There’s nothing more I really care to say about what we should have done about the North Korean-built nuclear reactor at Al-Kibar in Syria, which Israel destroyed in a September 2009 air strike. This was a matter of some temporary inconvenience to Chris Hill’s efforts (abetted by the President and Secretary of State) to sell us a shiny, pre-owned agreed framework, complete with rust-proofing and warranty.
Recently, however, Dick Cheney’s memoir has revived that debate. Michael Anton, writing in The Weekly Standard, summarizes Cheney’s argument. Bob Woodward responds here, at the Washington Post. For sur-rebuttal, we have this piece by Elliott Abrams, Eliot Cohen, Eric Edelman and John Hannah, writing in the Washington Post. Among the interesting facts we learn from this is that Syria apparently had other facilities on its territory, presumably reprocessing facilities, that were designed to work with the reactor.
On a somewhat related note, although this piece by Jonathan Pollack about North Korea’s missile trade is interesting, it finds that North Korea’s missile exports declined precipitously after 2006. So how can Pollock be so sure of that? He thinks this decline coincides roughly with when the U.N. Security Council passed Resolution 1695, the first resolution banning North Korea’s missile program. I suspect that Pollack is partially right — North Korea probably did sell fewer missiles outright since the Proliferation Security Initiative began to bite, although I have yet to be convinced of exactly when the decline began or how steep it was. The reason? It may just be that because of said resolution, the North Koreans and their customers simply became more cagey about hiding their commerce. One way they went about this was to fly their missile parts right through the Beijing airport. Maybe Pollack has ways of registering that traffic, too, but I tend to doubt it.
Also somewhat related: I don’t find myself agreeing with Jennifer Rubin all that often, but I think failing to block Wendy Sherman’s confirmation will eventually turn out to be one of the worst decisions the Republicans in the Senate failed to make. It would have been better to let Sung Kim slip through and make Sherman the political issue, but some congressional oversight is still better than none at all.
The U.S. State Department is trying to persuade a senior Republican senator to lift a hold on the confirmation of Sung Kim, the nominee to become a new ambassador to South Korea, congressional sources said Monday.
Jon Kyl (R-AZ), assistant minority leader in the Senate, has been blocking the confirmation process for more than a month, according to the sources. He is known as a staunch conservative on foreign policy. [….]
“Sen. Kyl seems to be placing a hold on Kim’s confirmation due to the Obama administration’s North Korea policy, but he has not clarified the reason,” a source said, requesting anonymity. [Korea Times]
Apparently, the Senate custom is that hold letters are, at least initially, anonymous, and therefore unexplained.
I’m just glad to see that someone in the Senate is still looking over the State Department’s shoulder, now that Sam Brownback has gone back to Kansas.
So months after Chris Hill protege Sung Kim was nominated to be our Ambassador to South Korea, I’d assumed that he must have been confirmed in the dark of some night when I was too busy to read my news aggregators. Not so:
The official confirmation for the next U.S. ambassador to South Korea designate, Sung Kim, is unexpectedly being delayed although it seemed a mere formality. Apparently some senators are stalling because they worry about the direction of the Obama administration’s North Korea policy, but who they are is not known.
Kim’s nomination was supposed to be wrapped up before Congress adjourned for the summer early this month so he could be posted at the end of the month. A senate confirmation hearing late last month also went smoothly and took no more than half an hour. But in its last meeting before the adjournment, the Senate only confirmed the nomination of David Shear as ambassador to Vietnam, but not Kim. [Chosun Ilbo]
It seems that one Republican Senator is holding up the nomination to extract policy concessions from the Administration over North Korea policy, and specifically, food aid. As to who the Senator in question is, your guess is as good as mine, and possibly better.
One source said, “The Korean Embassy in Washington is asking around trying to find out the cause of the delay, but even the State Department apparently said it doesn’t know.” The prevailing theory is that Republicans who take a hardline view of North Korea are holding up the process to ensure that the Obama administration does not repeat the mistakes of former president George W. Bush, who drastically softened his stance toward the North during his later years in office but achieved nothing.
This is a tactic that the Republicans used with mixed success before. The nominations of Kathleen Stephens, Chris Hill, and Kurt Campbell were all held up for varying periods of time by former Senator Sam Brownback. Brownback eventually dropped his holds on the Stephens and Campbell nominations for policy concessions. In Stephen’s case, Chris Hill broke the promise after Stephens was confirmed. In Campbell’s case, lifting the hold may have been for the best. Campbell has generally been a voice of reason and an advocate of attaching negative consequences to Kim Jong Il’s aggressive behavior. Hill was confirmed over Brownback’s metaphorical dead body — meaning, a filibuster and a cloture vote — only to leave office as U.S. Ambassor to Iraq after just a year in office.
Anyway, one person they can’t pin this on is Sam Brownback.
Another person they can’t pin this on is me. I had nothing to do with any of this. Not directly, anyway. At least, not this time. But still, you can’t deny that getting profiled on OFK seems does have an inverse relationship to the speed of a Senate confirmation, no?
If Wendy Sherman is confirmed, I predict that she’ll screw up this administration’s North Korea policy — royally — but probably not until President Obama’s second term:
Wendy Sherman, a former senior U.S. official on North Korea, was nominated to a lofty State Department post on Friday despite political controversy over her earlier handling of North Korea affairs. The White House announced that President Barack Obama picked her to serve as under secretary for political affairs, the No. 3 post at the department.
Sherman was an adviser to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. If confirmed, she will succeed William Burns, who has been nominated to be deputy secretary of state. Burns would replace James Steinberg, who resigned to teach at Syracuse University. [….]
If Sherman takes office, she is expected to be in charge of the department’s Asia policy, while Burns focuses on the Middle East and Europe.
This is really too bad, because until now, the policy had been pretty good, and had managed to put substantial economic pressure on the North Korean regime. Sherman’s past record suggests that she’s predisposed to sign Agreed Framework III, and you can safely assume the same of whomever South Korea’s Democratic Party nominates for the upcoming presidential election campaign there.
A staffer for the new, improved, media-savvy Republican Staff for the House Foreign Affairs Committee forwards some interesting video clips of its senior members talking about U.S. policy toward China. First up is Committee Chair Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, who calls President Obama’s treatment of the Dalai Lama “shameful.”
Next, Dan Burton contrasts this with the effusive welcome given to the ChiCom emperor, who used the occasion to embarrass his hosts and score points with nationalist, anti-American netizens at home.
Finally, Chris Smith called Obama’s failure to raise human rights issues during Hu’s visit “a grotesquely missed opportunity.”
You can easily predict the reaction from certain quarters to this sort of rhetoric — that strident criticism of China’s domestic abuses and its foreign mischief hinders the all-important goal of “harmonious” relations, to which some of them seem to assign more value that the very values of our nation. This criticism comes into two flavors. The first of these discounts the very legitimacy of the issues that the members raise. Its arrogance is to squander the right of free speech by insisting that the same right should be denied to everyone else. But that is a view held mostly by inhabitants of the political fringes and those who would only visit a site like this one to gather open-source information.
The second view nominally accepts the legitimacy of the issues, but prefers to downplay them while questioning the stridency of rhetoric raising them. When pressed, these Downplayers usually insist that their criticisms originate from a sincere desire to help the United States to acquire influence, improve relations, and ultimately advance its national interests, but the criticisms lack mutuality when it’s China that commits the effrontery. For example, you’d expect to hear these critics express a little more dismay when China it engages in gratuitous antagonisms like having a pianist play “My Motherland” at a White House state dinner. It’s hard to see what legitimate national interest that advanced. Or, you’d expect them to advocate America’s interests to the Chinese when China is repeatedly exposed enabling North Korea as a proliferator and aggressor. If that is happening, I’m not seeing it, and furthermore, China clearly isn’t listening to it. But unlike the state dinner fiasco, you can at least rationalize these provocations-by-proxy with China’s national interests … provided that you interpret China’s view of its interests as a zero-sum competition with the United States. So much for harmonious relations. Meanwhile, as the Downplayers held functional control of U.S. policy in Asia, we have moved further from the realization of America’s interests, not closer.
The Obama administration initially appeared to accept the counsel of the Downplayers, but to its credit, it shows signs of having since learned that its obsequiousness toward China gained us nothing more than an intensification of human rights abuses, more Chinese bullying of its neighbors, and more money in Kim Jong Il’s bank accounts. Indeed, the main flaw in the Republicans’ criticism is that parts of it now seem stale — I mean, have you read what Hillary Clinton has said about China lately? It almost makes Ileana Ros-Lehtinen’s words seem mild:
The Obama Administration has been ratcheting-up the rhetoric on China’s human rights record lately, especially since the arrest of the dissident Ai Weiwei, but Secretary Clinton, in our interview, went much further, questioning the long-term viability of the one-party system. After she referred to China’s human rights record as “deplorable” (itself a ratcheting-up of the rhetoric), I noted that the Chinese government seemed scared of the Arab rising. To which she responded: “Well, they are. They’re worried, and they are trying to stop history, which is a fool’s errand. They cannot do it. But they’re going to hold it off as long as possible.”
That is a welcome change. Deferential policies by both Obama and his predecessor, a slower learner when it came to perceiving China’s malicious intent, contributed to North Korea’s confidence that it could attack South Korea with diplomatic and financial impunity. China obviously concluded that there would not be tangible consequences for its own role in supporting and underwriting North Korea’s crimes, and nothing that the United States has done in the last two decades has really suggested otherwise. The effect of this has been to reinforce China’s arrogance, not its interest in compromise. Maybe what more members of Congress are thinking is that it’s time for a new approach that threatens to impose some consequences for China’s bad faith. Such as? Such as:
The United States is considering expanding sanctions on North Korea to the same level as those imposed on Iran. Legislation, called the ‘Iran, North Korea, and Syria Sanctions Consolidation Act of 2011′ that has been submitted to the US Senate, introduces tougher sanctions on the communist stateand aims to increase pressure on companies doing business with the North. The bill, which is currently imposed on Iran, would expand an asset freeze on companies, groups or individuals selling military goods or technology to Pyeongyang and ban their access to the US banking system.
The bill to “expand sanctions imposed with respect to the Islamic Republic of Iran, North Korea and Syria and for other purposes” calls for the freezing of assets of any company trading technology and equipment with the countries and banning their access to the U.S. banking system.
Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) introduced the bill Monday with the sponsorship of 11 other senators. Among them are Joseph Lieberman (I-CT), Susan Collins (R-ME), Bob Casey (D-PA) and Jon Kyl (R-AZ). The bill comes one day ahead of the Obama administration’s announcement to blacklist Korea Tangun Trading Corp. of North Korea and 14 other foreign firms for their involvement in weapons of mass destruction programs in North Korea, Iran and Syria. North Korea has been under sanctions by the United Nations for its nuclear and missile tests.
The bill also coincides with North Korean leader Kim Jong-il’s ongoing tour of China, his third visit within a year, apparently to seek economic cooperation and China’s support for the third-generation power transition to his youngest son, Jong-un.
This looks like nothing more than a refined form of item six of Plan B, yet another idea whose time might just have finally come. Given the mood among House Republicans, who ran out of patience with China’s North Korea mischief years ago, there’s little question that they’d support a similar bill. The more interesting question now is whether the President is prepared to sign it into law.
Clearly, China is the country whose parastatals and businesses would be most affected by this legislation, which might be why China now feels the need to lie to us about all the pressure it’s really putting on North Korea. Alarmists will predict that sanctions like these would cause a dangerous financial rupture between China and the United States, but they forget that such a rupture would also be harmful to China economic and political stability. Even most Chinese entities that currently have investments in North Korea, faced with the choice of cutting their financial links to North Korea or the United States, would escape any ill effects by simply choosing the former. The consequence would be capital flight from the North Korean regime’s banks.
Bonus points for any guesses as to how this might affect Kaesong.
The bill, co-drafted by Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), who chairs the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA) calls for the expansion and strengthening of sanctions against the so-called rogue states.
Among a set of stipulations in the bill is to tighten reporting requirements in the existing nonproliferation act to include information on persons who have acquired materials mined or otherwise extracted within the territory or control of the three nations.
It also sanctions any entity that is selling conventional military goods or technology to them.
“The continued collaboration between Iran, North Korea and Syria helps drive the dangerous programs and policies of each of these rogue states, and endangers the United States and our allies,” Ros-Lehtinen said in a press release. “The threats posed by these rogue regimes to free nations and to the oppressed people of these three countries grow every day.”
She added the measure will “strengthen laws already on the books which seek to prevent these rogue states from sending dangerous materials to one another, other rogues and extremist groups.”
Chinese companies are heavily involved in mining in North Korea, and those operations are a major source of income for Kim Jong Il, but without reading the bill, it’s hard to determine the effect it would have on those operations. The bill is still so new that the text isn’t on Thomas.
You know how hard I’ve worked for the coveted Human Scum Award for the last seven years, and I’ve yet to receive so much as a nomination:
Ros-Lehtinen, member of the U.S. House of Representatives, called for taking “strong counteraction” and relisting the DPRK as a “sponsor of terrorism,” while terming it a “rogue regime”. This is intolerable as it is malignant vituperation against the dignified DPRK and its system. Ros, man representing the U.S. conservative hard-liners, is human scum as he earned ill-fame as an anti-communist fanatic. He is a political illiterate ignorant of the background against which the nuclear issue cropped up on the Korean Peninsula and the processes to settle it. It is natural to hear such rubbish from him. What should not go unnoticed, however, is that he let loose vituperation against the DPRK soon after he became chairman of the House International Relations Committee. It is quite clear that he would escalate the anti-DPRK campaign in Congress and political arena. [KCNA]
More here, from the Wall Street Journal’s Jay Solomon.
My sincere congratulations to the brigandish gentle lady from Florida. After you have a giggle at the fact that North Korea’s official news service doesn’t even know (or can’t correctly translate) the gender of one of Congress’s soon-to-be most powerful members, consider the depth of North Korea’s willful ignorance about Earth, and what this suggests about its risk-assessment skills. Occam’s Razor tells us that there’s no need to resort to complex explanations when simple ones will do. Yes, there may be some merit to the speculation about the cognitive effects of Kim Jong Il’s stroke, but consider the possibility that the North Koreans have been behaving like ignorant, bloody-minded assholes because that’s just what they are.
This isn’t to say that they’re crazy or irrational. I don’t believe they’re either of those things. I actually think the Kim family is a collection of malignant narcissists-slash-sociopaths. But reason isn’t just about the presence of viruses, it’s also a function of the input data and the processor speed. One can be subjectively rational and objectively irrational. And if you believe, as I do, that extortion was one of the reasons for North Korea’s recent attacks on the South, it has misjudged. The same KCNA piece reports that “Senator John McCain said that he would make new Congress commencing its work next year immediately relist the DPRK as a ’state sponsor of terrorism’ and apply financial and other sanctions against it.” I wouldn’t normally afford KCNA a strong presumption of accuracy, but I have it on good first-hand authority that Ros-Lehtinen will place the same objectives high on her list of priorities. And if Lee Myung Bak does what I think he’ll soon have to do and closes Kaesong, the effect will have been exactly the opposite of North Korea’s likely objectives.
(WASHINGTON) – U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), the incoming Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, today announced the Vice Chairman and the Subcommittee Chairmen for the Committee in the 112th Congress. Statement by Ros-Lehtinen:
[….]
“The oversight and investigations component of this Committee will be robust, and I will be establishing mechanisms for Americans to blow the whistle on waste, fraud, and abuse in State Department and Foreign Aid operations by welcoming anonymous tips. I will also be establishing a mechanism for the American people to be directly involved in Committee hearings.
“Congressman Rohrabacher, who has experience with this Committee’s past investigation of corruption in the United Nations Oil for Food program, will be leading our Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations. He also participated in investigations into foreign-owned banks under U.S. contact which violated U.S. sanctions on Iran, Cuba, and Libya.
“I am proud to lead this team which will protect and advance America’s interests and values, and not apologize for doing so.”
The Vice Chairman and Subcommittee Chairmen of the House Foreign Affairs Committee in the 112th Congress are as follows (Subcommittee Chairmen listed alphabetically by Subcommittee name):
U.S. Rep. Elton Gallegly (CA), Vice Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee
U.S. Rep. Christopher H. Smith (NJ), Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health, and Human Rights
U.S. Rep. Donald A. Manzullo (IL), Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific
U.S. Rep. Dan Burton (IN), Subcommittee on Europe and Eurasia
U.S. Rep. Steve Chabot (OH), Subcommittee on the Middle East and South Asia
U.S. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (CA), Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations
U.S. Rep. Edward R. Royce (CA), Subcommittee on Terrorism, Nonproliferation, and Trade
U.S. Rep. Connie Mack (FL), Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere
A few random observations here. First, I think Royce would have made a great subcommittee chair for Asia and the Pacific. He’s extremely knowledgeable about and engaged on North Korea issues, including human rights issues, proliferation, and money laundering (his highly capable staffer, Young Kim, undoubtedly deserves much credit for this). That said, he’ll be great for the position for which he’s been chosen.
Manzullo, by contrast, hasn’t been vocal about Korea, in or out of the committee room. In the hearings I attended, he had relatively little to say. Maybe this is a matter of his style. We’ll have to see how he does. In Congress, there are members who are dedicated to the issues, while others are mostly concerned about bringing investment into their districts. I’ll just have to watch and see what hearings and witnesses we get on Manzullo’s watch. Before the Democratic takeover in 2006, the Republican subcommittee chair was Jim Leach of Iowa, a decent and fair-minded man with a deep and sincere interest in human rights in the North, but not a conservative on issues of policy or diplomacy.
Dana Rohrabacher, on the other hand, is far from a quiet presence in any hearing. I left one hearing wondering if he shaves with a blowtorch. Going after U.N. profligacy and stupidity will be a good role for him. By stupidity, I refer to the likes of Margaret Chan, whose next gaffe of that sort won’t go unchallenged by Dana Rohrabacher. You could say that Dana Rohrabacher is more conservative than I am on these issues. For example, I recall him being opposed to food aid to North Korea. I’m supportive in principle, but only if the aid is monitored and subject to nutritional surveys of recipients, and since the current North Korean regime will never agree to that, the issue is probably moot for the foreseeable future.
It’s going to be an interesting hearing season next year. It’s too bad that I so seldom have time to attend them anymore.
I came to know the name of Stephen Solarz as a high school kid, observing a man I either agreed with (the Philippines) or disagreed with (Central America) strongly. After his electoral defeat in 1994, the next time I heard his name when I learned that he was one of the leading members of the board of the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea. I met Mr. Solarz once, after observing him making a rousing speech in front of the Capitol. I had never thought that “rousing” was Mr. Solarz’s style, and I was so amazed by his command of the facts he spoke of that I asked if I could get a copy of his text. I was amazed to find that he spoke from just a half-page of illegibly scrawled notes. The speech had been almost entirely contemporaneous. We’ve clearly lost a brilliant and decent man in Stephen Solarz.
Solarz, by the way, died of esophageal cancer, the same cancer that took Tom Lantos from us. Like Lantos, Solarz was a part of that dying liberal, pro-democracy wing of the Democratic Party. Funeral services were held Thursday at Temple Rodef Shalom.
Just how weak does your diplomacy have to be for Barack Obama, recipient of the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize, to call you out for it? I do not mean to imply that the answer to this question is an obvious one. I ask it because of this statement by President Obama, at a joint news conference with President Lee Myung Bak, after this Veterans’ Day speech at my former duty station:
After delivering his remarks, Obama met with South Korean President Lee Myung-Bak. Appearing at a joint press conference with the South Korean leader, Obama said that the six-party talks, which were first launched in 2003 to address North Korea’s nuclear program, had degenerated in 2005 when they became “talk for the sake of talking.” Obama did not appear eager to restart the talks under the current circumstances.
“President Lee and I have discussed this extensively and our belief is that there will be an appropriate time and place to re-enter into six-party talks,” Obama said. “But we have to see a seriousness of purpose by the North Koreans in order to spend the extraordinary time and energy that’s involved in these talks. We’re not interested in just going through the motions with the same result.” [Real Clear Politics, Scott Conroy]
My, my, how times have changed. President Obama’s reversal on North Korea has to be the most amazing policy shift since . . . President Bush’s reversal on North Korea. No regular reader here will be surprised that I agree with the President’s criticism, but I think we all share some astonishment at the source.
George W. Bush’s North Korea legacy is to leave the Republicans outflanked on North Korea, where President Obama’s policy is, on paper, far tougher than Bush’s, even if it’s still insufficient in many important ways. The new House Republicans now find themselves in a place where they first have to repudiate President Bush’s weakness before they can criticize some of President Obama’s legitimate shortcomings on the list of state sponsors of terrorism, on human rights, and on the administration’s displays of weakness toward China, which have only aroused China’s predatory nature. One way the House Republicans are likely to do this is to move to have North Korea put back on the terror-sponsor list, though they realize that their bill will die on John Kerry’s desk. Another rumor on Capitol Hill has it that when Ileana Ros-Lehtinen becomes Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, Chris Hill will be called before the Congress to explain his broken promises to, deceptions of, and withholding of critical information from those in attendance. But of course, Chris Hill wasn’t the President. In the end, the President is responsible for letting Chris Hill do what comes naturally to Chris Hill.
Some Republican-leaning snarks have even begun asking, while referring to President Bush, “Miss me yet?” You can put me down for “not yet.” I didn’t care for the overheated, conspiratorial fulminations against President Bush either the far left or the far right. I don’t care for its polar opposite against President Obama. I believe that Bush and Obama both make their decisions with a higher ratio of good faith to self-interest than, say, Clinton or Nixon might have. Rather than seeing Obama as inflexibly ideological, I see him as a typically pliable politician who is moving away from his left-leaning origins, because he sees those origins for what they are — an obstacle to his re-election. In doing so, he has redeemed many of President Bush’s most controversial decisions on national security, including many he criticized as a candidate. I suspect that this part of Bush’s legacy is already shifting in the public consciousness.
This doesn’t mean most people will soon consider Bush a successful president. Bush probably did the best job he could with the intellect and charisma God gave him. But it was his stubbornness in sticking with his decisions that made the most outsized mark on his legacy, with mixed results. Bush tended to select mediocre people — Powell, Rice, Hill, Harriet Miers, and many of his top generals during the first years in Iraq — and would stick with them even after they performed poorly. But at one exceptionally consequential moment, that stubbornness was redeemed when Bush ignored the collective advice of our vastly overrated foreign policy brain trust and implemented The Surge.
It certainly looks like every government official outside Beijing who has seen the evidence now believes that North Korea sank the Cheonan and killed 46 members of its crew. Among those who have drawn their conclusions are the South Korean government, the Obama Administration, and the Republicans in Congress. The multinational investigation is now sufficiently advanced that the official Yonhap News Agency says that the findings could be released as early as next week. One interesting leak references a stray North Korean torpedo the ROK Navy recovered several years ago. The investigators are now comparing it to aluminum fragments recovered near where the Cheonan sank, and which don’t appear to be pieces from the ship.
The South Korean government’s comments are not exactly, but tantamount to, a conclusion of North Korean guilt:
“The sinking of the Cheonan has shown the world the cruel reality of division” on the Korean Peninsula, Unification Minister Hyun In-taek said in a speech to a forum in Seoul. His comments came hours after a presidential aide for political affairs said “an external attack was highly likely” to have sank the 1,200 corvette, the Cheonan, in the Yellow Sea.
“From such a standpoint, this is a grave situation concerning national security,” Park Hyung-joon told a radio interview. [Yonhap]
Coming from the Unification Minister, whose traditional role has consisted of obsequious kowtowing toward North Korea, those comments are even more meaningful.
The Joongang Ilbo reports that the Obama Administration and its semi-autonomous subsidiary, the U.S. State Department, also agree:
The U.S. government has concluded that North Korea sank the South Korean warship Cheonan in March and has begun discussing possible measures to be taken in response, according to a source here.
Another diplomatic source said the Obama administration is also preparing a joint U.S.-South Korean statement condemning the North Korean action and strengthening the two countries’ military alliance. The statement, the source added, would be issued after the findings of the Cheonan probe are announced sometime next week.
“About a dozen officials handling East Asia and the Korean Peninsula at the State Department, the Defense Department and the Central Intelligence Agency held a closed-door meeting [Monday, Washington time] to talk about responses to the Cheonan sinking for the first time,” the source said. “They discussed measures to take in case North Korea attacked the ship, and they didn’t bring up any other possibility [that some other cause may have been responsible].”
What the Administration is prepared to do about this isn’t nearly as clear. The only specific response mentioned, a new round of military exercises, certainly would not be a complete response, and hopefully isn’t meant to be. The Mainichi Shimbun adds that the U.S. and South Korean plan to hold more high-level military and diplomatic meetings between now and July.
Needless to say, the Obama Administration’s North Korea policy is about to face its most important test so far. North Korea’s nuclear test in 2009 was more effective than its 2006 test, but the probably premeditated sinking of a South Korean warship is an entirely level of provocation, and quite possibly the first in a series that’s intended to provoke a limited conflict. How President Obama responds now could be very important to the lives of plenty of people on both sides of the DMZ. And while a direct military response is probably unwise, Obama has to choose options that are at once restrained, principled, and which will genuinely deter Kim Jong Il’s next bad decisions.
One important (but also incomplete) response would be to re-add North Korea to the list of state sponsors of terrorism. Via the Chosun Ilbo, it appears that a bill to do just that is now percolating among the Republicans in Congress. It’s interesting that the South Korean embassy doesn’t seem opposed. One wonders whether John Kerry will block this attempt to re-list North Korea, just as he blocked the last one, by a very close vote. Certainly Kerry would not do this against the will of the White House. We’ll soon have a much better idea of who is running this administration’s North Korea policy. But one wonders what negotiating atmosphere Kerry would be afraid of spoiling today, when even the State Department has said that it can’t be business as usual if North Korea sank the Cheonan.
Some would tell you that re-listing is mostly a symbolic gesture, but they’re wrong. First, a terror-sponsor listing effectively blocks North Korea’s access to international loans, something we’d likely do anyway in times like these, but this measure would also send an important signal of political risk and bad creditworthiness to other potential lenders and investors. Second, it’s important for reasons of principle — since it was de-listed, North Korea has been caught arming terrorists at least twice, has attempted to assassinate a dissident in exile, and has repeatedly used its official state media to terrorize the populations of other states. These actions meet the statutory definition of international terrorism, and we can’t deter state-sponsored terrorism if it doesn’t have consequences. Third, the de-listing was originally a quid-pro-quo for nuclear disarmament, a condition that North Korea decisively repudiated when it tested a nuclear weapon in May 2009.
While re-listing itself would not be symbolic, a congressional resolution would be. The legal procedure for listing a state as a sponsor of terrorism leaves that decision entirely within the discretion of the Secretary of State and the President. But then, this is an election year, and Obama is already under attack for having a weak North Korea policy:
Ironically, Obama’s negotiating posture with the North is, so far at least, somewhat less objectionable than that of the Bush administration’s last years. Bush’s negotiators were, in effect, negotiating with themselves, making unforced concessions to create the illusion of diplomatic progress, while North Korea did little or nothing.
By contrast, the Obama team, at least optically, has seemed more prepared to have China make the grease payments necessary to persuade Kim’s regime to resume the long-stalled six-party talks.
But beneath the optics is a disturbing reality. Obama’s underlying strategy remains fixed in the belief that once everyone returns to the bargaining table, progress on denuclearizing North Korea is still possible. It is a major article of faith, closely linked to Obama’s view that negotiations with Iran might actually divert the mullahs from their determined pursuit of nuclear weapons. [John Bolton, N.Y. Daily News]
Bolton is one of the few conservatives who carries over enough consistency from the Bush Administration to be a credible critic of Obama, who has at least recognized the power of financial constriction to affect North Korea (if not its behavior). Speaking of sanctions, I also liked this quote from the Heritage Foundation’s Bruce Klingner on this:
What is Obama’s Plan B? The Obama administration’s two-track policy of pressure and negotiations is an improvement over earlier approaches that veered to either extreme. However, “strategic patience” is insufficient as a long-term strategy. Simply containing North Korea in a box is problematic for several reasons. First, it allows Pyongyang to expand and refine its nuclear and missile delivery capabilities. This not only further undermines the security of the U.S. and its allies but also sends a dangerous signal of de facto acceptance to other nuclear aspirants. Members of Congress, the media, and think tanks who excoriated the Bush administration’s policy of “benign neglect” are now hypocritically silent against Obama’s similar strategy. [Bruce Klingner, Heritage Foundation]
Read that one in its entirety.
If no sane person still thinks that North Korea can be talked out of its nukes — and that’s only a very slight exaggeration in this town — then the question becomes what the point of sanctions really is. Is it to get North Korea back to the six-party talks to stall us for a few more years while it keeps proliferating nukes to Syria, Iran, Burma, and God-knows-who-else?
As Klingner argues persuasively, sanctions, like talks, are not an end in themselves. Both need to be part of a more comprehensive policy with a concrete goal. To me, the policy ought to be to weaken the regime’s grip on its population by damaging its capacity to oppress. The Great Confiscation and the backlash it created are good illustrations of how this works in practice. So for the moment, Obama’s sanctions happen to advance us toward the same goal I envision, even if it’s probably not the same goal that Obama’s people envision. To me, the concrete goal is a regime so subverted, destabilized, weakened, and lacking in the means to maintain order and control that China (along with a critical mass of the North Korean military) has a fundamental change of attitude and decides that perpetuating Kim Jong Il’s misrule impedes, rather than advances, the objective of stability in North Korea. Maybe then, China will have an incentive to join in forcing North Korea into a negotiated and controlled abdication. That’s not in the cards now, and it won’t be until the North Korean people acquire the means to organize against the state.
Dear People of both South and North Korea, Members of the North Korea Freedom Coalition, Ms. Scholte of the Defense Forum Foundation, Members of the NGO Human Rights Community, Pastors, North Korean Defectors, Abductee Families, Members of the Korean-American Community and Friends of Korea:
It is particularly fitting and proper that this year’s annual North Korea Freedom Week will be held for the first time on the Korean peninsula. This week of events also comes at a particularly critical time as we seek answers to the tragic sinking last month of the South Korean naval vessel, Cheonan, and look forward to honoring veterans during the upcoming sixtieth anniversary of the outbreak of the Korean War in June.
I have joined with Representative Sam Johnson as a co-sponsor of legislation commemorating the anniversary of the commencement of that tragic war, due to North Korean treachery, which nonetheless formed an unbreakable bond between two allies, the United States and the Republic of Korea. As a friend and ally, I also wish to state that I fully agree with President Lee Myung-bak’s recent statement of the need for a resolute response once the cause of the South Korean ship’s sinking is determined. The families of the forty-six dead South Korean sailors deserve no less than a full accounting.
North Korea’s refusal to allow a transparent and thorough verification regime for inspection of its nuclear program led to a complete breakdown of the Six-Party Talks last year. This followed the premature and unwise decision by the United States in 2008 to remove North Korea from the State Department list of state sponsors of terrorism. Read the rest of this entry »
Here is President Obama, talking about North Korea, nukes, and sanctions yesterday:
“I think it’s fair to say that North Korea has chosen a path of severe isolation that has been extraordinarily damaging to its people,” Obama told a news conference at the end of a summit on nuclear security.
He said that as pressure builds, Pyongyang will want to break out of its isolation and “we’ll see a return to the six-party talks and … we will see a change in behavior.” [Reuters]
I don’t advocate that Obama’s North Korea policy is perfect, but it’s good enough to remove North Korea as a foreign policy issue for conservatives. Obama’s policy isn’t much milder than Bush’s in its semantics, and is clearly superior to Bush’s in its tangibles. I said when UNSCR 1874 passed that it would be as good as its implementation, and that the President’s directions to Treasury would matter most. On both counts President Obama deserves good marks from any objective observer. I’m even willing to give him a pass on his relative silence about human rights. What will his words really mean anyway? Nothing short of the regime’s collapse will change anything anyway, and financial sanctions have brought us much closer to that than any of George W. Bush’s hollow words.
If conservatives have a more practical and appealing policy to offer, I haven’t seen what that is. I know what it could be, but I don’t see any conservatives or Republicans advocating it. On the contrary, the Republican voice on North Korea is often Richard Lugar, whose policy is much closer to Bill Clinton’s than Barack Obama’s. That will be more true than ever when Sam Brownback retires this year.
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry (D-MA) issued the following statement in response to the conviction of American Aijalon Gomes by a North Korean court. Senator Kerry called on the DPRK to release Mr. Gomes immediately on a humanitarian basis:
“This is a mother’s worst nightmare and a horrific situation. This young man belongs in Massachusetts with his family, and I join with them in expressing my hope that North Korea will do the right thing and send him home. I will do all I can, in concert with our government and Aijalon’s family, to see him released safely.”
I really wish I could say this was an April Fool’s hoax or a Mensa audition gone horribly awry. Actually, it’s a hearing in the House Armed Services Committee:
Which seems like a good time to mention that Senator Carl Levin is filled with angst over all the wise on-the-spot guidance our general officers are missing out on because of a Republican parliamentary stall tactic somehow related to health care collectivization reform:
“Lives are at stake here. American lives and Afghan lives,” said Levin, who would have led the hearing on US national security in Asia. “It’s unconscionable.” [….] Defiant Republicans rolled their eyes, with one leadership aide asking “Do they really believe that a hearing is the difference between life and death? Seriously?” [….]
The Michigan lawmaker said he had hoped to question them about “pressing national security topics such as North Korea’s nuclear program, Chinese military capability and the threat of cyber-warfare.” [AFP]
The government is best that governs least, and that’s never more true that when your national brain trust is comprised of pompous, talentless buffoons like John Kerry and the shallow waters of the Foreign Relations Committee. I’ve given kind reviews to President Obama’s North Korea policy, but the current Congress — and the Democrats in particular — represents an intellectual vacuum whose collective impulse always defaults to the Sisyphean diplomacy of appeasement and agreed frameworks. Are we really missing anything by having 40% less of that?
Now, these diplomatic efforts have also strengthened our hand in dealing with those nations that insist on violating international agreements in pursuit of nuclear weapons. That’s why North Korea now faces increased isolation, and stronger sanctions –- sanctions that are being vigorously enforced. That’s why the international community is more united, and the Islamic Republic of Iran is more isolated. And as Iran’s leaders continue to ignore their obligations, there should be no doubt: They, too, will face growing consequences. That is a promise. (Applause.)
Now, I suppose you detect sarcasm, but don’t take this as criticism. If candidate Obama’s campaign rhetoric was sincere, then I credit him with being a quick study, with an assist from Kim Jong Il. I don’t deny that President Obama’s North Korea policy leaves much to be desired — it’s really just a continuation of the same paradigm of the last 20 years, only with more sanctions. It’s ultimately headed toward an agreement that won’t make our country more secure. Still, the pressure is hastening the Kim Jong Il’s Untergang, and it’s far, far better than my initially low expectations.
The United States said Friday it was “very concerned” about human rights violations in North Korea, as President Barack Obama named an envoy to focus on the issue.
“We’re deeply concerned about the situation in North Korea, particularly the plight of North Korean refugees, and human rights in general,” State Department spokesman Ian Kelly said. [….]
If confirmed by the Senate, King will work as part of US special representative for North Korea Stephen Bosworth’s team and cooperate with other top State Department officials involved in Washington’s policy toward Pyongyang, according to Kelly.
He will also serve as the liaison with human rights groups and other non-governmental organizations “to try and highlight the problem of North Korean human rights and trying to promote a more transparent political system in North Korea,” said Kelly. [AFP]
That means that for the last eight months, North Korea has managed to misdirect our focus on its calculated and calibrated provocations and away from the pathology in which they originate.
The AFP story, apparently written by a reporter untrained in the use of Google, goes on to report that “[s]cores of North Koreans are believed” to flee North Korea each year, to escape “extreme poverty and malnutrition.” This manages to fit two inaccuracies into a single sentence. In fact, the number of North Koreans arriving in the South — almost certainly a pale shadow of the number fleeing the North — has been more than 1,000 a year since 2002 (page 54). At the end of 2004, there were 7,688 North Korean defectors in the South (page 53). Today, more than 3,000 arrive every year, and the total number of North Korean defectors in the South has more than doubled to more than 16,000.
To say that North Koreans are fleeing their homeland because of hunger and poverty is no more true than saying that Anne Frank died of natural causes. Many North Koreans are starving, and a few are riding in Mercedez sedans and yachts, or wearing Omega watches. When that happens in the world’s most centrally planned economy, it means that someone’s corn ration was written out of the central plan. Often, those written out of the plan were born into the lower regions of a system of hereditary political castes known as songbun and written off as expendable. In North Korea, your songbun is your destiny:
Getting a job in North Korea requires a certain family background and lobbying skills rather than desire and talent.
North Korean middle school graduates (high school in South Korea) have three choices for career after graduating 11 years of compulsory education. These are: to go to the army or college, or get a job. Only ten percent with background by birth can get to college and the rest must either enter the army or get jobs. Those without college or army entrance were transferred to labor department of Administration Committee, and they are assigned jobs. The problem is that the job assignments are decided without regards to an individual’s wish or talents. By so called ‘group assignment’, hundreds of graduates are assigned to one job location.
Therefore, middle school students who are about to graduate start lobbying in the labor department of Administration Committee with bribes and using connections. Those without any means have no choice but to go to coal mines or construction companies and end up with physical labor jobs that nobody desires. [
Open News]
Those state industries, however, are vulnerable places to be. When they shut down, the workers are effectively cut out of the rationing system and left with no means of survival. Even after the work, rations, and pay stop, workers must still report to “work” or be sent to a labor camp.
(For all of its faults, AFP’s article at least covers the story, and features what sounds a lot like the administration backtracking on bilateral talks, a subject about which I’m ambivalent.)
I don’t have strong feelings about Bob King because I know almost nothing about him. Few of those who have followed this issue closely do, either, including some of the most prominent activists working on this issue. It’s a plus that he worked for Tom Lantos, and his background is probably better than Jay Lefkowitz’s was coming into the job (though to be fair, Lefkowitz was a quick study). On the other hand, King’s lack of an established reputation puts him at a disadvantage to other rumored candidates, including Jared Genser and my good friend David Hawk.Stephen Solarz was my personal dark horse favorite because of his political stature and connections. King may be an easier figure to dismiss, as was the case with Lefkowitz.
The next question is whether Bob King will be more relevant to the Obama Administration’s North Korea policy than Jay Lefkowitz was to Bush’s. I challenge anyone to untangle all of the layers of vagueness in the State Department’s canned response, offered by Spokesman James Kelly:
In terms of what his role will be, he will be part of Ambassador Bosworth’s team in the Office of the Special Representative for North Korea Policy. He’ll work closely with bureaus within the State Department here, our human rights bureau – Democracy, Human Rights and Labor – and of course, with the Bureau of East Asia and Pacific Affairs. And of course, he’ll coordinate with his colleagues in the Korean office with Ambassador Kim and Ambassador Goldberg.
He’ll also have a very important role of being the liaison with the human rights community, with the NGO community, and will also engage with international human rights organizations in his efforts to try and highlight the problem of North Korean human rights and trying to promote a more transparent political system in North Korea. As you know, we are – we’re deeply concerned about the situation in North Korea, particularly the plight of North Korean refugees. And human rights, in general, for the State Department are a big priority, and this is another indication of that.
QUESTION: Will Bob King also participate in the possible U.S.-North Korea bilateral meeting? Because he is on the team of Ambassador Bosworth.
MR. KELLY: Well, I think first we have to make the decision we’re going to actually have the bilateral talks, and then we’ll see who actually participates in it. Yeah, go ahead.
QUESTION: Do you intend to be talking with North Korea specifically about human rights during these meetings that are often more geared towards the nuclear program, the Six-Party Talks?
MR. KELLY: Do we talk about human rights when we –
QUESTION: Will you be – I mean, before, you separated human rights out from the Six-Party Talks.
MR. KELLY: Yeah.
QUESTION: Will you be now bringing human rights back in to the Six-Party –
MR. KELLY: Yeah. You’re asking me to speculate on how – what the framework of the talks will be. I mean, human rights is in the center of all of our bilateral discussions, and I’m sure – although our priority, of course, is the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, human rights always plays an important role in our bilateral relations. [State Dep’t. Daily Press Briefing, Sept. 25, 2009]
When Lefkowitz had the temerity to link North Korea’s oppressive system to its then-unfolding renunciation of its last set of promises to disarm, Condi Rice publicly humiliated Lefkowitz in a manner that would have drawn a very public resignation from a man of greater pride, stature, and sense of mission. History has established, I think, that the Bush Administration’s talk about human rights in the North was just that, and in the end, it was Bush and Rice — with plenty of help from Christopher Hill — who ended up proving (again) the futility of appeasing North Korea.
If we have learned anything from this, it should be that North Korea’s pathology cannot be compartmentalized away from its diplomatic mendacity. Yet a diminishing few still believe that Kim Jong Il wants better relations and free commerce with Earth. These people either don’t understand, or haven’t grasped the significance of, North Korea’s domestic propaganda about how it games and extorts America. North Korea has hostility, isolation, xenophobia, and secrecy in its genes. It can’t exist without them and can’t be cajoled or forced into abandoning them. Richardson calls the diplomatic aspect of North Korea’s pathology “strategic disengagement.” The central idea of it is that sustaining a state of hostility with the outside world is an essential element of what makes North Korea what it is. Its removal necessarily means transforming North Korea into a place that would turn on Kim Jong Il faster than a centrifuge. The implications of those realities are unpleasant, which may be why so many people refuse to recognize them. But not to recognize them requires one to disregard decades of experience, including North Korea’s eventual renunciation of every diplomatic commitment it has ever made.
Oddly enough, these people have managed to get the news media to call them “realists.”
Consider all of the logical chasms one must cross to believe in the verifiable diplomatic disarmament of North Korea today. How can we believe in the verification of disarmament when we can’t even verify that our food aid is going to those in need, and where brief and closely-monitored meetings between elderly siblings are considered a newsworthy diplomatic accomplishment? How can we expect North Korea to meet internationally accepted verification standards when it demands to be excused from every other norm of humanity, civilization, and transparency? How can we expect its scientists and technicians to be truthful with us when they live in a society so opaque, so controlling, and so vindictive — not only against those perceived as even minimally disloyal, but against their parents, spouses, and their children? Who believes that North Korea shares our interests in peace and security — interests that are rooted in moral, humanitarian, and economic values — when its mass culling of its own people through famine, concentration camps, and public executions shows utter malice for the value of human life?
More specifically, recent reports from defectors suggest that North Korea’s underground nuclear test site was built by prisoners from Camp 16, which is adjacent to the test site’s eastern perimeter. The prisoners, it is said, never leave that tunnel alive. Who will ever give us a full accounting of North Korea’s nuclear test activities if the North isn’t prepared to let our inspectors go to Mount Mantap and hear the candid observations of its scientists and technicians? If there is one thing that unites North Koreans more than their hatred of us, it is the fear of some dark fate if they compromise betray the state that made the arsenal of terror. Let there be no mistake that North Korea’s disregard for human life means that it would not hesitate to arm terrorists with any weapon it has the capacity to make.
So far, the Obama Administration has demonstrated surprising strength in responding to Kim Jong Il’s nuclear and missile tests. The passage of UNSCR 1874, despite its flaws, has spurred international cooperation with sanctions. This has been useful, but Obama’s empowering of the Treasury Department to attack Kim Jong Il’s palace economy has probably done far more. After all, without the ability to engage in financial transactions, Kim Jong Il has no efficient means of recouping his profits from arms sales, drug dealing, insurance fraud, cigarette or pharmaceutical counterfeiting, or any other means he uses to support his regime. It’s likely that his cash reserves are declining.
But to what end? For Kim Jong Il, nuclear weapons are central to his national security and personal survival. They are a substitute for a massive conventional military whose equipment is degraded and whose troops are withering away physically. They are one of the last remaining sources of national pride for an otherwise miserable and discontented population. There are even reports that Kim has threatened his own military with nuclear force if it rebels against him. Finally, as Kim Jong Il’s health visibly declines what else can he claim for a legacy? His transformation of his cities into vast cemeteries? These factors, combined with two decades of failed diplomacy, all suggest that Kim Jong Il will never disarm voluntarily. For now, Kim Jong Il probably concludes that he can break sanctions by appearing to our fear and our gullibility, and that of other nations in the region. Financial sanctions may be building real pressure on Kim Jong Il’s regime and retarding the expansion of his arsenal, but they any agreement they secure will be illusory.
President Obama now offers Kim a “grand bargain,” but The Big Deal comes with an impossible condition — nuclear disarmament first. This offer will not sit on the table for long. Eventually — absent Kim Jong Il’s sudden death from natural or not-entirely-natural causes — North Korean provocations will force President Obama to either accept North Korea as a nuclear power or escalate the confrontation, either through more robust containment or by opting for constricting and subverting of the regime itself. Acceptance may take the form of taking North Korea’s word to verify complete disarmament at some future date, but no one could possibly take any such promises seriously now. And a nuclear North Korea is an unacceptable condition for U.S. national security. Within the next two years, we will know which path President Obama chooses.
Dear People of both South and North Korea, Members of the North Korea Freedom Coalition, Ms. Scholte of the Defense Forum Foundation, Members of the NGO Human Rights Community, Pastors, North Korean Defectors, Abductee Families, Members of the Korean-American Community and Friends of Korea: