By DAVID WHITEHOUSE
IN ITS form, the nuclear agreement reached in early February with North Korea gives the U.S. options to push for a final disarmament deal or to drag out fruitless discussions for a period of many months. In its content, however, the “first steps” represent a major concession to the North Koreans—and to their closest partner, China.
The deal’s initial phase, which calls for shutting down the plutonium-producing Yongbyon reactor in return for $230 million in heavy fuel oil, is supposed to extend for sixty days, but it doesn’t touch major arms issues such as uranium enrichment or North Korea’s existing nuclear arsenal. As U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice put it, “This is still the first quarter. There’s still a lot of time to go on the clock.” The options that arise from this piecemeal approach—to move toward a final deal or to string the Asians along—can dial back the Far East crisis while the U.S. considers strikes against Iran and other escalation in the Middle East.
The concessions to North Korea do not end with the fact that key disarmament issues are pushed down the road. The U.S. agreed to unfreeze North Korea’s assets in a Macau bank allegedly used for money laundering—the point that scuttled an arms agreement that was reached in September 2005. Bush’s former chief disarmament negotiator John Bolton and other hardliners such as Deputy National Security Adviser Elliot Abrams, quickly condemned the new deal as similar to Bill Clinton’s 1994 Agreed Framework, and said that Bush was “rewarding North Korea for bad behavior.”
This gets things upside down, as usual, unless loosening a stranglehold is counted as a reward. The bank sanctions had damaged North Korea’s already weak ability to get credit worldwide. The U.S. has kept the North Koreans out of the International Monetary Fund, and U.S. ally Japan regularly vetoes their applications for loans from the Asian Development Bank.
The U.S. has been the driving force behind the nuclear crisis since it began in 2002. North Korea did not provoke the crisis by suddenly violating the Agreed Framework. The U.S. ignored the 1994 framework from the start—failing to lift sanctions, to open trade, establish diplomatic relations, or to start work on the two light-water reactors it had promised. The Clinton administration, up until the summer of its final year in 2000, maintained the Cold War stranglehold in hopes that the regime would collapse.
The Bush administration’s motivation for confronting North Korea over uranium enrichment in the fall of 2002—which precipitated the five-year crisis—was to thwart the moves that South Korea and Japan had made toward peace with the North in the previous months. Bush and others had two major fears about U.S. allies’ reconciling with this Cold War foe.
First, an outbreak of peace would make U.S. political and military power less important in the region. A final resolution of the Korean War would undermine the excuse for the U.S. military presence in South Korea and would render obsolete the scheme under which control of the South’s 650,000 troops goes to the U.S. commander-in-chief in time of war.
Second, the integration of North Korea into Northeast Asia would benefit China at the expense of the United States. Korean reunification would draw the economies of Japan and especially South Korea even closer toward China. It would also facilitate Asian business connections with Europe and the Middle East that would cut the U.S. out. Right now, the Seventh Fleet is the guarantee of Japan and South Korea’s oil imports—and of their car exports to Europe. Shipping overland through North Korea, once the roads and rails are upgraded, would become cheaper than sailing through the U.S.-defended Straits of Malacca at the Equator near Singapore.
In recent months, the Chinese have made their own push to get North Korea back into negotiations, but the main initiative came from the Americans. From the start, China’s rulers have wanted North Korea to back down, since a nuclear-armed North tends to drive Japan closer to the U.S.—and gives Japan an excuse to arm itself. The crisis has given Japan’s rulers domestic political cover to sign onto a U.S. plan for a regional “missile shield.” The plan draws Japan, for the first time, into the defense of Taiwan against a potential attack from mainland China. The crisis over North Korea is thus pushing China’s rulers into a regional arms race that they would rather put off to a time when their economy is more developed. North Korea’s missile test last July disturbed the Chinese, but the October 9 nuclear test forced their hand. They voted to approve new UN sanctions (at least verbally) and stepped up their pressure on North Korea in meetings last December.
But the key player in getting the current deal started was the U.S.—as the party that brought about the crisis, and the one that could lose some strategic stature by resolving it. The outlines of the deal, including its parcellation into steps, was the work of January meetings in Berlin between Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Hill and the North Koreans—the bilateral talks that Bush swore would never happen. In fact, the U.S. could have gotten North Korea to accept this kind of deal at any time in the past five years. The difference now is that the U.S. is willing to offer it. The original confrontation in 2002 was clearly calculated to produce a crisis, but not one that would escalate to North Korea’s detonation of a nuclear device. If the U.S. is still able at this late date to get the North to reverse the nuclear program, the administration can make major concessions and still spin the result as a victory.
Despite the dire warnings of the right-wingers inside and outside the administration, this “victory in retreat” is possible—because the North Koreans have an incentive to grant it. North Korea’s objective from the start has been to establish good relations with the United States. The North has lacked a wealthy patron since the end of the Cold War, when Russia turned its back on the North and China turned its attention toward the more lucrative South. These losses—and the continued financial and commercial blockade by the U.S.—account for the crisis that the North has suffered for sixteen years. The central problem is a lack of foreign exchange, which translates into an inability to buy crucial economic inputs such as energy and fertilizer.
Specialists such as former Washington Post reporter Don Oberdorfer and historian Bruce Cumings have long noted the North’s search for a new imperial sponsor. Oberdorfer’s The Two Koreas details a 1991 overture from Kim Il-sung to George Bush Sr. to transfer the North’s great-power dependence to the U.S., and Cumings’ North Korea: Another Country reports a similar offer that Kim’s son, Kim Jong-il, extended to Bill Clinton in 2000. According to Cumings, Kim Jong-il offered to allow U.S. troops into the northern part of a reunited Korea—up to the border with China—if Kim could live out his days as ruler of a rebranded “autonomous northern province.”
A reunified Korea might move closer into China’s economic orbit, but many in the ruling class of South Korea, as well as in the North, see an advantage to a close relation to the U.S. as leverage against their giant neighbors, China and Japan. If the U.S. is really moving toward a deal with the North, it will be sure to promote such a special U.S.-Korea connection for the future. And if Bush Jr. is aware of the offer that Kim made to Clinton, he must be wondering whether that deal is still on the table! It might not be, since China’s status has climbed since the U.S. began to enlist its help to pressure the North.
The current concessionary agreement is a tacit admission that U.S. imperialism is overextended. With the Middle East on fire and anti-imperial politics in Latin America boiling, Bush decided to turn down the heat in the Far East. In fact, a deal that simply ends the crisis would be a strategic concession to China in exchange for, at best, some tactical elbow-room in the Middle East. For that reason, the U.S. will drag out the process with an option to wreck it and blame the failure on the North.
If a deal does go through eventually, the U.S. will make sure that its final shape preserves a crucial U.S. political and military role in the Far East. The U.S. can’t, however, turn back the rise of China as the economic hub for the region. This situation guarantees more imperial clashes between the two in the future, whether or not the Far East is the battleground.
The North Korea deal raises the stakes for Iran. China has been a potential obstacle to U.S. action against Iran, but progress over North Korea may make the Chinese more willing to accept a military strike. China has already agreed to Security Council sanctions against Iran. Although China and Iran have a multibillion dollar economic connection, China’s foreign policy, for now, is to avoid direct conflict as long as other countries’ actions don’t interfere with its economic growth. In this case, the line of least resistance for the Chinese may be to commit further diplomatic betrayal of Iran in order to reap the benefits of helping the U.S. out of its Far Eastern jam.
And the Chinese should be able to weather the economic shock of a spike in oil prices that would result from an attack on Iran—in part because of their growing connections to oil suppliers in Africa and Saudi Arabia. The favor the U.S. is extending to China over North Korea could be returned with Chinese acquiescence to the U.S. police role in the Middle East. The Chinese know that the U.S. is in a Middle East quagmire, and they might not mind handing Bush a shovel to dig even deeper.
David Whitehouse is on the editorial board of the ISR. He can be reached at [email protected]
