Gary Samore on North Korea Policy

In addition to his comments on North Korea’s HEU program, Gary Samore talked about President Obama’s North Korea policy.  As someone who found Bush’s North Korea policy to be incoherent and disappointing, but who didn’t have high expectations for Samore’s boss, either, I could not be more pleased to read things like this:

I think we have to create, in the case of both North Korea and Iran, a narrative by which, if the big powers work together, and if the international community works together in support, that can be successful.  [….]

We are determined at the end of the day to achieve nuclear disarmament in North Korea.  [….]

In terms of where we go from here. I think the North Koreans made a very calculated decision last March that they would walk away from the deal they made with Bush and that they would demonstrate their nuclear and missile capabilities. In a way they did us a favor because they acted in such an unjustified and provocative manner that it was very easy for the United States to organize a strong action against them that of course culminated in 1874.  [Gary Samore at IIIS]

That may be something of an overstatement:

I think my sense is that the North Koreans are lookking for a way to deescalate now. If you noticed the statement they made in response to 1874 was remarkably mild by North Korea standards. Their fireworks over, their July 4th holiday was actually not much to be concerned about, I mean shooting off a couple of missiles, big deal, and they turned a ship around, so to me, all the sort of straws in the wind vindicate that North Koreans are probably looking for a way to get back to the bargaining table.

Here, Samore is ahead of himself.  It is encouraging that the ICBM launch did not materialize, but there could also be technical reasons for that.  Maybe our initial intelligence about a possible launch wasn’t that good.  And North Korea’s probable complicity in a week-long denial-of-service attack on U.S. government web sites doesn’t suggest a loss of appetite for confrontation.  Even so, I’m more interested in what Samore would say when the North Koreans do come back to the table and demand Agreed Framework III:

It’s typical North Korean behaviour.  You create a crisis and after you think you’ve extracted sufficient advantage from the crisis, you engage in a peace campaign.  I think that’s probably what we’re seeing here. The difficult problem is going to be how we make progress once we get back to the bargaining table, because clearly there are huge difference in views and as President Obama has said, we don’t want to be in a position of buying the North Korean horse for a third time.  And whether the North Koreans are willing to sell their horse for steps that are truly irreversible I think is going to be challenge in the next round of negotiations.”

The use of the word “third” here is important, because it confirms that this administration accepts both agreed frameworks as failures and rejects the partisan sophistry that tried to distinguish either as less inherently flawed than the other.  Anyone who still adheres to that sophistry after all we’ve seen in the last ten years either doesn’t know what he’s talking about, is being deceitful, or has deceived himself.    And while we’re on the subject, how many people do you know who’ve consistently recognized both agreements as inherently flawed since, well, since I started this blog?

I haven’t yet written about one recent and mildly positive development, the election of Yukiya Amano to head the International Atomic Energy Agency.  But Samore’s mention of it is a useful segue:

First of all I think, we very much welcome the election of Dr. Amano as the new DG [Director General] and we think he is the perfect person to lead the agency right now at a time when it needs to focus on its technical responsibilities for safeguards in nuclear security and technical assistance. The key to this is making sure the IAEA has the resources to do its job. For years and years they’ve been on a zero budget. We think this is the time to break that and the current budget is for a very modest 8 percent, which the U.S. is prepared to support.”

Obviously, the administration likes him, and the announcement at this time that we’ll restore funding suggests (a) that we think the IAEA may become useful again with El Baradei out of the way, and perhaps even (b) that we whispered that funding wouldn’t be forthcoming otherwise.  That qualifies as no-kidding smart diplomacy to me.  At least with regard to North Korea policy, the Obama Administration’s policy continues to be surprisingly clear-eyed and pragmatic.