Dealing with North Korea

Pyongyang's signal that it would stop Washington from launching a pre-emptive strike against it has prompted the United States, wracked by a host of uncertainties already, towards the diplomatic route.

in Singapore

THE larger American view of North Korea, through the looking glass, has remained different, until very recently, from the Pentagon's perception of Iraq, although President George W. Bush banded the two countries, along with Iran, to raise the spectre of an "axis of evil" while seeking to present a `brave new vision' of the world in January 2002 itself. Now, in February 2003, Bush has considered it a matter of even-handed `war diplomacy' to warn Pyongyang, too, that the United States is keeping all the options on the table to address North Korea's nuclear profile.

The notion of all the options being on the table is supposed to be a diplomatic euphemism for a U.S. willingness to consider waging war to dispossess the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) of its capabilities to produce and deploy nuclear weapons and to disarm it of its existing stocks, if any, of atomic arms. Viewed in this perspective, Bush has finally begun to see the nuclear "threats" everywhere in the same light. After all, he began his diplomatic offensive towards the present moment of a possible war with Iraq (as on February 9), with similar comments, about keeping all the options on the table with regard to Baghdad's nuclear profile.

An obvious question, therefore, would relate to the nature and scope of the steps that the DPRK has adopted in recent weeks that would have loomed larger before Bush as a potential threat to the U.S.' perceived global interests. Two aspects of Bush's latest comments are of critical importance. First, he certainly has upgraded the level of threat posed by North Korea as he sees it. The second, and no less significant, aspect of Bush's reactive diplomacy with regard to the DPRK pertains to his stated willingness to explore fully all diplomatic means to sort out his concerns about Pyongyang's current `overdrive' towards the production and deployment of nuclear weapons.

The more immediate new cause of "concern" to the U.S. is the signal from Pyongyang that it might not be averse to the idea of preventing Washington, in some form or the other, from launching a pre-emptive strike (perhaps of the nuclear kind as well) against the DPRK.

Doubts persist about the exact words that the DPRK has used in the Korean language to deliver such a message to the U.S. However, diplomats and analysts familiar with the substance of North Korea's world-view tend to believe that Kim Jong-il, the DPRK leader, is still engaged in determining the full extent of his country's sovereign rights in a world that is changing by the minute since September 11, 2001.

Given the indication (as on February 9) that the U.S. might seek to address the DPRK's nuclear issue at some leisure, despite the Pentagon's assertions about its ability to wage war in more than one theatre simultaneously, the Korean peninsula has turned into a virtual diplomatic cauldron. How long this would be so is a matter of conjecture in the context of the U.S.' own sense of uncertainties.

North Korea's recent withdrawal from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and the subsequent expulsion of the inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) from the DPRK's Yongbyon nuclear power complex did not alarm the U.S. as much as Pyongyang's new assertions, in early February, about its capabilities to keep Washington at bay through some form of pre-emptive action. The latest warnings to Washington followed its monitored moves to heighten its military presence in and around the Korean peninsula in order to prevent any `adventurism' from Pyongyang during a possible U.S.-led war against Iraq (such a war being only a strong possibility at the time of these military movements in or near the Korean peninsula).

However, the latest U.S.-DPRK confrontation began with Bush's depiction of the DPRK as a key component of an "axis of evil" in January 2002. Washington argued that it had reason to see the DPRK in such a dim light, but Pyongyang saw the U.S. as an arrogant and solitary "hyperpower" (a notion popularised by Hubert Vedrine of the French establishment). When Bush labelled the DPRK an "evil" power, he had already adopted a posture of willingness to talk to Pyongyang without preconditions after suspending the Clinton administration's policy of measured engagement with North Korea. The DPRK regarded Bush's "axis of evil" speech as a clear signal of his dismissal of Pyongyang as one unfit to be a negotiating partner. Much of the DPRK's attitude towards the U.S. since that speech has been determined by the anger and resentment that Kim Jong-il felt over Bush's `moralistic' stand.

Two subsequent events in 2002 clouded U.S.-DPRK ties. First, a top U.S. official claimed that Pyongyang had taken him into confidence about its systematic infractions of the Agreed Framework (A.F.) of 1994. The A.F. was a bilateral deal that committed Pyongyang to a policy of nuclear non-proliferation in exchange for efforts by Kedo, or the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organisation, a Washington-sponsored consortium, to provide the DPRK with heavy oil and other proliferation-proof fuels for the generation of electricity. The chief objective of the A.F. was to prevent North Korea from producing electricity through nuclear means and to discourage it from reprocessing the spent atomic fuel to make weapons of mass destruction. Pyongyang had signed the deal in the specific context of North Korea's own sense of isolation in the mid-1990s following the collapse of its socialist ally, the Soviet Union.

The claim by the U.S. in 2002 was that the DPRK had violated the A.F. by producing enriched uranium whereas the accord of 1994 had primarily stopped Pyongyang in its tracks so that it could not use the plutonium, already available at its nuclear power plants, to make the atom bomb. The U.S. intelligence community soon broke the `news', in the context of the U.S. claim, that Pakistan, itself a suspected beneficiary of China's strategic goodwill, had helped Pyongyang produce enriched uranium for the purpose of fabricating nuclear weapons. However, the Bush administration chose to ignore the `lead' regarding Pakistan obviously for fear of creating fissures within the larger `anti-terror' coalition in the global arena. While this aspect did not suit the strategic interests of Japan and a few other countries in North Korea's neighbourhood, Pyongyang itself denied that it had disclosed its nuclear `secrets' to any U.S. official at any time.

The second key development that ruptured U.S.-DPRK ties beyond repair in 2002 was the decision by KEDO to halt fuel supplies to North Korea in view of its supposed confessions about a `clandestine' nuclear weapons programme in violation of the A.F. At one level, this development was followed by North Korea's exit from the NPT and the expulsion of the IAEA inspectors. At another and equally important level, the stoppage of fuel supplies to DPRK has been a crucial factor behind the worsening of ties between Washington and Pyongyang in the first 40 days of 2003 as well.

CONSPICUOUS during this period in 2003 is the move by North Korea to test the U.S.' mood and `patience' at almost every twist and turn in Washington's own strategic standoff with Iraq. One reason for the DPRK not being able to keep the U.S. on its toes has much to do with the dynamics of the inter-Korean dialogue. Despite Japan's growing concerns about the DPRK's nuclear profile, South Korea has hardly slackened its efforts to build a cultural-strategic bond with Pyongyang. This ground reality has not been diminished by the fact that Japan seeks to act in concert with South Korea and the U.S. to checkmate the DPRK on the nuclear chessboard. Moreover, Seoul's "sunshine policy" of sustainable engagement with Pyongyang in the cultural and broad strategic spheres, as distinct from the military-political areas, has remained unaffected by a presidential election in South Korea as also the alleged monetary `scandal' behind the efforts at inter-Korean rapprochement and by the DPRK's perceivably incremental `militancy' towards the U.S.

This reality check about the DPRK has remained largely unexplained, except as an aspect of the reunification urge of the people on both sides of the divide on the Korean peninsula. The role and relevance of China as the strategic master of the Korean scene, therefore, acquires unusual importance. Specialists on Pyongyang's foreign policy, like Ilpyong J. Kim have already outlined how "China may be the only country North Korea can count on to provide support when its security is threatened". It is in this context that a new diplomatic nuance in China's stand with regard to the DPRK's nuclear profile may prove significant. While China has generally held that the A.F. provides the framework for U.S.-DPRK interaction, Beijing seems increasingly inclined to consider "joint efforts" by all parties concerned as the possible way forward on the Korean peninsula.