The WaPo’s Glenn Kessler and Edward Cody noted today that the administration’s newly-struck deal with North Korea was reached because the president “was willing to give U.S. negotiators new flexibility to reach an agreement.”
That’s not a sentence I expected to see anytime soon. Bush isn’t supposed to believe in “flexibility” when it comes to negotiating with evil. As Cheney once famously said, “We don’t negotiate with evil — we defeat it.” North Korea wanted us to be flexible, so Bush was intransigent, telling Kim Jung Il’s regime that it had to give up its nuclear program in order to begin diplomatic negotiations. (It never made much sense — Bush was effectively saying, “Give us everything we want and then we’ll talk to you.” For some reason North Korea didn’t agree.)
To be “flexible” was to “reward bad behavior.” So Bush stubbornly stuck to his policy of not having a policy, while North Korea became increasingly dangerous.
What changed? As Fred Kaplan explained, Bush “finally got a nuclear deal with North Korea because he finally started negotiating like Bill Clinton.”
A constant mantra for the past dozen years — chanted by Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney on several occasions — is that the Agreed Framework, which the Clinton administration signed with North Korea in 1994, was a naive and disastrous failure.
And yet the deal that Bush’s diplomats just negotiated is very similar to Clinton’s accord in substance — and nearly identical in its approach to arms control. […]
The talks made progress after the Clinton team made offers that called on the two sides to take actions simultaneously and in step-by-step phases. That’s what the deal reached Monday calls for, too. The “Joint Statement,” released at the six-party talks in Beijing Tuesday, refers to “coordinated steps … in a phased manner,” “the principle of ‘action for action,’ ” and “actions in parallel.”
The Clinton team also detected, once talks got under way, that disputes between the two sides were almost always resolved in small, informal settings. Bush has resisted these kinds of meetings, but that’s where the outline of this new deal was sketched out — in one-on-one sessions in Berlin.
The good news is Bush finally realized Clinton’s approach represented progress, and the policy of the last six years represented failure.
The bad news is, Bush’s foolish delays have strengthened North Korea considerably.
This week’s deal with North Korea will lead Kim Jung Il to “freeze” his nuclear program in exchange for 50,000 tons of heavy fuel oil or a comparable amount of food and other aid. North Korea will also open all of their facilities to inspectors in exchange for another 950,000 tons of heavy fuel oil.
The agreement then says that after this is complete, the United States will negotiate directly with North Korea on normalizing relations. Later on, negotiations will begin on the dismantling of North Korea’s nuclear program. (As Kaplan put it, “In other words, the North Koreans get nearly half a billion dollars in aid and a forum for diplomatic recognition before they even have to talk about scrapping a reactor or surrendering a gram of plutonium.”)
Let’s look at this another way. What does North Korea get out of this?
* Money
* Aid
* Nuclear fuel
* Recognition
* U.S. and its allies have to move first
* North Korea keeps all of the plutonium and nuclear bombs they’ve developed over the last five years
What does the United States get?
* Inspectors
* A North Korean nuclear program that isn’t going to get worse in the short term
I’m not necessarily saying this is awful deal, but I am saying this is a deal Bush could have had five years ago. This has been on the table all along, but the president didn’t want to “negotiate with evil.”
In the end, Bush’s negotiations led us right back to where we were before, except now North Korea has a nuclear arsenal. Bush’s strategy hasn’t improved our position at all; it’s only made the world more dangerous by allowing North Korea to become a nuclear state while finally accepting a five-year-old deal.
Remember, Bush believes foreign policy is his strength as a president.