Don Kirk: We Can’t Trust North Korea
Long-time Korea and Asia correspondent Don Kirk, who broke the story that Kim Dae Jung used illegal payments to buy the summit that won him the Nobel Prize, comments on the self-evident pointlessness of negotiating with North Korea:
North Korea’s latest missile test raises a critical question. Why should anyone consider giving aid to this regime that has already squandered hundreds of billions of dollars on firing off missiles and producing nuclear warheads? Here’s an impoverished country, the single biggest recipient of aid from the World Food Program, where half the people are underfed, if not starving and diseased, hundreds of thousands consigned under unspeakable conditions to a vast prison system, and world leaders wonder whether to ply them with billions more.
It is not just that such thinking is ridiculous. It’s that it has no chance of working. We’ve been disillusioned again and again.
Kirk then relates a long series of broken North Korean agreements: the North-South Red Cross talks of 1972; the 1991 inter-Korean denuclearization agreement; the first Agreed Framework of 1994, and later, Chris Hill’s not-quite-agreed framework:
It’s mind-boggling to imagine that any one could have fallen for North Korea’s promises again, but Christopher Hill, as President George W. Bush’s nuclear envoy, fell for two more agreements in a year of talks after the North conducted an underground nuclear test on October 9, 2006. [Don Kirk, The Washington Examiner]
While I believe that humanitarian aid distributed directly by foreigners to hungry North Koreans would strongly serve both our interests and those of the North Korean people, the North Korean regime knows it can’t afford to relax its isolation of, and control over, its subject to that degree. Simply stated, it would rather let them starve. Kirk is obviously right that cash and unmonitored aid have done much to bring us (and North Korea) to the woeful state of today. And yet, no matter how many times Kim Jong Il uses our money to terrorize everyone within his growing reach, there are always some people who are inflexibly attached to a strategy that’s a proven failure.
Whenever ideology refuses to yield to the facts and logic, look beneath the ideology for a similarly inflexible motive. Kirk, hardly a right-wing ideologue by any reasonable definition, yields to common sense in a way that others, however inexplicably, won’t.
The simple fact North Korea hamstrung multinational aid groups in the 1990s when millions of its citizens were starving to death — was decisive enough to convince me any hope of diplomacy with Pyongyang was useless.
I think it was the Secretary of Defense who said last week we have to deal with the North Korea as is – not as we want it to be.
— Well – isn’t it obvious we’ve been doing exactly the opposite since the late 1990s?
By refusing to acknowledge that normal diplomatic talks with the North are useless, have we not been trying very hard to pretend North Korea is like we want them to be?
…That all we have been doing for most of the past 10 years is pretending that North Korea isn’t the North Korea it has demonstrated itself to be time and time and time again?
I have a bad feeling…..not very strong at this point…..but the kind of bad I’m feeling is of the major kind.
Our reaction to the North’s missile launch was going to likely cost us a good bit over the next 4 to 10 years. North Korea is very shrewd at reading the world community, and it just got a greenlight for even its biggest provocation cards.
Hell, couple that with the basically non-reaction to their getting caught helping Syria build toward weapons-grade nuclear material, and I’d have to imagine officials are dancing in the halls in Pyongyang and skipping through them to work every day just dying to dream up buttons it can now push with near impunity.
The North very much gauges what it can get away with.
That is why I could predict the 2nd ICBM test a couple of years ago. As I said back then, the North had been unusually quiet for itself since the mid-1990s – most likely because it knew it had little room to piss China off. They knew they needed China desperately and they couldn’t do much to paint China in a corner when it came to pressure from the US.
The equation was/is – how far can I go compared to the amount of pain I’m willing to suffer short term.
When the US applied the banking sanctions, Pyongyang squealed like a stuck, injured pig. That was very un-Pyongyang-like. To me that likely meant 1 thing: a threshold had been crossed in what North Korea believed it could suffer short term — that they viewed the sanctions as something that could definitely cause the regime to collapse.
Which in North Korea’s case could only mean one thing — they would push back hard, because caving in is just unthinkable to such a regime.
So, an ICBM test was a good bet as to what card they would play. And they added a nuke test too.
Fast forward to today: The equation still stands – What can we get away with vs how much suffering can we “endure” as Koreans like to say.
And our lack of response to the latest ICBM test will likely convince North Korea: We can get away with a hell of lot more than we’ve tried since the mid-1990s.
Now we also have this Somali pirate thing making us look even weaker and unwilling to take risks than before — and people in places like Pyongyang are surely watching and gauging.
Pulling troops out of Somali in the early 1990s, we now know, emboldened a good number of rogue players on the world scene – and translated into bigger attacks and more death than in the 1980s.
Now, I have a bad feeling North Korea is going to push hard in the next coming years, because they will believe the equation greatly favors it.
With this feeling, I doubt we could even pay them off if we so desired — that concessions will only encourage them to push more.
Other rogue players are watching as well and probably like what they see.
If this were poker, I’d say: I have a bad feeling North Korea is going to make big moves in the near future to take control of the table.
…I think to North Korea’s eyes, there are just too many greenlights flashing….