NY Times: U.S. Negotiators Don’t Think NK Will Disarm

As promised, I’ve updated this post.

Our two main negotiators with the North Koreans, Ambassadors Chris Hill and Joseph DiTrani, went to the Senate to testify about the prospects for negotiating with the North Koreans. Amid signs that President Bush gave President Roh one more hard-fought chance to bring the North Koreans back to the table for serious talks, the diplomats aren’t sounding particularly hopeful about diplomacy:

The Bush administration’s top negotiators with North Korea said Tuesday that they harbored “increasing doubts” that President Kim Jong Il’s government was ready to give up its nuclear weapons program in return for security guarantees and economic incentives.

The envoys, noting that there had been five sessions of talks between an American and a North Korean official at the United Nations in the last 10 months, rejected the idea that more incentives or one-on-one talks would be likely to revive serious negotiations.

“I think the real issue here is not that they don’t know the benefits, but they simply haven’t made the fundamental decision whether they want to give up on being a nuclear state,” said Christopher Hill, assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, speaking at a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Let’s drive directly to the heart of this problem: (1) North Korea isn’t serious about disarming (2) because it has no fear that there will be consequences if it does not disarm, and because (3) its greatest fear is the openness and transparency that are essential to verifying any disarmament agreement. Ergo, there won’t be an agreement in the near future, if ever.

In that light, some readers of this blog may have been disappointed to see this:

Mr. Hill and Mr. DeTrani also clarified the issue of security guarantees for North Korea, disputing a suggestion by Mr. Biden that the Bush administration withhold such guarantees if North Korea did not improve its human rights record.

“As I understand your proposal, security assurances are only, quote, ‘provisional’ until other issues are addressed, right?” Mr. Biden asked.

“Once their nuclear program’s eliminated, they will get permanent security assurances,” Mr. DeTrani replied. He added, however, that “we are not prepared to have a fully normalized relationship in the absence of movement on these other issues,” referring to North Korea’s authoritarian practices and brutal suppression of dissent.

Mr. DeTrani’s comments were significant, because although President Bush has said the administration has “no intention” of attacking North Korea, many conservatives in the administration and in Congress oppose any security guarantees without progress on human rights or even an ousting of Mr. Kim’s government.

I’m not very surprised by DiTrani’s comment, in light of what I’ll just call “other information.” Clearly, everyone at State, including Condi Rice–along with her boss in the White House–is ready to make a nuke deal and shunt human rights off to the side for some other day (which, in the North Korean dialect, translates to “never”). Once North Korea has its security guarantees, we presumably won’t be free to do anything that would undermine the regime’s security, and North Korea will have zero incentive to relax the grip of the iron fist.

Given that the main point I’ve stressed on this blog is that human rights and nuclear weapons become inextricable at an intersection called “transparency,” you’d expect me to be in a deep funk over this. Actually, the funk is fairly shallow, and here’s why: there isn’t going to be any deal.

Let me explain.

President Bush does not appear likely to make a deal with the North Koreans without an extensive verification regime, which would have to allow something close to anytime, anywhere inspections to be effective. There goes your deal. No deal means no security guarantees and a change to a really hostile policy, which is the only way to persuade North Korea that opacity and mendacity will have serious consequences. We know that North Korea built some of its underground weapons facilities with forced labor, and we suspect that it tests poison gas on gulag prisoners, so effective inspection means we have to be able to inspect gulags and interview slave laborers, and enter North Korea’s darkest secrets in its “closed areas.” Nothing we are threatening them with right now will make them let us into those places. Threats of war won’t do that, because they know (or worse yet, may miscalculate) we won’t follow through. Threats of bankruptcy, instability, and insurgency will.

Meanwhile, Biden and company are making a last-gasp effort to steer us in the opposite direction. The problem is that we have already tried what they propose, and there’s no wriggling away from the fact that it failed even more miserably than the six-party talks have.

For all the justifiable suspicions about his diplomacy, President Bush is at least talking about human rights, and that’s important when it comes from the President of the United States. The Times had more information about Bush’s meeting with Kang Chol-Hwan, something they can’t have missed in Seoul. So millions of New York Times readers have just been introduced to what goes on in North Korea’s concentration camps:

Underscoring the importance that the administration attaches to North Korea’s human rights record, the White House said Tuesday that Mr. Bush met Monday with a defector from North Korea, Kang Chol-Hwan, whose memoir, “The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in a North Korean Gulag,” recounts his suffering at the hands of the North Korean government.

Imprisoned with his family at age 9 in 1977, Mr. Kang was released a decade later, and subsequently escaped to South Korea, where he now works as a journalist and is a vocal critic of the Kim government. Mr. Bush has read Mr. Kang’s book and wanted to meet with him in person, said Frederick Jones, a spokesman for the National Security Council.

Mr. Lugar, among others on the Senate committee, pressed Mr. Hill and Mr. DeTrani to put pressure on China and South Korea to allow more refugees into their country, especially those escaping punishment for political reasons. Both nations have been reluctant to do so for fear of security problems in their countries and out of concern about angering North Korea.

Mr. DeTrani said the administration had made “some progress” on that issue.

The latter point is interesting; I’ll wait to see the results.