Kremlinology Watch, Washington Edition: Did the Clintons Just Screw Up Our North Korea Policy Again?

How far has Kim Jong Il’s skillful use of two American hostages set back our efforts to disarm him? Assuming, as we safely can, that President Obama made some concessions for their release, all now depends on whether the President is willing to let himself be upstaged by the Clintons, be cornered into making concessions under the duress of an implicit threat to the safety of two American hostages, and give needlessly fastidious honor to a deal between two men with undistinguished records for keeping promises of their own.

It’s no coincidence that this comes just as President Obama has done what neither President Clinton nor President Bush before him managed to do — design and implement a more-or-less pragmatic and coherent North Korea policy. Will Obama discard that promising start for the sake of Clinton’s deal? For the sake of the country and his own political interest, he should not.

Unfortunately, that will require him to ignore much bad advice from some who are constitutionally incapable of learning a damn thing from North Korea, including some who are actually recognized as North Korea “experts.” Take Jack Pritchard, to name one:

I think from my point of view ““ from a policy point of view ““ you take a look at the situation and say, we understand how this will play out and the two women can come home. Now let’s look at it from a security point of view ““ from a relationship point of view ““ is something positive ““ will something positive come out of that? And the answer in, at least in my advice would be, I think that there is a signal here that the North Koreans don’t like the direction for which the relationship is heading. And they can’t control it. They need a very face-saving way to change this dynamic. I think they are signaling that they want to do something differently. I would recommend that we take this opportunity. Let’s see if this message comes out from the North Koreans. [Jack Pritchard, Interviewed by Jake Tapper]

That’s funny, Jack. So you think that North Korea didn’t like the way “the relationship” was heading way back on March 19th, before they launched an ICBM and tested a nuke? Knowing as they must have that those high-profile provocations would draw the inevitable watered-down U.N. resolution and force President Obama to reimpose sanctions? Did the North Koreans engage in those provocations because they just assumed that Obama would … take your counsel? Or was it Kim Jong Il’s original, principled intent to send these two young women to labor camps, until he saw the political value of having two U.S. hostages, and only after engaging in all these provocations? Do you mean to suggest that a decision to hold two Americans has hostages — which would be — is really fortuitous in the greater scheme of things?

The great policy question this raises, of course, is this: Do these people ever learn? Why, as a matter of fact, some of them do. Look who’s a neocon now!

For many years, based on five visits to North Korea and its border areas, I’ve argued for an “engagement” approach toward Pyongyang, but now I’ve reluctantly concluded that we need more sticks. [Nicholas Kristof, N.Y. Times]

Huh. And just six months into a Democratic president’s administration. Do tell:

The truth is that North Korea doesn’t want to negotiate away its nuclear materials. It is focused on its own transition, and this year it has declined to accept a visit from the Obama administration’s special envoy, Stephen Bosworth. The North isn’t interested in “six-party talks” on nuclear issues; instead, it seeks talks with the U.S. conditioned on accepting North Korea’s status as a nuclear power — which is unacceptable.

Kristof’s bill of particular particulars includes North Korea’s recent provocations, its suspected proliferation to Burma, and its dismantling of those “engagement” showpieces from the Sunshine Policy era. It all makes him sound at least 20% smarter than the editors of his paper.

You may now insert your own “neocon-manufactures-shoddy-WMD-evidence” conspiracy theory.

I’m still waiting.

The speculation about what President Clinton gave the North Koreans for the freedom of Ling and Lee is worrying Japan and South Korea, which have both marched in formation alongside us despite having hostages of their own held in the North. Both have sought assurances from Obama that we’re not going to fold, cut them out, and go directly to bilateral talks. (I’ll just let you soak that in for a moment — the people who ran on a platform of not alienating allies? Double-cross our allies to pursue our own interests unilaterally? Perish the thought.) Not to worry, says the Chosun Ilbo — America is not going soft. I don’t share their confidence, unfortunately. And with yielding to terrorism duly legitimized, South Korea is keeping its options open. The Chairman of Hyundai Asan wants to go to North Korea to negotiate a ransom payment plead for the freedom of a South Korean man held by the North Koreans at Kaesong.

Frankly, my greatest source of optimism in this regard is President Obama’s political shrewdness and his fear and loathing of the Clintons. I’ve never doubted that Obama’s plan for Hillary was to put her in this little gilded cage, and that the Clintons’ plan for Obama was to upstage the Young Turk who overthrew her. If Obama shifts his North Korea policy now, the Clintons beat him at his own game and (as Bill plays coy while basking in the spotlight) let their surrogates laud Bubba’s Great Diplomatic Opening that broke our impasse with North Korea. As The Telegraph’s Ron Coughlin points out, that would be quite an irony; after all, President Clinton is the one who missed our last real chance to keep North Korea from going nuclear in the first place.

Some point out, of course, that this almost certainly would not really be a Great Diplomatic Opening; rather, it would be a stall tactic that would legitimize and holding American citizens as hostages and end with de facto U.S. recognition of North Korea as a nuclear power:

The impulse to save two young women from 12 years of hard labor in a North Korean gulag is powerful. Yet now that this goal has been achieved, we need to balance the emotions of the moment against the precedent for the future.

It is inherent in hostage situations that potentially heartbreaking human conditions are used to overwhelm policy judgments. Therein, in fact, lies the bargaining strength of the hostage-taker. On the other hand, at any given moment, several million Americans reside or travel abroad. How are they best protected? Is the lesson of this episode that any ruthless group or government can demand a symbolic meeting with a prominent American by seizing hostages or threatening inhuman treatment for prisoners in their hands? If it should be said that North Korea is a special case because of its nuclear capability, does that create new incentives for proliferation? [….]

At the end of a negotiation, North Korea will either destroy its nuclear arsenal, or it will become a de facto nuclear state. So far, it has used the negotiating forums available to it in a skillful campaign of procrastination, alternating leaps in technological progress with negotiating phases to consolidate it.

We seem to be approaching such a consolidating phase now. North Korea may return to its well-established tactic of diverting us with the prospect of imminent breakthroughs. This is exactly what happened after the last Korean nuclear weapons test in 2006. Pyongyang undoubtedly will continue to seek to achieve de facto acceptance as a nuclear weapons state by endlessly protracted diplomacy. The benign atmosphere by which it culminated its latest blackmail must not tempt us or our partners into bypaths that confuse atmosphere with substance. Any outcome other than the elimination of the North Korean nuclear military capability in a fixed time period is a blow to non-proliferation prospects worldwide and to peace and stability globally. [Henry Kissinger, Washington Post]

Also worth reading, as always, is Claudia Rosett’s take.

Brian Myers doesn’t see any Great Breakthrough here, either. What Brian Myers has to say is always worth reading, though in my view, Myers seems to overestimate the effectiveness of North Korean propaganda on an audience that — to the extent it can be surveyed (opens in pdf) — probably isn’t as easily fooled as Myers thinks. Although North Koreans probably tend to revere Kim Il Sung to some residual degree and may hate America almost as much as college students in Seoul, that doesn’t mean that they revere Kim Jong Il or juche ideology as much as college students in Seoul. Myers is incorrect (which is a rare event) when he says that North Korea maintains a stable population when a country with such a low standard of living ought to be experiencing a high birthrate and population growth. Instead, North Korea’s population has either held steady or declined in the last two decades, which would make it almost unique among the world’s poorest countries. Despite tightened border fencing and the threat of public execution for fleeing North Korea, large numbers of North Koreans still vote with their feet for a life in South Korea, or as fugitives in China.

Still, some good is sure to come of all of this. If anyone is still dumb enough at this point to stray into North Korean territory, either as a journalist, a tourist, or as an employee of Hyundai Asan, we may now possess the clarity of judgment to leave them there. At some point, you have to just resign yourself to the fact there’s only so much you can do to rescue the unfit from Darwin’s maw so that they can go on bringing down the average I.Q. of our collective gene pool. That helps our policy goal of isolating North Korea and constricting its Palace Economy.
And for those so lacking in a conscience that they’re contemplating one of those tyranny tourism ventures to the Arirang Festival, maybe these incidents will be just the discouragement they need. Granted, if I were the Treasury Department, I’d block all of the accounts of Koryo Tours and the Korean Friendship Association, but it wouldn’t bother me much to see a few of those people stop-lossed in Pyongyang for a few weeks of crunching down tol-pi-bim-pab.