Catherine Killough / LobeLog & Leon V. Sigal / 38 North – 2018-03-08 00:59:23
Let The Record Show:
Negotiations With North Korea Work
Catherine Killough / LobeLog
(November 29, 2018) — President Trump has consistently misrepresented the negotiation record between North Korea and the United States. In his speech before the South Korean National Assembly, he derived one conclusion from a complex history of hard-earned diplomatic achievements: “The North Korean regime has pursued its nuclear and ballistic missile programs in defiance of every assurance, agreement and commitment it has made to the United States and its allies.”
It is neither new nor uncommon to berate North Korea for its imperfect negotiating record, but it has never been more dangerous. In a series of tweets last month, Trump not only discredited past diplomatic efforts for “making fools of US negotiators,” but also concluded with alarming ambiguity, “Sorry, only one thing will work!”
If not diplomacy, then that “one thing” sounds like a military strike, a serious proposal that has been reverberating throughout Washington’s foreign policy establishment.
As Evan Osnos noted in his article for the New Yorker, “Is the Political Class Drifting Toward War with North Korea?” the idea of a preventive war has become so pervasive that even a former Democratic Cabinet secretary confided, “if he were in the government today he would support attacking North Korea, in order to prevent it from launching a strike on America.”
For those seeking to prevent a war that could result in millions of casualties on the Korean Peninsula, there are no military options. But for many Democrats, promoting diplomacy runs the risk of signaling weakness. Unsurprisingly, economic measures that straddle the line between being punitive and not-quite-war receive the widest bipartisan support.
Given this political environment, correcting the distorted history on US-North Korea negotiations is imperative — especially as the tendency to view talks as appeasement, or deals as concessions, grows stronger. Much of that stems from the way critics have framed the first US-led bilateral agreement with North Korea and its eventual collapse.
The Deal that Froze North Korea’s Nukes
In 1994, the United States and North Korea were at the brink of war. It was the first time that the relatively unknown regime north of the 38th parallel threatened to go nuclear. After expelling all international inspectors from the country, North Korea prepared to extract six bombs’ worth of weapons-grade plutonium from the fuel rods in its Yongbyon research reactor.
At the time, a fresh-faced President Bill Clinton considered taking military action, including a plan to conduct surgical strikes on North Korea’s nuclear facilities. Many of his top officials doubted that they could persuade the North Koreans from developing nuclear weapons. As Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Ashton Carter said, “We were not, by any means, confident that we could talk them out of taking that step.”
However, as former Secretary of Defense William Perry recalled, the risks of precipitating a second Korean War compelled the administration to pursue a diplomatic path. A meeting between former President Jimmy Carter and North Korean leader Kim Il Sung led to serious bilateral talks that culminated with the US-North Korea Agreed Framework on October 21, 1994.
In this landmark deal, North Korea agreed to freeze and eventually dismantle its graphite-moderated reactors in exchange for fuel and two proliferation-resistant light-water reactors. These reactors could produce power, but could not, practically speaking, be used to make nuclear weapons.
For nearly a decade, the United States sustained a direct, open line of communication with a paranoid and insecure regime. That level of engagement made it possible for two adversaries to commit to an agreement with a significant, material outcome: North Korea stopped producing plutonium for eight years.
As former US Ambassador to South Korea Thomas Hubbard concluded, the Agreed Framework “proved to be imperfect . . . But it did prevent North Korea from producing as many as 100 nuclear weapons by now.”
Unfortunately, these achievements are overshadowed by the Agreed Framework’s collapse, wherein “collapse” has become synonymous with “failure.” But to say the deal failed too narrowly defines what success could realistically entail with a country carrying as much historical baggage as North Korea.
Poor media coverage, including omissions of shortcomings on the US side of the deal, is partly to blame. But hawkish conservatives, who have long exploited the agreement as a cautionary tale of liberal appeasement, are largely at fault.
Both the United States and North Korea played a part in the Agreed Framework’s collapse, but the assertion that North Korea cheated obscures that fact. Soon after the Clinton administration brokered the deal, Republicans gained control of Congress, resulting in “a lack of political will,” according to chief negotiator Robert Gallucci, and led to significant delays in the delivery of US obligations.
Congressional opposition peaked again in 1998 amid accusations that the North was hiding an underground nuclear facility at Kumchang-ri. Instead of taking a punitive approach, the Clinton administration communicated its concerns directly to the North Koreans and, seeking to salvage the agreement, negotiated a new deal that permitted the United States regular inspections of the suspected site, where it failed to find any evidence of nuclear activity.
This diplomatic approach persisted even as North Korea’s advancing missile program sounded new alarms. Following North Korea’s launch of a long-range ballistic missile over Japan in 1998, the Clinton administration tasked a small team of inside and outside government experts with a North Korea Policy Review that would encompass the goals outlined in the Agreed Framework.
Former Secretary of Defense William Perry collaborated with the governments of North Korea, South Korea, China, and Japan in what became known as the Perry Process.
Several rounds of negotiations culminated in 1999 with a report that outlined recommendations for the United States to pursue a verifiable suspension and eventual dismantlement of the North’s nuclear and long-range missile activities. In turn, the policy review team found that the United States must take steps to address the North’s security concerns and establish normal relations.
North Korea responded positively by not only agreeing to freeze its missile testing for the duration of talks, but also sending its senior military advisor to Washington to discuss the details of Perry’s proposal with President Clinton. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright reciprocated the visit by traveling to Pyongyang for a meeting with Kim Jong Il later that month.
However, momentum for what former Special Advisor to the President Wendy Sherman called a “tantalizingly close” proposal stalled the next month with the election of George W. Bush. Then-Secretary of State Colin Powell stated that North Korea policy would continue where Clinton left off, but Bush, who decided to cancel all negotiations with North Korea for the next two years, overruled him.
The Bush administration veered far off the diplomatic course that the Clinton administration took pains to maintain. Bush added North Korea to his triad of “axis of evil” states. Dick Cheney rejected diplomacy for regime change, asserting, “We don’t negotiate with evil. We defeat it.”
Then-Undersecretary of State for Arms Control John Bolton used intelligence reports about a suspected secret uranium enrichment program to kill a deal he never favored. In his own words, “This was the hammer I had been looking for to shatter the Agreed Framework.”
In the end, the Bush administration alleged that a North Korean official confirmed the existence of the suspected uranium enrichment program. North Korea denied the admission, which led to back-and-forth accusations that each side was in violation of the deal. Instead of working to overcome mounting distrust, the United States backed out of the deal in 2002.
The Agreed Framework Redux
Bush’s refusal to engage with North Korea came back to haunt his administration in 2003. North Korea quickly resumed its plutonium program and announced it possessed a nuclear weapon.
Convinced of the need to re-enter negotiations, the United States joined China, Russia, Japan, and South Korea in the Six Party Talks.
Several rounds of dialogue led to a breakthrough two years later with the 2005 Joint Statement, which pledged the North to abandon “all nuclear weapons and existing nuclear programs.” But no sooner had the six parties announced the agreement than the US Treasury froze North Korean assets in the Macau bank, Banco Delta Asia.
For the North Korean leadership, choking off their access to $25 million in capital was a grave offense and suggested that the United States was not serious about making a deal. Even those working for the administration, such as chief negotiator Ambassador Christopher Hill, saw the act as an attempt “to sidetrack the negotiations entirely.”
Whatever the US Treasury’s intentions, the freeze had the effect of unraveling years of hard-earned progress to rebuild trust. North Korea retaliated in 2006 by not only test-firing eight missiles, but also detonating its first nuclear device.
The United States just barely salvaged negotiations by lifting the freeze and removing North Korea from the State Sponsors of Terrorism list in 2007. In return, North Korea readmitted nuclear inspectors and disabled its Yongbyon reactor, exploding the cooling tower in a dramatic televised event.
But enough damage had been done that by the time new disputes arose over verification measures, the Six Party Talks landed at a stalemate and failed to move into the final phase of dismantling North Korea’s nuclear weapons program.
The Limitations of Strategic Patience
Like the administration before him, President Obama was slow to broker negotiations with North Korea. Though Obama made clear from the onset that he would take a pro-diplomacy approach and “extend a hand” to those regimes “willing to unclench your fist,” North Korea fell low on his list of foreign policy priorities.
Instead, a policy of “strategic patience” stood in for any targeted effort to bring North Korea back to the negotiating table. Although the door for talks remained technically open, the United States pursued sanctions and pressure campaigns not unlike the Trump administration’s current posture. North Korea fired back its share of provocations, including a second nuclear test and two deadly skirmishes on its border with South Korea.
It was not until 2011 that the Obama administration restarted denuclearization talks. After a brief hiccup following the death of Kim Jong Il, the two countries announced a “Leap Day” deal in February 2012. North Korea agreed to a moratorium on its long-range missile and nuclear tests in exchange for 240,000 metric tons of food aid.
Sixteen days later, North Korea announced its plans to launch a satellite into space. The United States held to the view that such a launch would violate the terms of the agreement, while North Korea claimed, “the satellite launch is not included in the long-range missile launch” and proceeded with its plans.
The administration immediately scrapped the deal, a perplexing move given past US efforts to address the risks of dual-use missile technologies. For example, for decades the United States denied South Korean requests to extend the range of their ballistic missiles out of fear that it would start a regional arms race.
Amid growing pressure, the United States reached an agreement in 2001 that broadened the scope of South Korea’s missile activities while including specific constraints on its space launch program, such as the expressed use of liquid fuel.
Instead of revisiting the deal to more clearly distinguish what is acceptable in terms of a satellite or missile launch, the United States let negotiations with North Korea, once again, fall to the wayside.
The Only Option
If Bush had kept the Agreed Framework, if hardliners had not sabotaged the Six Party Talks, and if Obama had clarified the terms of the Leap Day deal, North Korea might not be the nuclear nightmare that grips the United States and its allies today.
But broken promises and burned bridges are no excuse for abandoning diplomacy. There are plenty of lessons within the cracks of an uneven negotiation record that are worth extracting, including the need to address North Korea’s security concerns head-on and the critical importance of US interagency coordination.
There is still an opening for compromise with North Korea, but Trump threatens to close it every time he underestimates the value of negotiations. As every president since Clinton has eventually come to understand, if the alternative with North Korea is war, every diplomatic option has to be explored to its fullest. Millions of lives hang in the balance.
Catherine Killough is the Roger L. Hale Fellow at Ploughshares Fund, a global security foundation. She earned her MA in Asian Studies from the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. Follow on Twitter @catkillough.
FACTSHEET: HISTORY OF US NEGOTIATIONS
WITH NORTH KOREA, 1992-PRESENT
Ploughshares.org
At the end of the Cold War, President George H.W. Bush authorized the withdrawal of most US tactical nuclear weapons deployed abroad, including approximately 100 nuclear weapons based in South Korea (September 1991).
Shortly after, the two Koreas signed the South-North Joint Declaration on the Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, which opened a path for dialogue between the United States and North Korea. Though the negotiation record is uneven, diplomacy, combined with pressure and incentives, has succeeded at key times to curb the North’s nuclear and missile capabilities.
The Agreed Framework (1994-2003)
In 1993, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) requested special inspections of suspected North Korean nuclear facilities. In response, North Korea rejected the IAEA, declared its withdrawal from the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), and announced its intention to produce weapons-grade plutonium.
The United States was prepared to conduct surgical strikes on North Korea’s nuclear facilities, but the risks of precipitating a second Korean War compelled the Clinton Administration to find a diplomatic solution.
In April 1994, former President Jimmy Carter visited North Korean leader Kim Il Sung to broker dialogue between the two countries. Carter’s efforts paved the way for sustained talks that, despite Kim Il Sung’s untimely death, culminated with the Agreed Framework in October 1994. North Korea agreed to freeze and eventually dismantle its graphite-moderated reactors in exchange for two proliferation-resistant light-water reactors and fuel.
For the next eight years, the agreement successfully froze North Korea’s plutonium production, during which time the North could have produced enough plutonium for more than 100 nuclear warheads.
Implementation of the Agreed Framework was subject to difficulties on both sides. Soon after the Clinton Administration brokered the deal, Republicans gained control of the US Congress, resulting in “a lack of political will,” according to chief US negotiator Robert Gallucci, and contributed to significant delays in the delivery of US obligations.
In 1998, Congressional opposition peaked amid concerns that the North was hiding an underground nuclear facility at Kumchang-ri. The Administration, seeking to salvage the agreement, negotiated a new deal that permitted the United States multiple inspections of the suspected site, where no evidence of nuclear activity was found.
In 2001, the newly installed Bush Administration received intelligence on a secret uranium enrichment program in North Korea. As then-Undersecretary of State for Arms Control John Bolton stated, “This was the hammer I had been looking for to shatter the Agreed Framework.”
After a bilateral meeting on the matter, the United States alleged that a North Korean official confirmed the existence of such a program. The admission, which North Korea denied, led to back-and-forth accusations that each side was in violation of the Agreed Framework. By 2002, the agreement had largely fallen apart.
The Perry Process (1999-2000)
In 1998, North Korea made progress in its missile program that raised new concerns for the United States and countries in the region. After North Korea’s launch of a long-range ballistic missile over Japan, the Clinton Administration tasked a small team of inside and outside government experts with a North Korea Policy Review that would ultimately address the goals outlined in the Agreed Framework.
Former Secretary of Defense William Perry collaborated with the governments of North Korea, South Korea, China, and Japan in what would become known as the “Perry Process.”
Several rounds of negotiations culminated in 1999 with a report that presented recommendations for the United States to pursue a verifiable suspension and eventual dismantlement of the North’s nuclear and long-range missile activities. In turn, the policy review team found that the United States must take steps to address the North’s security concerns and establish normal relations.
North Korea responded positively by pledging in September 1999 to freeze its missile testing for the duration of talks. In October 2000, North Korea’s senior military advisor visited Washington to discuss the details of Perry’s proposal with President Clinton, resulting in the US-DPRK Joint Communiqué that would set the tone for future negotiations. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright reciprocated the North’s visit by traveling to Pyongyang for a meeting with Kim Jong Il later that month.
However, momentum for the proposal stalled in the following month with the presidential election of George W. Bush. Then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, who stated that North Korea policy would continue where President Clinton left off, retracted his remarks following President Bush’s decision to cancel all negotiations with North Korea for the next two years.
The Six Party Talks (2003-2008)
In 2003, the Bush Administration resumed negotiations with North Korea following intelligence reports of a secret uranium enrichment program. The United States joined China, Russia, Japan, South Korea, and North Korea in a process called the Six Party Talks.
By September 2005, the Six Parties reached a Joint Statement that pledged the North to abandon “all nuclear weapons and existing nuclear programs.” Negotiations on how to implement the Joint Statement amounted to a second-phase agreement in October 2007, committing the North to “a complete and correct declaration of all its nuclear programs” in exchange for energy aid, sanctions relief, and the removal of North Korea from the US State Sponsor of Terrorism list.
Negotiations were hamstrung in each phase. In September 2005, the US Treasury froze North Korean assets in a Macau-based bank, Banco Delta Asia. According to chief US negotiator to the Six Parties Ambassador Christopher Hill, the timing of the incident “sidetrack[ed] the negotiations entirely.”
It was not until the United States lifted the freeze in 2007 that the Six Parties were able to move forward, readmit IAEA inspectors into North Korea, and disable the Yongbyon nuclear reactor. However, disputes over the October 2007 agreement terms, which did not include a provision on verification, stalled efforts to move into the final phase of dismantling North Korea’s nuclear weapons program.
The Leap Day Agreement (2011-2012)
In July 2011, the Obama Administration attempted to restart denuclearization talks with North Korea. After a brief hiccup in negotiations following the death of Kim Jong Il, the United States and North Korea announced a “Leap Day” deal in February 2012. North Korea agreed to a moratorium on its long-range missile and nuclear tests in exchange for 240,000 metric tons of food aid.
The United States soon scrapped the deal over a dispute regarding North Korea’s right to conduct a satellite launch. Despite the US view that a space launch would violate the Leap Day agreement, North Korea proceeded to conduct a rocket launch under the new leadership of Kim Jong Un. These discrepancies are difficult to clarify as the Leap Day deal has not been made public.
In the past, negotiations with North Korea have provided unprecedented access into the country, clarified intentions between aggrieved parties, and laid the groundwork for tangible steps toward peace on the Korean Peninsula.
Sanctions pressure, isolation campaigns, and military buildup alone have failed to achieve similar success. As the negotiation record shows, sustained dialogue between the United States and North Korea can yield positive results.
Contact: ckillough@ploughshares.org
Bad History
Leon V. Sigal / 38 North: Informed analysis of events in and around North Korea
(August 22, 2017) — Korea has a bad history by most journalistic accounts. That bad history, however, is mostly just bad journalism. The latest example is Russell Goldman’s erroneous account in the August 18 edition of the New York Times. [1]
The negotiating record is much more successful than he or other journalists acknowledge and far superior to the record of pressure of sanctions and isolation without negotiations. Any achievements have been temporary, however, because neither side kept its commitments or sustained negotiations.
At the root of that bad history is a misreading of Pyongyang’s purpose, which has never been about blackmail or money. During the Cold War, Kim Il Sung played China off against the Soviet Union to maintain his freedom of maneuver.
In 1988, anticipating the collapse of the Soviet Union, he reached out to improve relations with the United States, South Korea and Japan in order to avoid becoming overly dependent on China. That has been the Kims’ main aim ever since.
From Pyongyang’s vantage point, that aim was the basis of the 1994 Agreed Framework, which committed Washington to “move toward full normalization of political and economic relations,” or, in plain English, end enmity.
That was also the essence of the September 2005 Six Party Joint Statement in which Washington and Pyongyang pledged to “respect each other’s sovereignty, exist peacefully together, and take steps to normalize their relations subject to their respective bilateral policies” as well as to “negotiate a permanent peace regime on the Korean Peninsula.”
For Washington, suspension of Pyongyang’s nuclear and missile programs was the point of these agreements, which succeeded for a time in shuttering the North’s production of fissile material and stopping the test-launches of medium and longer-range missiles. Would North Korea have kept its word? No one will ever know because both agreements collapsed when Washington did little to implement its commitment to improve relations and Pyongyang reneged on denuclearization.
The Agreed Framework and Its Collapse
The 1994 agreement is a case in point. Not only did the North shut down its 5 MWe reactor and reprocessing facility at Yongbyon under inspectors’ watchful eyes, but it also stopped construction of two much larger reactors that together were capable of generating 30 bombs’ worth of plutonium a year, by US estimates.
No sooner had the agreement been concluded than Republicans took control of the House and Senate, putting it in jeopardy. In 1997, after the Clinton administration had taken only minimal steps to end enmity, was slow to get the reactor project off the ground, and seldom delivered promised heavy fuel oil on schedule, Pyongyang began warning that if Washington did not live up to the Agreed Framework, it was not obliged to either.
It then began to acquire the means to enrich uranium from Pakistan and elsewhere. Yet it made no attempt to reprocess the spent fuel stored under inspection at Yongbyon or to restart its reactor. Indeed, it let its other nuclear facilities deteriorate to a point where they could not be salvaged.
Pyongyang Tries Again — This Time with Missiles
Pyongyang tried again to get Washington to end enmity, this time offering to curtail its missile programs as an inducement. The United States had begun missile negotiations with North Korea in 1996 but had held just two rounds of talks, hardly a sign of seriousness.
On June 16, 1998, North Korea made public an offer to negotiate an end not only to its missile exports but also to “development” — its word — of new missiles. It linked that offer to the conclusion of a “peace agreement.” [2] Along with the offer, it issued a threat to resume missile tests, a threat the North carried out on August 31 when it launched a three-stage rocket, the Taepodong, in a failed attempt to put a satellite into orbit.
Former Secretary of Defense William Perry broached the possibility of a missile deal in talks in Pyongyang in May 1999. He also gave the North a draft of a joint communiqué that would be issued during the visit to Washington of Marshal Jo Myung Rok, vice chairman of the National Defense Commission, in October 2000, pledging “steps to fundamentally improve . . . bilateral relations,” including “replacing the 1953 Armistice Agreement with permanent peace arrangements.” It was explicit about an end to enmity: “As a crucial first step,” it noted, “neither government would have hostile intent toward the other.” [3]
That helped pave the way for the first ever North-South summit meeting. It also led to the resumption of missile talks and North Korean acceptance of a test-launch moratorium while the talks proceeded.
Within weeks of Jo’s visit, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright went to Pyongyang to meet with Kim Jong Il, who offered to end not only exports of missile technology but also development, production and deployment of all medium and longer-range missiles in return for an end to enmity. [4] In Perry’s recollection:
In October of 2000, we had already come to a full verbal agreement on a detailed agreement on North Korea, by which they would agree to give up their nuclear program, and their long-range missile program. We were, I think, three to six months from having a signed, formal, agreement for doing that. [5]
Persuaded that President-elect Bush would continue the negotiation once in office, Clinton decided to leave the matter to him. Clinton’s assumption proved wrong.
In October 2002, having balked at talks for nearly two years, President Bush sent James Kelly, Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, to Pyongyang — not to negotiate but to confront it over its clandestine uranium enrichment program.
The North Koreans offered to forego uranium enrichment, as well as plutonium production, in return for diplomatic recognition, legal assurances of nonaggression, including nonuse of nuclear weapons, and not impeding its economic development, as Kelly himself acknowledged three weeks later: “They did suggest after this harsh and — personally, to me — surprising admission that there were measures that might be taken that were generally along those lines.”[6]
Under strict instructions, Kelly ignored the offer. In her memoir, Condoleezza Rice is more forthcoming. Kelly, she recalls, was bound in a diplomatic straitjacket:
Usually there is enough trust in an experienced negotiator that the guidance is used more as points of reference than as a script. But in this case, given the fissures, the points were to be read verbatim. There were literally stage directions for Kelly. He was not to engage the North Koreans in any side conversation in any way. That left him actually moving to the corner of the table to avoid Pyongyang’s representatives. [7]
Rice’s conclusion is worth underscoring: “Because his instructions were so constraining, Jim couldn’t fully explore what might have been an opening to put the program on the table.” [8]
Instead, administration officials claimed that the North Koreans had “admitted” they had an enrichment “program” and said they should be punished. They overcame resistance from South Korea and Japan to suspend shipments of heavy fuel oil, thereby tearing up what little was left of the Agreed Framework.
While US forces were tied down preparing to invade Iraq, North Korea retaliated by reprocessing the five or six bombs’ worth of plutonium, which, when weaponized, would allow it to conduct nuclear tests for the first time. It also moved to restart its plutonium reactor, ramped up imports of enrichment equipment, and aided Syria in constructing a reactor of its own. The North’s nuclear effort, largely held in check for a decade through negotiations, was now unleashed.
Bush Goes Back to the Negotiating Table
Bush’s initial response was to ignore North Korea’s nuclear actions while hard-liners in his administration began touting regime change. On the very day that Saddam Hussein’s statue was toppled from its pedestal in Baghdad, Assistant Secretary of State John Bolton said, “We are hopeful that a number of regimes will draw the appropriate lesson from Iraq.” [9] Far from making Pyongyang more pliable, however, the war on Iraq strengthened its determination to arm.
As a DPRK Foreign Ministry spokesman noted on April 6, 2003, “Only military deterrent force, supported by ultra-modern weapons, can avert a war and protect the security of the nation. This is the lesson drawn from the Iraqi war.” [10] Yet Pyongyang was still prepared to suspend arming if Washington moved to end enmity.
Pressed by President Kim Dae Jung in Seoul and Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro in Tokyo, President Bush eventually relented and resumed talks in 2003. It took two years before Washington, again under allied pressure, allowed its negotiators to meet directly with the North Koreans in August and September 2005. Diplomacy worked. Pyongyang grudgingly accepted a Six Party joint statement, incorporating the main goal Washington was seeking, a pledge to abandon “all nuclear weapons and existing nuclear programs.”
Yet Pyongyang was not about to settle for fine words any more than Washington was. It insisted on phased reciprocal steps by Washington to reconcile — end enmity — as it eliminated its nuclear programs.
The September 19, 2005, joint statement embodied that point:
“The six parties agreed to take coordinated steps to implement the aforementioned consensus in a phased manner in line with the principle ‘commitment for commitment’ and ‘action for action.'” [11]
The accord laid out some of the steps Pyongyang sought. The United States undertook to “respect [the DPRK’s] sovereignty,” diplomatic code for not attempting to overthrow its government. It stopped short of agreeing to normalize relations, wanting the North to reduce its forces along the DMZ and embrace human rights first.
At the urging of the other parties, Washington committed to “respecting” Pyongyang’s right to nuclear power and “agreed to discuss at an appropriate time the subject of the provision of light-water reactors [LWRs] to the DPRK.” The North would not be entitled to reactors until it eliminated its weapons and weapons programs to the satisfaction of the International Atomic Energy Agency and rejoined the NPT as a member in good standing.
Yet the ink was hardly dry on the September 19 accord when administration hard-liners struck back, undoing the deal and hamstringing US negotiators. In a closing plenary statement, US negotiator Christopher Hill announced a decision, dictated by the hard-liners, to “terminate KEDO,” the international consortium set up to provide the reactors. [12]
Later that day, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice implied that the “appropriate time” for discussion of replacement reactors was when hell froze over: “When the North Koreans have dismantled their nuclear weapons and other nuclear programs verifiably and are indeed nuclear-free . . . I suppose we can discuss anything.” [13]
Pyongyang reacted sharply. “The basis of finding a solution to the nuclear issue between the DPRK and the US is to wipe out the distrust historically created between the two countries and a physical groundwork for building bilateral confidence is none other than the US provision of LWRs to the DPRK,” said a Foreign Ministry spokesman. “The US should not even dream of the issue of the DPRK’s dismantlement of its nuclear deterrent before providing LWRs, a physical guarantee for confidence-building.” [14]
Even worse, having declared in the September 19 accord that it had “no intention” of attacking the North “with conventional or nuclear weapons” and having pledged to “respect [DPRK] sovereignty,” renounce military attack and regime change, and “negotiate a permanent peace regime on the Korean Peninsula,” the Bush administration backed away. Under pressure from hard-liners, Hill undercut those commitments in prepared testimony to Congress days later by echoing a familiar refrain, “All options remain on the table.”
Worse yet, the administration began taking action under the Illicit Activities Initiative (IAI) to put a roadblock in the way of negotiations.
On September 15, the day that the Six Party accord was reached but two days before it was made public, it had capitalized on a Treasury Department investigation of money-laundering at the Banco Delta Asia in Macao to convince banks around the globe to freeze North Korean hard currency accounts — some with ill-gotten gains from illicit activities, but many with proceeds from legitimate foreign trade.
By late summer, a senior official told the New York Times, the administration decided “to move toward more confrontational measures.” He described the strategy:
“Squeeze them, but keep the negotiations going.” In the words of Undersecretary of State Robert Joseph, “We believe that they will reinforce the prospect for success of those talks.” What did success mean? Another senior State Department official put it this way: IAI turned Six Party Talks into nothing more than “a surrender mechanism.” [15]
How much the freezing of North Korea’s hard currency accounts curtailed its trade is unclear, but it looked a lot like regime change to Pyongyang, which responded by refusing to return to Six Party Talks until its accounts at the Banco Delta Asia were unblocked. In talks in New York on March 17, 2006, it proposed a bilateral US-DPRK mechanism to resolve the issue.[16] Hill, however, was not allowed to meet with the North Koreans.
Far from giving Washington leverage, the financial sanctions provoked Pyongyang to begin preparations for missile test launches. When a high-level Chinese delegation came to Pyongyang to urge top officials to call them off and warn of UN action, they were kept waiting for three days — and then ignored.
The July 4, 2006, fireworks display, conducting seven test launches including the Taepodong-2, prompted China to vote for a US-backed resolution in the UN Security Council condemning the tests and threatening sanctions.
Undaunted, North Korea immediately began preparations for a nuclear test, which it carried out on October 9, 2006. It was demonstrating that it would never bow to pressure — whether from the United States or China or both. Only US moves to end enmity would get it to change course.
In announcing the nuclear test three days before conducting it, the DPRK Foreign Ministry denounced the UN Security Council resolution and warned, “The US extreme threat of a nuclear war and sanctions and pressure compel the DPRK to conduct a nuclear test, an essential process for bolstering [our] nuclear deterrent, as a corresponding measure for defense.”
Nevertheless, the North insisted, its aim of negotiated denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula remained unchanged. So did its price — an end to enmity:
The ultimate goal of the DPRK is not “denuclearization” to be followed by its unilateral disarmament but one aimed at settling the hostile relations between the DPRK and the US and removing the very source of all nuclear threats from the Korean Peninsula and its vicinity. [17]
“The North Koreans successfully gamed the United States,” Russell Goldman claims. Far from it: when President Bush took office, thanks to diplomacy, North Korea had stopped testing longer-range missiles. It had less than a bomb’s worth of plutonium and was verifiably not making more.
Six years later, as a result of Washington’s broken promises and financial sanctions, it had seven to nine bombs’ worth, had resumed longer-range test launches, and felt free to test nuclear weapons. The strategy of pressure had failed.
Implementing the September 2005 Joint Statement
On October 31, just three weeks after the nuclear test, President Bush returned to diplomacy, permitting US negotiator Hill to meet bilaterally with his DPRK counterpart. Hill offered a compromise on North Korean accounts frozen in the Banco Delta Asia.
That opened the way to negotiations to implement the September 2005 joint statement, which yielded a first-phase agreement on February 13, 2007, suspending nuclear testing, and shutting down the North’s reactor and reprocessing facility at Yongbyon. [18]
A second-phase agreement on October 3, 2007, committed the North to provide “a complete and correct declaration of all its nuclear programs” and put Pyongyang on a path to disable its plutonium facilities at Yongbyon, making it more time-consuming and costly to restart and thereby whittling away its nuclear leverage.
In return, the other parties pledged to supply the North with energy aid and the United States agreed to ease sanctions under the Trading with the Enemy Act and delist the DPRK as a “state-sponsor of terrorism.” [19] The second-phase agreement said nothing about verifying the North’s declaration, which was left to a subsequent phase of implementation.
Once again, however, Washington failed to sustain this promising diplomatic course, this time with enthusiastic backing from the incoming president in Seoul, Lee Myung-bak, who was determined to back away from his predecessors’ “sunshine policy” and impede implementation of the Six Party agreements. [20]
On June 26, 2008, the DPRK handed China a written declaration of its plutonium program, as required by the October 2007 accord. North Korea reportedly declared it had separated 38 kilograms of plutonium — within the range of US estimates, albeit at the low end. In a side agreement with Washington, Pyongyang committed to disclose its enrichment and proliferation activities, including its help for Syria’s reactor.
Many in Washington, Tokyo and Seoul questioned whether the declaration was “complete and correct,” as required by the October 2007 agreement. The crux of the dispute was how much plutonium the North had separated before the end of 1991.
Washington decided to demand arrangements to verify the declaration. The trouble was the October 2007 agreement contained no provision for verification in the second phase of denuclearization. The day that Pyongyang turned in its declaration, the White House announced its intention to relax sanctions under the Trading with the Enemy Act and to delist the DPRK as a “state-sponsor of terrorism” — but with a caveat.
As Secretary of State Rice told the Heritage Foundation on June 18, “[B]efore those actions go into effect, we would continue to assess the level of North Korean cooperation in helping to verify the accuracy and completeness of its declaration. And if that cooperation is insufficient, we will respond accordingly.”
Rice acknowledged Washington was moving the goalposts: “What we’ve done, in a sense, is move up issues that were to be taken up in phase three, like verification, like access to the reactor, into phase two.” [21]
In bilateral talks with Hill, the DPRK agreed to allow “sampling and other forensic measures” at the three declared sites at Yongbyon — the reactor, reprocessing plant, and fuel fabrication plant — which might suffice to ascertain how much plutonium it had produced. If not, he also accepted “access, based on mutual consent, to undeclared sites,” according to a State Department announcement. [22]
Yet Japan and South Korea insisted the North’s commitment be put in writing and insisted on halting energy aid. Washington went along. The North responded to the suspension of promised energy aid by assembling a rocket at its Musudan-ri launch site starting in late January 2009. It did not launch the rocket until April 5, giving the incoming Obama Administration more than two months to undo North Korea’s walk-back or open talks to resolve the issue. It did neither.
On June 12, the Security Council, with China’s backing, responded to the launch by enacting Resolution 1874, which “sharpened its weapons import-export ban . . . by calling on States to inspect, seize and dispose of the items and by denying fuel or supplies to service the vessels carrying them,” including intercepting vessels at sea.
It also banned “the provision of financial services . . . that could contribute to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’s nuclear-related, ballistic missile-related or other weapons of mass destruction-related programs or activities.”
The DPRK Foreign Ministry responded within hours, saying that “nuclear abandonment has now become absolutely impossible” and warning that all the plutonium it had just removed from its reactor would “be weaponized” and that its uranium-enrichment program would move beyond the test phase to an operational plant.” [23]
As it had in 2006 when Washington and Beijing had agreed on sanctions at the UN Security Council, Pyongyang then conducted a nuclear test to drive them apart. It was demonstrating once again that an end to enmity with Washington, not tougher sanctions by Beijing, was the key to denuclearization.
Once again, the resort to pressure had failed to stop North Korean nuclear and missile advances. Now, Washington is again pressing Pyongyang to accept talks on its terms. If the past is prologue, pressure without negotiations to end enmity is a recipe for failure.
1. Russell Goldman, “How Trump’s Predecessors Dealt with Korean Threat,” New York Times, August 18, 2017, p. A-10.
2. “Nobody Can Slander DPRK’s Missile Policy,” Korean Central News Agency, June 16, 1998.
3. US-DPRK Joint Communique, October 12, 2000.
4. As President Clinton described the deal this way, “They stop missile development and the sale of missiles. Now, they obviously need to earn some funds from some other places and we think there are ways they can do that.” (White House transcript of Associated Press interview aboard Air Force One, November 4, 2000.) North Korea’s version is in “Conclusion of Non-Aggression Treaty between DPRK and US Called for,” Korean Central News Agency, October 25, 2002.
5. William J. Perry, Transcript of a 38 North Press Briefing, Washington, January 9, 2017.
6. Doug Struck, “North Korean Program Not Negotiable, US Told N. Korea,” Washington Post, October 20, 2002, A-18.
7. Condoleezza Rice, No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington (New York: Crown, 2011), 161 (emphasis in original).
8. Ibid., 162 (emphasis added).
9. Guy Dinmore, “Heed Lesson of Iraq, US Tells Iran, Syria, and North Korea,” Financial Times, April 10, 2003, 4.
10. “Statement of Foreign Ministry Spokesman Blasts UNSC’s Discussion of Korean Nuclear Issue,” Korean Central News Agency, April 6, 2003.
11. Joint Statement of the Fourth Round of Six-Party Talks, September 19, 2005.
12. Ambassador Christopher R. Hill, “Statement at the Closing Plenary,” Six-Party Talks, September 19, 2005.
13. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Press Availability at UN Headquarters, September 19, 2005.
14. “Spokesman for the DPRK Foreign Ministry on Six-Party Talks,” Korean Central News Agency, September 20, 2005.
15. David E. Sanger, “US Widens Campaign on North Korea,” New York Times, October 24, 2005, p. A-7.
16. Mike Chinoy, Meltdown: The Inside Story of the North Korean Nuclear Crisis (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2008), 269.
17. “DPRK Foreign Minister Clarifies Stand on New Measures to Bolster War Deterrent,” Korean Central News Agency, October 3, 2006.
18. Initial Actions for the Implementation of the Joint Statement, February 13, 2007.
19. Second Phase Agreement for Implementation of the Joint Statement, October 3, 2007.
20. Choe Sang-hun, “Lee Plans to Harden Seoul’s Line with North Korea,” International Herald Tribune, December 20, 2007; Jung Sung-ki, “Peace Zone Project Faces Derailment,” Korea Times, December 30, 2007.
21. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Address at the Heritage Foundation, “US Policy towards Asia,” June 18, 2008.
22. US Department of State, Office of the Spokesman, “US-North Korea Understandings on Verification,” October 11, 2008.
23. “DPRK Foreign Ministry Statement,” Korean Central News Agency, June 13, 2009.
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