Dear Mrs. Clinton: Pyongyang Will Not Be Triangulated

For a moment, leave aside what we think Hillary Clinton’s goals for her recent Asia visit should have been. For most of us, that is just an exercise in catharsis anyway. Ask yourself what Mrs. Clinton’s subjective goals were. One certainly must have been to improve our frayed alliances with South Korea (frayed by Roh Moo Hyun’s America-bashing populism) and Japan (frayed by George W. Bush’s betrayal on the abduction issue), and to show both nations that America is a reliable friend. On North Korea, she probably wanted to deter belligerence, encourage disarmament, and invite “engagement” of some kind. She wanted to present an image to China that is both tough and pragmatic.

While Mrs. Clinton’s visit has some useful bits of script, I suspect that her visit accomplished none of those things in the eyes of anyone but the most wishful of observers. The most obvious example was South Korea, which was hoping for “a strong message to the North” about its missile testing, nuclear proliferation, and terroristic threats like this one:

The North’s official Korean Central News Agency said “Inter-Korean political and military tension has reached the extreme. A physical clash remains only a matter of time.” It claimed South Korean and U.S. troops are “concentrating their energy on reinforcing their combat capabilities and preparing for a war against the North.”

The news agency enumerated South Korean military exercises and said the “warmongers’ confrontational action” had brought relations to a point “where it is difficult to save the situation or to straighten things out.” [Chosun Ilbo]

Instead of a “tear down this wall” moment, Mrs. Clinton’s words were overcalculated, awkward, and mealy-mouthed: “The possible missile launch that North Korea is talking about would be very unhelpful in moving our relationship forward.” On the one hand, it probably gives no offense. On the other, it conjures the images of two real estate lawyers chatting on e-Harmony. She sounds so … unelectable.

If Mrs. Clinton’s goal was to graciously invite Kim Jong Il into the loving arms of earthly civilization, it couldn’t have helped to refer to North Korea’s “poverty and tyranny,” or to muse publicly about the regime’s potential instability or a possible “succession crisis.” Please don’t mistake this for an objection on my part. North Korea probably cares much less about what we say than what we pay. But just imagine how the press would have reacted if John Bolton had said those things. Not that Mrs. Clinton has much to worry about from the press, now that her contest with Obama is safely behind her. The New York Times’s Mark Landler and the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler spackle liberally over Mrs. Clinton’s gaffes as “tossing away the script,” a refreshing new brand of candor! And to think that in diplomacy, candor is a virtue again! (Sheesh. Is that what reading Pravda and Izvestia was like in the 70’s?) Still, if one criticizes this regime, the criticism should have a higher purpose than domestic triangulation, something that won’t fool many of us in the intended audience anyway.

Of Mrs. Clinton’s lowest moment, in China, I’ve already said plenty. Another bad sign: Mrs. Clinton is considering whether to lift sanctions against Burma.

Clinton deserves some praise for meeting with the families of Japanese abductees, but her failure to offer any specifics to back her support left the families disappointed, and probably did little to undo the damage. Japan wants a reversal of Washington’s policy on removing North Korea from the terror-sponsor list. Instead, Japan will get McSame. Of course, it’s still early in the administration, so an excess of pessimism is no more justifiable than the optimism of a headline appearing over the words of my friend, Rabbi Abraham Cooper:

By exclusively pursuing the nuclear tail around the six-party table, we have also contributed to the horrible suffering of the people of North Korea and degraded the United States’ long-standing commitment to fundamental human rights. Like the inmates of the Soviet Gulag or the Nazi concentration camps of the 1930s, about 200,000 to 300,000 hapless victims in North Korean camps wait for help.

Every day, they are forced to renounce their very humanity. How else to survive when prison guards threaten to chop off a child’s hand to force a confession from a parent? Why doesn’t that guard, or those who’ve run gas chambers or performed experiments on political prisoners, have any reason to fear punishment under international law?

Our silence to these and other outrages is perhaps Pyongyang’s greatest victory to date. We want them to dispose of fearsome weapons “• they want our silence. And too often, we have acquiesced. For the past two years we have let Japan go it alone in its fight to bring back citizens who were abducted by North Korea, kidnapped as they walked the streets of their hometowns in Japan. [Rabbi Abraham Cooper, Korea Times]

Which is, more or less, what Mrs. Clinton gave when she visited the very guarantor and enforcer of North Korea’s oppression.

Admittedly, criticism from Claudia Rosett and John Bolton shouldn’t surprise anyone too much. Bolton sees “overwhelming — and unfortunate — continuity” with the Bush administration. Rosett only reminds us what’s already obvious to anyone capable of comprehending it: the nature of the regime itself is as inseparable from how it deals with us as how it deals with its own people.

If Mrs. Clinton’s “unscripted” musings were meant to sound smart and wonkish, she gave me the impression of someone who doesn’t really know what to do next. According to at least one report, her advisors are riven by the same factional gridlock that paralyzed 43’s first term. Even from the subjective center-left perspective of someone who probably shares Hillary Clinton’s policy goals, it’s difficult to see which of those goals her visit really advanced.

Related:

Although I doubt that the many of the Korea Times’s Korean readers have much sympathy for Japanese abductees, I can’t let this comment by Rabbi Cooper pass without comment:

The logic of [sacrificing our commitment to human rights] was never stated more vapidly than in the written statement of a private witness at last week’s hearing before the House Foreign Affairs Committee: “Japan will continue to be part of the problem rather than part of the solution when it comes to engaging North Korea, despite being one of our most important allies. By allowing the abduction of a handful of its citizens decades ago to dominate all policy considerations when it comes to the North, Tokyo has become irrelevant at the nuclear talks,” the statement said, implying that being part of a negotiating process should outweigh a nation’s interest in the rights of its own citizens. Thankfully, Hillary Clinton disagrees.

When that statement was first e-mailed to me — among others — I was more than a little shocked to see that the person who said that is a former Executive Director of the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, and a person I know and like. It’s incomprehensibly cold to advocate abandoning these victims of international crime, and I have to wonder why someone who believes in subordinating human rights to diplomatic “practicalities” had any business leading an organization that should advocate exactly the opposite.

Who would say the same if these were Americans?