Critics Blast North Korea Deal as Rewarding 'Bad Behavior'
The nuclear deal unveiled today in Beijing to freeze North Korea's plutonium-yielding reactor and readmit inspectors is, as a smiling Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said, "the result of patient, creative, and tough diplomacy." True as that is, her statement masks the range of difficulties that had to be overcome in reaching this point. They include not only the obvious North Korean obstinacy but also the nagging policy disputes within a Bush administration that, at times, has seemed ambivalent about doing diplomatic business with a troublemaking communist regime.
U.S. officials have said they would craft their negotiating approach so as not to reward the North's "bad behavior" in breaking out of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, ejecting inspectors, manufacturing bomb-grade plutonium, and–last fall–test-firing a nuclear bomb. But even before many of the negotiators from the six participating countries left Beijing, erstwhile supporters of the administration were charging that it had done just that.
John Bolton, a former top arms control official and envoy to the United Nations, told CNN that with this "very bad deal," the administration would "look very weak, at a time in Iraq and dealing with Iran that it needs to look strong." Added Heritage Foundation analyst Bruce Klingner, "North Korea has again foiled attempts to penalize it for violating international commitments."
The assertion by critics that North Korea had somehow bested the United States was, paradoxically, partially shared by many supporters of the deal. Their complaint: The years of delay in getting to this point have allowed North Korea to multiply its stockpile of plutonium several times over the one or two bombs' worth thought to exist when the crisis erupted in October 2002.
"This deal takes us back to the future," said Sen. Joseph Biden, a Delaware Democrat running for president. "North Korea's program is much more dangerous to us now than it was in 2002, when President Bush rejected virtually the same deal he is now embracing."
The deal announced today at the six-party talks is, in essence, a broad road map for how to start implementing a September 2005 agreement on the principles for denuclearizing the North in exchange for security guarantees and economic and political benefits. Pyongyang is now supposed to halt its nuclear reactor at Yongbyon–verified by returning inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency–within 60 days. The North would get initial aid of 50,000 tons of heavy fuel oil. Once it irreversibly disables all of its nuclear facilities, it would receive an additional 950,000 tons of fuel oil–all told worth between $250 million and $300 million.
Five working groups on implementing the pact are to meet within 30 days. One will focus on normalizing relations between Pyongyang and Washington. The Bush administration agreed to "begin the process" of removing the North from the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism and from countries facing trade sanctions under the Trading With the Enemy Act.
The new accord brought immediate comparisons with the Clinton administration's 1994 "Agreed Framework" with North Korea, a bilateral pact that until 2002 delivered fuel aid, among other benefits, in return for a reactor freeze. That such a comparison is now being made is particularly galling to some administration backers. Indeed, administration insiders once informally dubbed the Bush official approach to North Korea as "ABC"–Anything but Clinton. Some internally advocated a strategy of isolating the regime and thereby hastening its collapse–but under no circumstances abetting its survival.
Rice today rolled out the administration's defense of the new deal, stressing that unlike the Clinton arrangement it was "multilateral," with heavyweight guarantors in China, Russia, South Korea, and Japan in place to pressure North Korea against cheating or backing out. Further, Rice and others noted, the deal is intended to be only a way station to North Korea's permanent and verified atomic disarmament.
Another vulnerability of the Beijing deal is that it does not expressly include North Korea's uranium enrichment program–an alternative path to the Bomb that the administration has alleged exists but which the North denies. Rice, as well as the top U.S. negotiator, Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill, say the North Koreans have been made to understand that they will have to fully account for the program. To reach the final phases of the deal–with most of its benefits–Pyongyang will have to provide a declaration of all of its atomic facilities and then allow it to be verified. Skeptics have long expected the North to try to conceal some of its nuclear assets in its intricate tunnel system or to fudge its accounting of the plutonium produced so far. Any major breaches that are discovered could stop the deal in its tracks, and supporters of a deal with the North have long feared that hard-liners will use the search for weapons in a game of "gotcha."
Pyongyang clearly is also assuming that at least some of its assets frozen in a Macao bank in response to U.S. financial sanctions for alleged counterfeiting and money-laundering will soon be freed up. The sanctions have become a favored hammer of administration hawks. The financial dispute has begun to gum up even legitimate transactions with the North, in addition, experts believe, to complicating Pyongyang's illicit moneymaking ventures. Rice says that separate U.S.-North Korean talks are aiming to resolve the problem within 30 days. But if Pyongyang is dissatisfied with the degree to which the United States responds to its demands on sanctions, it is likely again to resort to a delay in the nuclear negotiations.
Unresolved, as well, are worries that North Korea, in the end, will not be willing to completely rid itself of nuclear weapons. Still, for the first time, it has agreed to practical steps that will start testing that proposition.
"This is still the first quarter. There is still a lot of time to go on the clock," says Rice. The question is whether the game has already gone on too long for a satisfactory end.