In December 2003, Dick Cheney said the White House would not engage North Korea. “We don’t negotiate with evil; we defeat it,” the VP explained.
And for quite a while, that was the totality of the Bush administration policy towards North Korea. Bush once shouted to Bob Woodward, “I loathe Kim Jong Il!” Soon after, the president mocked the N.K. dictator at a dinner with senators, calling him a “pygmy.”
The approach didn’t exactly pay dividends, and North Korea’s nuclear arsenal grew while Bush and Cheney saber-rattled. Eventually, Bush came to appreciate the Clinton policy; the president began negotiations; and the results are striking. This announcement was hard to predict as recently as a couple of years ago.
President Bush said Thursday he will lift key trade sanctions against North Korea and remove it from the U.S. terrorism blacklist, a remarkable turnaround in policy toward the communist regime he once branded as part of an “axis of evil.”
The announcement came after North Korea handed over a long-awaited accounting of its nuclear work to Chinese officials on Thursday, fulfilling a key step in the denuclearization process. Bush said the move was “a step closer in the right direction” although he made clear the United States remains suspicious about the communist regime in Pyongyang. […]
Specifically, Bush said the U.S. would erase trade sanctions under the Trading With the Enemy Act, and notify Congress that, in 45 days, it intends to take North Korea off the State Department list of nations that sponsor terrorism.
Bush repeatedly emphasized this morning that the diplomatic process will continue, explaining, “We will trust you only to the extent you fulfill your promises. I’m pleased with the progress. I’m under no illusions. This is the first step. This isn’t the end of the process. It is the beginning of the process.” What’s more, while U.S. trade sanctions will be lifted, U.N. sanctions will remain in place.
Nevertheless, while the right won’t like today’s announcement — I expect “appeasement” to be thrown around quite a bit — by coming around, Bush has done the right thing.
Steve Clemons provided this political context this morning: “Barack Obama’s inclination towards engagement with problematic leaders around the world now is now buttressed by an experience of the George W. Bush administration.”
Quite right. Bush, of course, refused for years to be “flexibile” when it comes to negotiating with “evil.” North Korea wanted us to be flexible, so Bush was intransigent. 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 a while back, 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 his first six years in office represented failure. The bad news is, Bush’s foolish delays strengthened North Korea considerably.
Better late than never, though. Given a choice between obstinacy and diplomacy, Bush eventually came around, which in turn, makes Obama’s policy of engaging with foreign rivals look pretty good.
And what about John McCain? He and Joe Lieberman, as recently as a few weeks ago, said they prefer the old Bush policy. You know, the one that didn’t work and made the problem worse.
Regardless, kudos to the reluctantly diplomatic president and Ambassador Chris Hill, who made today happen, over the objections of Cheney and Bolton.