It hasn’t gotten a lot of attention lately, but the diplomatic progress with North Korea over the last week or so has been fruitful and encouraging.
The United States is looking to build on momentum created by North Korea shutting down its nuclear reactor and will start deliberations on removing the regime from a list of terrorism-sponsoring states, the main U.S. envoy on the issue said Monday.
In an interview with The Associated Press, Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill laid out a busy agenda for steps Washington hopes can be made in the reconciliation process as Pyongyang lays aside its nuclear weapons program.
Among them, he said, are negotiations on a permanent peace treaty to replace the 54-year-old cease-fire that halted the Korean War and talks on setting up a regional security forum in northeast Asia.
“If North Korea wants to denuclearize, all of this stuff is very doable,” Hill said.
That’s obviously terrific news. Tensions with North Korea had reached a very dangerous level. For the better part of his first six years in office, Bush had no policy on North Korea to speak of, other than to mock Kim Jung Il and reject any and all notions of bilateral diplomacy.
Now, after the president finally gave up on his nonsensical, ineffective, and surprisingly dangerous approach, we’re seeing real progress. The IAEA confirmed today that North Korea has, in fact, shut down its sole functioning nuclear reactor at Yongbyon, as Kim Jung Il had said. IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei said, “The process has been going quite well and we have had good cooperation from North Korea. It’s a good step in the right direction.”
If only Bush had shown the wisdom to have a responsible policy sooner, we would have averted a crisis and seen this progress years ago.
Josh Marshall had an excellent take on this:
[H]ere’s the thing no one should forget: it’s taken the Bush administration six-plus years to get things to where the Clinton administration had them when Bush took office.
Let’s review: the Clinton administration had a deal with the North Koreans in which the US — actually a consortium of the US and its allies — gave fuel oil and a promise of diplomatic normalization for the North Koreans to shutter their plutonium-producing nuclear facility. The Bush team called this appeasement and set-up deliberately scuttling that deal, which indeed happened. The North Koreans proceeded to get back into plutonium production big time. And it’s now assumed that they made a few actual weapons with the stuff. Realizing that they’d shot their mouth off with no idea what an alternative policy might be for the Korean Peninsula, they eventually started creeping their way back to the Clinton policy, to which point they have now arrived.
So, back to where we started, only now the North Koreans probably have several nuclear warheads instead of what was probably none in early 2001.
Dick 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. As Kim Jung Il amassed nuclear warheads, Bush inexplicably believed his policy was working.
What changed? As Fred Kaplan explained, Bush “finally got a nuclear deal with North Korea because he finally started negotiating like Bill Clinton.”
I’d only add that Clinton’s approach was the same approach advocated by anyone who knew anything about North Korea, but Bush wouldn’t listen — Cheney & Co. wouldn’t let him.
Eventually, he came around. And now, finally, we’re seeing progress, but not before what Josh describes as “another of those mind-numbingly stupid Bush policy failures that would be funny if so much hadn’t been (and continues to be) on the line.”