What are the two major party candidates' policies on North Korea?
By Michael Barone
North Korea is certainly a legitimate issue in the 2004 presidential race. The North Korean regime of Kim Jong Il seems on its way to possession of nuclear weapons if it does not already have them. It is also one of the most repressive, vicious regimes in the world, perhaps the very worst. Recent example: a BBC documentary that reported that chemical weapons were tested on prisoners in concentration camps. One witness was Kwon Hyuk, a former administrator at such a camp. "I witnessed a whole family being tested on suffocating gas and dying in the gas chamber," he said. "The parents, son, and a daughter. The parents were vomiting and dying, but till the very last moment they tried to save the kids by doing mouth-to-mouth breathing."
advertisement
Browse through an archive of columns by Michael Barone.
The United States obviously has an interest in preventing Kim's regime from obtaining and using nuclear weapons. We also have an interest, I would argue, in ending the regime peaceably if we possibly can. Certainly we do if we believe George W. Bush's arguments that we have an interest in advancing democracy and human freedom in countries where they do not exist.
What are the two major party candidates' policies on North Korea? We can get an idea of John Kerry's policy from an unsolicited phone call he placed on a Sunday, September 12, to New York Times White House correspondent David Sanger. Sanger asked Kerry's responses to the multilateral negotiations the Bush administration has been pressing with North Korea and its neighbors, South Korea, China, Russia, and Japan. "They haven't made it work; they haven't put anything real on the table," Kerry responded. And what would he do? Sanger asked. "He declined to be prescriptive other than to say that the issue would probably have to be taken to the United Nations Security Council. 'Hypothetical questions are not real,' he said, arguing that North Korea was a case for preventative diplomacy and that Mr. Bush's 'ideologically driven' approach had kept him from truly engaging North Korea. 'The Chinese are frustrated; the South Koreans, the Japanese are frustrated,' he said."
Evidently Kerry would prefer that we engage in bilateral negotiations with North Korea, as it has repeatedly demanded, and make a deal with them like the Agreed Framework negotiated by Bill Clinton in 1994. Under that agreement, the United States agreed to supply North Korea with materials for safeguarded civilian nuclear power plants and food and other aid in return for North Korean promises not to develop nuclear weapons. As the North Koreans admitted after Bill Clinton left office, they have not kept those promises. There doesn't seem to be much reason to believe they would keep similar promises if made in return for U.S. aid in a second Agreed Framework. So Kerry's approach, if that is what it is, would seem to be a nonstarter. And of course it does nothing to undermine the evil North Korean regime.
Bush's approach probably has a greater chance of getting genuine concessions from North Korea because it relies on getting North Korea's neighbors to put pressure on; those neighbors, especially China, provide much more in the way of aid to the North Korean regime and, in the case of China, try to prevent North Koreans from escaping from their prison/country and often return them to North Korea, where they will likely be sent to concentration camps and often to death. But no one can be sure Bush's policy will work. And it's not at all clear that any agreement that ended the North Korean nuclear weapons program would undermine the regime any more than Kerry's apparent policy would. Bush has named North Korea as a member of the "axis of evil" and has spoken stirringly of the human rights abuses of Kim's regime. But his administration has not taken affirmative steps to pressure the regime to change its way.
