pyongyang allow inspectors to enter all North Korean nuclear facilities.  Washington also demanded that Pyongyang accept inspections of its nuclear weapons and nuclear development program with highly enriched uranium, which were not specified in its declaration, as well as its cooperation with other countries’ nuclear development.

North Korean Deputy Foreign Minister Kim Gwe Gwan, who heads the delegation to the six-nation talks, refused the U.S. [verification] demands. He also insisted North Korea be treated as a nuclear power, according to a source in the six-nation negotiations.

The source said U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill, the top U.S. chief negotiator in the talks, looked furious at hearing Kim’s remark.

According to a former senior U.S. government official who was previously involved in the nuclear talks, North Korea still aims to have the United States remove the country from its terrorism blacklist and end its hostile policy toward the country, while keeping its nuclear weapons, so it is out of question for Pyongyang to have its nuclear weapons inspected, the former U.S. official said.   [Yomiuri Shimbun; emphasis mine]

On one hand, the North Koreans  hate the very idea of verification and are plainly stalling us.  On the other, they’re not acting up yet, even while they’re fulminating at Lee Myung Bak and feigning conciliation toward  the Japanese, who clearly pressed the Americans hard not to give North Korea the concession it wanted most:

Foreign Minister Masahiko Komura told reporters Monday a fternoon, “I believed the removal [of North Korea from the U.S. list of terrorism-sponsoring nations] would never take place. What I was told was what I expected,” after he was notified by Rice about the U.S. decision not to remove North Korea from its terrorism blacklist for the time being.  [Yomiuri]

I think what happens next depends mostly on how desperate the North Koreans are, what they think they can still get, and who they think they can get it from.  If  you’re one who believes that North Korea’s tantrums over inconsequentials and intangibles are mostly calculated threatrics, and if you believe that trade sanctions and international lending are consequential and tangible, then you can bet  this month’s  corn ration that Kim Jong Il won’t take Bush’s refusal to lift sanctions at the eleventh hour of his term lightly.  And if you think this is all about offending the North Koreans’ sincere fanaticism about juche, then you can amuse me  to no end  by blaming Chris Hill’s human rights activism  for what I think  is about to  happen next.