Bush Pressured to Move on North Korea Disarmament
Two weeks after North Korea missed a deadline to begin verifiably stopping its nuclear work, pressure is building on the Bush administration–and other countries in the six-nation Korean nuclear talks–either to prod the unpredictable regime into getting on with the process of disarmament or to reassess the deal.
Two senior officials–Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and her top negotiator in the talks, Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Christopher Hill–have placed a large policy bet on negotiating with the North through the six-party mechanism and on its principal achievement to date: a February 13 deal that is supposed to serve as an implementation plan for Pyongyang's denuclearization in exchange for energy, economic, and political benefits.
U.S. critics of Rice's strategy see the delays in North Korea's compliance as validating their doubts about doing deals with the secretive regime. And President Bush suggested Friday that time is limited before turning to new pressures on the North.
Though it was not part of the February 13 deal, the North Koreans demanded that a separate financial dispute involving U.S. Treasury Department sanctions against a Macao-based bank accused of complicity in Pyongyang's money-laundering had to be resolved in its favor. In what most observers saw as a major concession, Treasury agreed to resolve the case quickly, and later it urged the Macao authorities to unfreeze some $25 million in North Korean-linked accounts.
That was done. But mysteriously, the North Koreans have not withdrawn much, if any, of the money. And they insist they will not begin shutting down their nuclear reactor at Yongbyon–which produces plutonium for weapons–or admit international inspectors or even resume the six-party talks until they have the money in hand.
U.S. officials say they are trying to be patient and not issuing any threats or deadlines. But in a meeting with North Korean diplomats in New York earlier this week, says one senior administration official, the message was, "We can't wait forever." This official says the North Koreans offered no serious explanation for why Pyongyang has not yet withdrawn its funds.
And that unexplained delay, concedes the official, stokes skepticism about working with North Korea through the February 13 deal. In pursuing that deal and in advocating uncommon flexibility on the financial dispute, Rice took a political risk that is significant in the annals of the Bush administration; she has been charting a course that flies in the face of the earlier, prevailing hard-line instincts, and she has drawn the ire of prominent conservatives who have left the administration or still serve in it. The administration took years both to agree to meaningful bilateral discussions with a regime the president dubbed "evil" and to develop a negotiating framework that stands a chance of success. With North Korea having tested a nuclear bomb for the first time last October, it is clear that Rice and the White House see the February 13 agreement as the best remaining hope for curtailing North Korea's atomic breakout.
And yet with each passing week, it is clear that North Korea's delays put Rice and Hill in an increasingly uncomfortable position. Administration officials decline to state it so bluntly, but they acknowledge the reality that the deal will come under more intense questioning. "It was a very difficult decision on our part to support the unfreezing of these accounts," says the senior U.S. official. "The longer this goes on, the more people become concerned." One former high-ranking administration official who supports the Rice approach called the North Korean stalling "embarrassing."
In the past few days, one more former senior administration policymaker went public with his doubts. Robert Joseph, who resigned earlier this year as the State Department under secretary for arms control and international security, told an audience at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington that he suspects North Korea is manipulating the six-party process to avoid real disarmament. In a speech that apparently sought to tread delicately on the administration he served for more than six years, Joseph suggested that the new U.S. approach might inadvertently "prolong the life of the [North Korean] regime."
A serving senior official agreed that "the longer that this goes on . . . that sort of thinking will become more resonant with people."
In a separate interview with U.S. News, another hawkish previous senior official, former Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton, asserted that North Korean intransigence "increases [the State Department's] proclivity to concede more." Adds Bolton, "I fear that the State Department may now be in a 'save the deal' mode. . . . If you're in the 'save the deal' mode, anything is possible." He also predicted growing pressure to revisit the deal in light of North Korean noncompliance. "A lot of people are feeling the heat," he said.
A senior U.S. official said the administration is trying to show patience and generate collective pressure on North Korea to live up to the deal. But flexibility on the first set of deadlines, the official warned, does not mean flexibility on meeting the substantive disarmament requirements in the agreement.
The stakes in avoiding a permanently nuclear-armed North Korea, all agree, are high. The same U.S. official argues that, "If we're off by a couple of weeks and a few days, that's OK"–as long as the North Koreans do their part.
How much time will President Bush give the North Koreans? He didn't answer directly Friday while meeting with Japan's prime minister, Shinzo Abe.
"Our patience is not unlimited," he said.
Yet Bush hinted at what will follow if the North Koreans do not relent. He said the six-nation structure in place could also serve to hold together countries opposed to North Korea's nuclear aims. "We have the capability of more sanctions," he said.
If North Korean leader Kim Jong Il opts not to honor the agreement, Bush vowed, "we've got a strategy to make sure the pressure we've initially applied is even greater."