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.