North Korea Takes the Bait

For all of its pomp and circumstance—the police-escorted limousines cruising unimpeded through capital cities, the grand conference rooms, the hordes of assistants and aides—international diplomacy can be a grindingly tough and draining business. For three years, Christopher Hill, the lead U.S. negotiator in the six-party talks on denuclearizing North Korea, had sought a Grand Bargain with Pyongyang, only to be frustrated at every turn. Finally, in the early hours of Feb. 13, that changed. Thanks in part to the Chinese, who played the stern taskmaster during the latest round of negotiations in Beijing (“they kept us up very late,” Hill later joked), the State Department diplomat was able to return to his hotel shortly before 3 a.m. with a deal in hand. Hill wasn’t the only U.S. official consumed by the talks. His boss, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, called him 12 times in three days to check the progress of negotiations. “He thought he had a tentative agreement,” Rice told reporters at a Feb. 13 press conference in Washington. “And I called him at 4:15 this morning just to make sure.”

When dealing with North Korea, “making sure” is never a bad idea. Going back to 1994, when the Clinton Administration cajoled Pyongyang into promising to abandon its nuclear-weapons program, North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il has repeatedly made and then reneged on such accords. But for the Bush Administration, whose officials had once speculated openly about the possibility of forcing Kim from power by cutting off his regime from aid and trade, the agreement signed on Tuesday represented a victory—albeit a small one. Now, the immediate question it faces is simple: Have the U.S. and its four negotiating partners—South Korea, China, Russia and Japan—laid a solid foundation for a lasting deal on North Korea’s nukes, or is this agreement, as one former U.S. negotiator puts it, “just another false start, destined to end badly?”

Despite its obvious need for a diplomatic success somewhere, anywhere, given the quagmire in Iraq and the stalemate over Iran’s purported nuclear-weapons program, the Administration could not be accused of overhyping what it got in Beijing. This was not a comprehensive solution that could bring about a nuclear-free Korean peninsula—a goal that, Bush aides say, the President has eagerly sought. But it was, Washington insists, an important first step toward that goal—”an early harvest,” as U.S. negotiators like to call it. “Little plants come up,” Hill says, “and you harvest those immediately.”

The preliminary nature of the deal is clear enough: North Korea agreed to shut down its nuclear reactor at Yongbyon, where it’s believed to have produced the fissile material needed to make the six to 10 nuclear weapons Kim is estimated to possess. Pyongyang has also promised to allow international inspectors into the country to verify compliance within 60 days. In return, the North is to receive an emergency shipment of 50,000 tons of fuel oil from the U.S., China, Russia and South Korea. The oil is desperately needed to run electric power plants in the impoverished land. If the North permanently disables the reactor, the deal calls for another 950,000 tons of oil to be donated.

Beyond that, it’s less clear what North Korea has conceded. The agreement holds out the possibility of an array of unspecified economic and humanitarian assistance flowing to the North, as well as the prospect that the U.S. will remove the country from its list of terrorist-sponsoring states, end its trade sanctions and eventually enter talks to normalize relations. Meanwhile, Pyongyang agreed “to discuss all of its nuclear programs,” including any stockpiles of plutonium already gleaned from the Yongbyon reactor. At her Feb. 13 press conference, Rice emphasized the phrase “all nuclear programs.” She says the U.S. and its partners want the North to dismantle both its plutonium-based weapons program and a suspected uranium-enrichment program. “Everybody understands what ‘all’ means,” she says. But Pyongyang, after first admitting to the uranium program when confronted about it by the U.S. in 2002, has since denied its existence—and may well have hidden it away deep inside a mountain somewhere in the countryside. Rice insisted that “we’re going to pursue the issue of the highly enriched-uranium program.” But if Kim decides not to “discuss” this issue, as the agreement demands, how will the U.S. and its partners react?

The agreement is also silent—ominously so, critics believe—on the subject of the North’s existing nuclear weapons. The question of whether Pyongyang has them is no longer a matter of conjecture: last October the North tested a nuclear weapon (albeit with mixed success), dramatically raising the stakes in the standoff with the U.S. and its allies. The fact that Kim’s existing nuclear stockpile is not mentioned in the latest agreement “is probably not an oversight,” says Gary Samore, who was head of the counterproliferation program at the U.S. National Security Council (NSC) under Clinton. “That’s an indication that the North Koreans are not going to be willing to give up their existing capabilities.”

It’s hard to see why they would do so. Ever since Bush’s speech in 2002 labeling North Korea a member of the “axis of evil,” Kim has believed “he has a big, fat target painted on his back,” says a former U.S. diplomat. “Kim believes that having a few nukes in his pocket is the ultimate guarantee that no one will try to topple his regime militarily. He’s probably right about that, and no matter how much fuel oil or diplomatic goodies we send his way, he’s not going to negotiate that away.”

As Bush’s critics see it, that’s where the latest disarmament deal falls short. Former Clinton Administration officials say the agreement is a close facsimile of the Agreed Framework signed by Washington and Pyongyang in 1994. That deal called for the North to halt nuclear-weapons development in return for two light-water nuclear-power plants, which are difficult to use to generate fissile material for bombs. Clinton’s presidency ended before the power plants could be completed and the projects today are derelict—evidence, in Pyongyang’s eyes, of Washington’s bad faith. But those who defend the Agreed Framework say all Bush had to do upon taking office was follow through, and several years of dangerous saber rattling in Northeast Asia could have been avoided. Says Graham Allison, a former Assistant Secretary of Defense under Clinton: “The bad news is that this is four years, eight bombs’ worth of plutonium and one nuclear test” after the Bush Administration veered from the course set by the Agreed Framework.

Gibes from Clintonites over the recent deal are to be expected. But criticism has come from the right as well as the left. John Bolton, Bush’s former ambassador to the U.N. and his lead negotiator in the early rounds of the six-party talks, told CNN the U.S. has sent a perilous signal to proliferators that they’ll be rewarded for bad behavior. “It’s a bad deal,” Bolton declared.

State Department officials deny they’ve let North Korea off the hook. “He’s just wrong,” Rice sniffed in response to Bolton’s criticisms. The Administration argues that their deal is much stronger than the one negotiated in ’94 because it effectively isolates Kim. The Agreed Framework was bilateral, the argument goes, whereas this time North Korea’s neighbors—including its closest ally and major benefactor, China—are signatories to the deal, which should force Pyongyang to keep its promises and continue to bargain in good faith. The Chinese were infuriated by Kim’s October nuclear blast; President Hu Jintao had publicly warned against such a test. This “deal has muscle,” argues Michael Green, a former NSC adviser on East Asian affairs in the Bush Administration, “because the Chinese have been very unhappy with the North’s provocations.”

Most of the deal’s critics, in fact, concede that it is at least better than the status quo: a North Korea bent on producing more weapons. Former Clinton negotiator Dan Poneman likened the latest agreement to putting a “tourniquet” on the plutonium program. If the Yongbyon reactor is shut down, the North’s ability to make more plutonium-fueled nukes is crippled. And although Pyongyang has not agreed to dismantle its nuclear program, a path for further negotiations has been set. This is likely the best deal the U.S. could get right now, and the fact that Bush’s team took it means “they have come to face reality,” says former NSC adviser Samore, rather than holding out for greater concessions that seemed increasingly unfeasible.

In two months, Rice and other foreign ministers will gather in Beijing to assess whether both sides have lived up to their initial promises. If they have, Rice says she will meet face-to-face with her North Korean counterpart for the first time during Bush’s presidency. That could set the stage for historic discussions about normalizing relations between two implacable enemies. Indeed, the Administration’s rhetoric about seeking a sweeping solution to the North Korea nuclear quagmire—with regime change as one of its options—has faded. Instead, the U.S. now seems willing to take a more modest, measured approach in pursuit of the ultimate goal of a denuclearized North. The first step was to halt the forward progress of Kim’s nuclear program. It will be harder getting him to reverse course.