Diplomacy Has Faltered While Each Side Blames the Other for Bad Faith, AggressionHow U.S., North Korea Turned Broken Deals Into a Standoff
As North Korea sees the world today, the Americans are menacing and untrustworthy. To America, the North Koreans are provocative and slightly crazed.
Such are the makings of the current nuclear-tinged standoff, which grows more tense by the week. But look beneath the bellicose surface and a basic dysfunction emerges Each side is convinced it's behaving rationally. And both sides may have made the situation worse by misreading it.
North Korea regards the steps it has taken to revive its nuclear program as the logical reaction to an American decision to break a deal in which it promised to give aid and pledged never to attack. Pyongyang suspects the secret American agenda may well be to invade. It believes the U.S. may have North Korean leader Kim Jong Il next on its "regime change" target list. Pursuit of nuclear weapons is a way to head off those threats and also obtain aid from the West that will keep leader Kim Jong Il in power.
In Washington's eyes, North Korea's nuclear cheating is the very reason diplomacy and aid promises have fallen apart. The Bush administration says it has no serious plans to attack -- indeed, it says it fears the consequences of an attack. U.S. officials increasingly suspect the secret North Korean agenda is simply to find an excuse to develop a more sizable nuclear arsenal. Talking directly to the North Koreans now would only endorse what the U.S. regards as nuclear blackmail.
The U.S. doesn't appear to have grasped how menacing its rhetoric, and sometimes its lack of attention, have seemed to the North. North Korea doesn't appear to recognize how alarming nuclear gamesmanship seems to the Bush administration since the Sept. 11 attacks, or to have read the U.S. signals that it doesn't intend to treat North Korea in the same way as Iraq.
The danger is that mutual suspicions are growing so deep that posturing on both sides could backfire and create a direct confrontation that neither side seems to want. Tensions escalated markedly this week when North Korean fighter jets buzzed and turned their radar on an unarmed American reconnaissance plane as it flew over what the U.S. says were international waters. The Pentagon said Tuesday it was sending 24 B-1 and B-52 bombers to the island of Guam in what officials described as a defensive and deterrent move aimed at North Korea.
In the wake of the planes incident, Mr. Bush talked more openly than he has before about the potential for military confrontation. Asked how diplomatic efforts are working in the standoff, he told a group of newspaper reporters Monday "It's in process. If they don't work diplomatically, they'll have to work militarily. And military option is our last choice. Options are on the table, but I believe we can deal with this diplomatically. I truly do."
White House officials later tried to soften the impact of those remarks, saying Mr. Bush was only repeating existing policy. Indeed, despite North Korea's fears, some Bush administration officials say that a targeted strike on the North's nuclear facilities isn't an attractive option, because Pyongyang would likely respond with massive artillery attacks on Seoul, possibly killing hundreds of thousands of people. Instead, these officials say, the U.S. would have to plan for the possibility of full-scale war on the Korean Peninsula -- not a step the administration is likely to take, especially with the potential for an Iraq war.
From the U.S. side, the tension is heightened by what officials say is new intelligence since State Department officials first confronted Pyongyang in October about its effort to produce highly enriched uranium as material for nuclear weapons. U.S. intelligence analysts think that North Korea could have the uranium-enrichment effort operating by early next year, and that it would be large enough to produce fissile material for three to seven nuclear weapons a year, according to the official. If Pyongyang also begins reprocessing spent nuclear fuel rods into fissile material, as U.S. officials fear, it could have enough material for more than a dozen new nuclear weapons by the end of 2004, an official said.
Tense Relations
North Korea experts say they believe that Pyongyang has been actively seeking to develop diplomatic and economic ties with the U.S. since 1990. Abandoned to some extent by its principal benefactors -- Russia and China -- North Korea found itself with a failing economy and few real options to fund it. Making matters worse, Seoul was in the midst of normalizing ties with Beijing and Moscow, potentially leaving Pyongyang out in the diplomatic cold.
But, with American troops stationed at its southern border, North Korea's leadership felt it had to continue to pursue its weapons programs to ensure its survival. North Korea is widely viewed as the most isolated state in the world, its leadership imbued with an extreme paranoia toward the U.S. North Korean leaders constantly told the U.S. -- even in the early 1990s -- that Pyongyang would have to be compensated for abandoning its weapons programs and assured of its security.
Pyongyang's increasingly desperate position, in which it continued to push its nuclear program ahead amid its economic problems, led to a crisis in 1994 and a near war on the Korean Peninsula. That crisis was ended only when North Korea and the Clinton administration negotiated a document in late 1994 called the Agreed Framework, in which North Korea pledged to freeze its nuclear program in return for fuel-oil deliveries, light-water reactors and other assistance from the U.S., South Korea, Japan and the European Union.
Just weeks after the Agreed Framework was signed in late 1994, a huge Republican win in Congressional elections undermined the Clinton administration's ability to implement it. A key tenet of the pact called for the U.S. to lift economic sanctions on the North and to move toward diplomatic relations. In exchange, North Korea agreed to cap its Yongbyon reactor. But North Koreans now complain that the lifting of economic sanctions didn't come for years and diplomatic ties were never restored, in part because President Clinton appeared unwilling to pick a fight with a Republican-controlled Congress.
"There are reasons why the North Koreans might think we weren't totally sincere" in implementing the agreement, says Stephen Bosworth, who served as the U.S. ambassador to South Korea during the second Clinton administration.
"Our military people feel like we're being conned," U.S. academic Selig Harrison said he was told by North Korea's second-highest leader, Kim Yong Nam, in a May 1998 meeting with Mr. Kim. In the ensuing months, North Korea unsettled the region by launching a long-range missile over the Sea of Japan.
Still, hopes for a comprehensive peace on the Korean Peninsula grew again after South Korean President Kim Dae Jung pushed his engagement policy toward the North in the late 1990s, and the Clinton administration eventually started lifting some types of economic sanction on Pyongyang.
Finally, in October 2000, then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and North Korea's second-highest military commander, Vice Marshal Jo Myong Rok, signed a little-noticed communique when the North Korean visited the White House. After agreeing that Ms. Albright would hold a summit with Kim Jong Il in Pyongyang, the two leaders sought to define for their governments a new post-Cold War relationship.
"The two sides stated that neither government would have hostile intent toward the other," the communique from Oct. 12 reads. Further, it states that the U.S. and North Korea "reaffirmed that their relations should be based on principles of respect for each other's sovereignty and noninterference in each other's internal affairs." For Kim Jong Il's government, the document amounted to almost a first draft of a nonaggression pact between the two countries, say officials who have had extensive dealings with the North Koreans.
Thus, the North Koreans felt betrayed when President Bush the following year decided to put discussions with North Korea on hold while he reviewed the Clinton administration's dealings with Pyongyang. If the Bush administration had endorsed the communique "things would have been very different right now," asserts Mr. Bosworth.
The suspicions grew more intense when Mr. Bush listed North Korea as a member of the "axis of evil" and proclaimed a strategy of using pre-emptive attacks to eliminate threats to American security as he reformulated his foreign policy after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Korea experts in China say that has made this standoff more than a replay of the 1994 one. This time around, while aid remains a subtext, the Chinese experts say that the North Korean leadership believes its survival is at stake.
The siege mentality was palpable to Cui Yingjiu, one of China's veteran Korea experts, when he visited Pyongyang late last year as the standoff began to intensify. "The crux of the matter is that they believe what the Bush administration wants is regime change," says Mr. Cui.
The Bush administration view is strikingly different. Mr. Bush is convinced that the Clinton administration was duped in its 1994 deal, because U.S. intelligence suggests the North Koreans resumed their nuclear activities in secret several years later. Some Bush administration officials came into office determined to scrap the 1994 deal. Others, including Secretary of State Colin Powell, wanted to preserve it. Hanging over those early deliberations was another fear, that North Korea was busy developing new long-range missiles capable of reaching the U.S.
Ultimately, Mr. Bush decided not to scrap the Agreed Framework. But after the September 2001 terrorist attacks, his foreign policy became increasingly focused on pre-empting threats from what he considered dangerous regimes, including North Korea. When U.S. intelligence agencies concluded in June 2002 that North Korea was pursuing a secret uranium-enrichment program, it confirmed Washington's suspicions that Pyongyang couldn't be trusted to live up to its agreements. That concern was made graver by the heightened fear of terrorists acquiring weapons of mass destruction.
U.S. officials confronted North Korean officials with the intelligence last October and say Pyongyang acknowledged the covert weapons program. Now U.S. analysts have concluded that the North Korean cheating had been under way for several years. So the U.S. and its allies have suspended shipments of fuel oil under the 1994 agreement, and Mr. Bush decided that Pyongyang would have to renounce its nuclear program before the U.S. would negotiate on renewed economic assistance and other benefits.
Although the U.S. has dangled incentives in front of North Korea in the months since, the administration remains insistent that the first step must come from North Korea. That has made it harder for officials to push something resembling the Clinton approach of engagement to resolve the crisis with North Koreans, officials said.
Still, the stakes are high enough that if Pyongyang showed any conciliatory signs, even the hard-liners in the Bush administration might leap at them. But it hasn't happened. "We need some signal from them showing that they are willing to negotiate in good faith," says a U.S. official. "So far we haven't gotten anything."
Although the U.S. has avoided calling for sanctions or threatening military action against the North since the crisis began in October, U.S. officials are stressing they may have to consider those steps eventually.
The tougher rhetoric may reflect how few options the administration has for restraining the crisis. The U.S. goal is to avoid getting dragged into one-on-one bargaining. It would rather use broad international pressure to convince Pyongyang to abandon its nuclear activities. Pyongyang has rejected anything but direct talks with the U.S. While in Asia, Mr. Powell raised the idea of multilateral talks, in which China, Japan and South Korea would be at the opening session and then the U.S. and North Korea would talk directly. The goal was to find a formula to get into direct talks -- which North Korea wants -- without seeming to give in to nuclear blackmail. The Chinese have shown interest in the idea, two officials say. But U.S. hard-liners within the Bush administration are scrambling to kill the idea off. One official says Mr. Bush already has rejected it.
-- Charles Hutzler and Carla Anne Robbins contributed to this article.