Grim Vindication: Predictably, Appeasement Fails to Disarm North Korea … Again

[Update: Now they’re asking the IAEA to remove the seals and cameras. More here.]

There are some who can look back on decades of failure and learn nothing, while some of us looked into the future two years ago and foresaw everything. One Agreed Framework should have been enough for any observer possessed of an average ration of common sense. Crediting myself with that much, in March of 2007, I wrote a post in the form of news reports not yet written, predicting how and when President Bush’s Agreed Framework 2.0 would fall apart. That eventuality has now come to pass, and North Korea has essentially renounced a disarmament agreement signed in February of 2007 and hailed by so many as a first step toward peace in our time. In opposition to that chorus, I predicted:

That the six-party talks would be on-again, off-again, but would continue to be unproductive;
That the U.S. government would quickly ease money laundering sanctions on the North Koreans, thus throwing away our most important leverage against the regime and prolonging its survival;
That North Korea would not account for the people it abducted from Japan, South Korea, or anywhere else;
That our decision to remove North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism anyway would draw objections from the highest level of the Japanese government and strain relations with our most important Pacific ally;
That the North Koreans would never agree to meaningful inspection or verification, and that they’d respond to our raising the very topic with bluster and filibuster;
That the North Koreans would publicly state that they would never give up their nuclear “deterrent,” but that our State Department would pretend not to notice;
Aside from throwing us some sort of bone at Yongbyon, true to their word, they would never meaningfully disarm. Here, it’s key to understand that North Korea partially disabled — and now claims to be restarting — one 5-MW reactor (pics here and here) that was probably crumbling and used up anyway, but did not disable a 50-MW reactor just across the river (pics here and here) that was reported in 2005 to be as little as two years from completion;
Most eerily, I predicted that the North Koreans would be caught in the act of a grave offense of proliferation, which would draw only a weak response from either the State Department or the U.N.;
That the agreement would collapse either sometime between the New Hampshire primary and the Republican convention” — which would have been so had we not dropped our insistence on a complete and correct nuclear disclosure — or at best, by December of this year. Kim Jong Il would bargain for as much aid as he could get, then take his chips from the table to the cashier’s window;
That Al Gore would be the Democratic front-runner going into the New Hampshire primary (OK, so nine out of ten).

So which of America’s “finest” diplomatic or journalistic minds — unlike me, they’re paid for the quality of their analysis — foretold recent events with greater accuracy? I even imagine that the AP’s Matthew Lee must have been reading this blog, including all of the uncomplimentary things I’ve written about his reporting, although he got the important part right this time:

A rare foreign policy success for the Bush administration is imploding as North Korea backs away from pledges to abandon nuclear weapons, pretty much as the president’s critics on the right had warned. [AP, Matthew Lee]

After that, Lee’s piece slides quickly into transparent partisan schadenfreude, but by then, hardly anyone is reading anyway. The point is that it was all so predictable that an amateur could foresee it. South Korea’s newly clear-eyed government is now threatening to cut off the energy aid to North Korea that was agreed in the February 2007 deal. Japan’s government has also taken a more hard-line turn. Its new prime minister is urging caution in dealing with the North’s “murky” regime and its “unstable” leader, and urging preparations for the regime’s collapse. Even the State Department acknowledges that it will not disarm North Korea before next January, something it had previously refused to acknowledge. In a departure from its usual tip-toe language, it is warning the North not to restart the Yongbyon reactor.

The Bush administration’s internal divisions, its greed for a “legacy,” and its ultimate failure to apply real pressure to North Korea have come at incalculable cost to the world’s security. In the intervening lost years, North Korea became a nuclear power and proliferated nuclear technology to Syria, perhaps to Iran, and God-only-knows who else. Uncounted thousands have perished and been left to rot in the forests, fields, and ravines of North Korea’s death camps. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of North Koreans have died as refugees — some drowned, some shot by snipers, others executed upon their repatriation. Thousands more have starved in a resurgent famine that coexists with the regime’s waste of resources on a jarringly ugly skyscraper hotel it will never fill, and on a missile program that directly violates two forgotten U.N. resolutions. Some legacy.

In hindsight, the reason for this failure has more to do with the big picture than any of its the details. We cannot presume to operate within the same moral, legal, and diplomatic framework as those for whom such grave crimes against humanity are merely the ordinary course of business. If you’re already stamping on the necks of racially impure babies, gassing kids with their parents, and starving millions more, what’s one more broken treaty with the imperialists? If the loss of a few million North Korean lives means so little to Kim Jong Il, why should the loss of a few million American, South Korean, or Japanese lives mean more? The only hell Kim Jong Il fears is an earth on which he is no longer god.

My final, still unrealized prediction was that the North’s food situation would continue to worsen until it triggered food riots, which would be brutally suppressed, but which could fatally fracture the regime’s cohesion and aura of invincibility and start the regime’s long, bloody, agonizing untergang. I pointedly did not predict the year in which this would take place, and I think I deserve a little more time — two years, tops — for that one to come true. The signs point to the development of the conditions for that if you’re watching for them.

Rather than end this post with nothing more constructive than “I told you so,” let me suggest that we come to grips with a basic principle of negotiating with thugs: without leverage, it’s like herding buffalo with a sharp stick. In January of this year, as it became increasingly clear that North Korea would never fulfill its agreements, I published a ten-point proposal for the economic strangulation and political subversion of the North Korean regime. My Plan B, recognizing the fragility of Kim Jong Il’s “palace economy” and our capacity to shatter it with a few strokes of a pen, sets aside the use of military force and calls for the continuation of talks until Kim Jong Il sees the need to take them seriously. Such a strategy would force Kim Jong Il to accept transparency and real disarmament, or, alternatively, would terminate his misrule in the most manageable way conceivable.

It’s as common as it is false for defenders of the Bush administration’s nuclear diplomacy to deny that we have the leverage to force North Korea to disarm. Those who say this cannot see how, concealed just beneath his overflowing chins, Kim Jong Il’s windpipe is within our grasp. Kim Jong Il is a despotic terrorist with no regard for human life, and he is selling nuclear technology to other terrorists. The time has long passed for the gauzy gullibility of our policies toward him for the last two decades. A good first step would be for Chris Hill and his entire East Asia Bureau coterie — including Sung Kim, Balbina Hwang, Kathleen Stephens, and Glyn Davies — to acknowledge the obvious with their prompt resignations.