It pays to take a look at the books George W. Bush hands out to his staffers. Last year Bush's book was Natan Sharansky's The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror, which argues that countries that do not protect individual rights cannot be reliable partners for peace. You could hear Sharansky's arguments in Bush's extraordinary second inaugural speech in which he promised to promote freedom and democracy in the Middle East and around the world. Bush's critics like to mock him as the sort of person who never read books. But he does, and his reading has consequences.
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This year Bush has been handing out copies of The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag by Kang Chol-Hwan. This is the harrowing story of a man who returned with his Communist family to North Korea to help build a Communist state and who was instead imprisoned. In the past Bush has denounced the North Korean regime as tyrannical and has been chided by some foreign policy experts for what they consider his allegedly impolitic bluntness. But his championing of The Aquariums of Pyongyang suggests that he is more determined than ever to undermine a regime that is probably the world's worst violator of human rights.
It also suggests that no one should expect this administration to endorse anything resembling the Agreed Framework that Bill Clinton endorsed in 1994. Under that agreement, the United States provided aid to North Korea and refrained from undermining the regime in return for North Korea's promises not to develop nuclear arms. The North Koreans broke their word, but some foreign policy experts argue that a similar agreement is the best we can get from the six-party North Korea talks and should be accepted as at least a way of buying time. Bush has never seemed inclined to support an Agreed Framework II. He has spurned North Korea's demand for direct talks with the United States and has insisted instead on talks that include China, the country best positioned to put pressure on North Korea, and its other neighbors, South Korea, Russia, and Japan.
Now he seems poised to go one step farther and to insist on including the issue of human rights in any negotiations. That is required as well by the North Korean Human Rights Act, passed last fall by overwhelming margins in the Senate and House, despite lukewarm support from the administration and some opposition from South Korea's appeasement-minded government. This act also provided for appointment of a special envoy on human rights to North Korea. To that position Bush is reportedly poised to appoint Jay Lefkowitz, a former deputy domestic adviser in the White House and general counsel at the Office of Management and the Budget in the first Bush term. Lefkowitz has no track record on North Korea. But he started off his political career in the 1980s championing the rights of Soviet Jewry. Friends expect him to be a forceful critic of North Korea's human rights record.
