Bush Faces Tough Nuke Diplomacy
With just over 1 1/2 years left in office, the Bush administration remains far from stopping the nuclear programs of North Korea and Iran.
Yet in recent days, both standoffs—especially that with North Korea—have seen at least some progress.
Pyongyang this week is hosting an expert team from the International Atomic Energy Agency, the Vienna-based nuclear watchdog agency. The goal of the visit is to agree on the technical requirements for verifiably shutting down the North's Yongbyon nuclear reactor complex—the plant that has produced an unknown amount of bomb-grade plutonium, though perhaps enough for as many as 12 bombs.
North Korea has also declared as resolved the nagging financial dispute over some $25 million in funds once held in a Macao bank, having received most of the money courtesy of a Russian financial transfer. And Pyongyang hosted the most senior U.S. official to visit in 4 1/2 years. Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill accepted the North's invitation in order to reinvigorate largely dormant six-nation denuclearization talks. Hill's trip further opened up the range of bilateral contacts between Washington and Pyongyang, in stark contrast to the earlier deep freeze in relations.
Still, Hill cautioned this week that the next few weeks are critical for the six-party negotiations. Diplomats hope to reconvene the talks by the second week of July, once the shutdown of Yongbyon has begun. North Korea has suggested that the process could take about three weeks, once it starts.
Later in the process laid out in a February 13 agreement, North Korea is supposed to declare all of its nuclear activities, weapons, and materials as well as disable the Yongbyon reactor.
Said Hill, "We have a long way to go."
"Essentially, what it involves is making it so that the reactor cannot be brought back on line without an enormous repair bill," Hill said. "Obviously, the more extensive the disabling, the better from our point of view."
In return for its steps, North Korea would receive energy aid and, eventually, diplomatic relations and other benefits. South Korea this week is about to send a major shipment of humanitarian rice aid, another sign that tensions are lessening for now.
Yet North Korea watchers fear that Pyongyang has learned the wrong lesson from U.S. concessions on the financial dispute. That could mean more squabbles and more delays later on.
Michael Green, a former top Asia official at the National Security Council, said the Macao financial dispute experience "has taught North Korea not to move off of the 50-yard line" in the expectation that "the goal posts will move toward" it. Added Green, who spoke this week at a nonproliferation conference held by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, "The North Koreans are not feeling very much pain."
On Iran, meanwhile, cooperation with the IAEA may soon be improved, but the overall prospects for securing a freeze of Tehran's nuclear fuel work look hardly any better.
The IAEA this week accepted an invitation from a senior Iranian envoy, Ali Larijani, that Iran hopes will remove suspicions that Tehran is trying at the least to build the capability of fielding a nuclear arsenal—an aim that would fundamentally violate its treaty obligations and perhaps spur an arms race in the Mideast. The State Department quickly declared its skepticism that the new effort will clear up the dispute.
Iran has failed to answer all of the IAEA's questions about its nuclear work, reduced IAEA inspectors' access to nuclear sites, and defied two United Nations Security Council resolutions demanding that it freeze its nuclear-fuel work. It is rapidly expanding the number of operational centrifuges—the fast-spinning machines that enrich uranium—and may have 3,000 running by the end of the year.
Separately, some U.S. allies are quietly discussing a possible compromise on their common demand that Iran freeze all nuclear-fuel work before negotiations (involving the United States for the first time) begin, as the Associated Press has reported. The alternative would be some kind of partial freeze. IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei has suggested that the moment has passed when it was possible to require Iran to halt all nuclear activities—an assertion that angered the Bush administration.
Maintaining a common approach against the Iranian nuclear drive could become increasingly difficult.
Security Council members Russia and China seem to be arriving at the same conclusion about softening their position on Iran. "Iran is not going to abandon what it already has," said Alexei Arbatov, a security expert with the Russian Academy of Sciences and a consultant to Russia's foreign and defense ministries.
Arbatov, speaking for himself at the Carnegie conference, argued that "the unity of the United Nations Security Council is very superficial and shallow, and that's why the [sanctions] resolutions are so weak."
Though the Bush administration wants to seek a third—and tougher—Security Council sanctions resolution, it may soon face uncomfortable pressures to ease its own stand on Iran.