[Column] Washington's continuing hubris and the North Korean nuclear crisis

Anthony DiFilippo, Professor of Sociology at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania and author of Japan's Nuclear Disarmament Policy and the U.S. Security Umbrella.

The Republican loss in the recent midterm election, as most observers have maintained, was a rejection of President Bush's failed Iraq policy. But the Bush administration's North Korean policy (not to mention its botched efforts with Tehran) has also been unsuccessful, since the six-party talks that were created more than three years ago have not defused the nuclear crisis that exists in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK). While there was no hard evidence that Pyongyang actually had a nuclear weapon before the North Korean nuclear crisis emerged in October 2002, there is irrefutable evidence now that it has restarted its plutonium-reprocessing plant at Yongbyon and that it has the technological know-how to detonate a nuclear device.

Along with the missteps of Kim Jong-Il's regime, the Bush administration managed to demolish the 1994 Agreed Framework that froze the Yongbyon facility. However, it was the Bush administration's accusations that Pyongyang was maintaining, at a location that has yet to be identified, a clandestine uranium-enrichment program to produce nuclear weapons that precipitated the ongoing North Korean nuclear crisis. It is believed that the nuclear device detonated by the DPRK in October 2006 had a plutonium not a uranium core. If the consensus opinion is correct and the DPRK test was a relatively substandard explosion resulting from miscalculation, then it is plausible that the Bush administration's North Korean policy helped persuade Pyongyang to make this very unwise decision - one that contributed to the undermining of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which has as its principal objective a world without nuclear arms. In its continuing attempt to get the attention of the Bush administration, especially to have a bilateral meeting with Washington, Pyongyang launched several missiles this past July and, after having announced in February 2005 that it had manufactured nuclear weapons, finally detonated what probably was a rudimentary device that could have conceivably been built after October 2002.

Even when some semblance of accomplishment became discernible in the second phase of the 4th round of the six-party talks that were held in Beijing in September 2005, the Bush administration concomitantly moved not to intentionally undermine the multilateral process, but to make unequivocal its unrestrained hubris. At the same time that the six-party talks produced the Joint Statement on September 19, 2005, which created a ray of hope that the DPRK nuclear crisis could perhaps be diplomatically resolved, the Bush administration was hard at work planning to impose financial sanctions on North Korea. Two days after the second phase of the 4th round of the six-party talks resumed, the U.S. Treasury Department announced that it planned to take action against the Banco Delta Asia (BDA), a bank in the Macau region of China. According to the Treasury Department, BDA has worked with the government in North Korea and its front companies for more than two decades and there is evidence that they have been involved in illicit activities, namely counterfeiting U.S. currency, drug trafficking, and the illegal distribution of tobacco products. Because the BDA had had a long-term financial relationship with the DPRK and since accusations of North Korea's involvement in illicit activities were hardly new, if nothing else, the question of the timing of the Treasury Department's announcement becomes suspect. Then, two days after the end of the second phase of the 4th round of the six-party talks, the U.S. Treasury Department decided to announce sanctions directed at eight North Korean businesses said to be connected to the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

Although the Treasury Department maintained that the imposition of financial sanctions on the DPRK was a separate issue from the six-party talks, Pyongyang interpreted them differently. As Pyongyang saw it, the U.S. imposed financial sanctions to pressure the DPRK, in the best-case scenario hoping that it would implode or at least weaken enough so that Washington could make unilateral demands without reciprocal actions to end the North Korean nuclear crisis. Not too long after the end of the 5th round of the six-party talks in November 2005, Pyongyang announced that it would not participate in these multilateral meetings until the United States lifted the financial sanctions.

Having on more than one occasion refused Pyongyang's request to meet bilaterally, the Bush administration suddenly changed its policy strategy, very quietly sending Christopher Hill, the Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, to Beijing in late October 2006 to meet with Chinese and North Korean officials. In Beijing, there were trilateral meetings; however, Hill also met bilaterally with Kim Gye-gwan, the DPRK's Vice Foreign Minister and its chief negotiator in the six-party talks. The announcement by the Chinese Foreign Ministry on October 31 that the six-party talks would soon resume was welcome news, since the hope that diplomacy could eventually resolve the DPRK nuclear crisis sounded far better to the international community than the stalemate that existed for nearly a year.

Hill stated after the meetings that he agreed to discuss the financial sanctions at the six-party talks - even though Washington had previously considered them unconnected - and that the DPRK did not have any conditions for returning to these multilateral discussions. Pyongyang's agreement to return to the six-party talks, notwithstanding the fact that the United States had not removed the financial sanctions, was a concession that is diplomatically tantamount to Washington's willingness to meet bilaterally with Kim Gye-gwan in Beijing, which was rationalized as occurring within the context of trilateral discussions. But Hill's claim that the DPRK made no conditions to return to the six-party talks is a harder political pill to swallow, since what else would an agreement to discuss the financial sanctions at the six-party talks be other than a condition. Indeed, right after the announcement in Beijing that the six-party talks would soon resume, Pyongyang stated that it was rejoining the multilateral discussions based "on the premise" that the United States and the DPRK will be able to settle the sanctions issue during the six-party talks.

Two days after the announcement that the six-party talks would soon resume, the U.S. Treasury Department dropped another bombshell that hardly helped make North Korea's return to these multilateral discussions any more attractive to Pyongyang. Responding to requests from the news media regarding the announcement that North Korea would be rejoining the six-party talks, the Treasury Department stated that its continuing investigation of BDA "confirms the illicit conduct of the bank, including that the bank took a fee from the North Koreans in exchange for lax due diligence on their accounts."

A Little Help from a Friend

Shortly after the Treasury Department announcement, Japan's largest daily newspaper, the conservative Yomiuri Shimbun, ran a story that maintained that there is now evidence that Pyongyang had used its deposits in the BDA to pay Japanese companies in 2002 for equipment that could be used on North Korea's WMD programs. While the U.S. Treasury Department would not acknowledge whether it had collaborated with Tokyo on the BDA investigation, Japan to this point had kept out of this financial sanctions imbroglio. However, Tokyo has been a staunch supporter of the Bush administration's hard-line DPRK policy from the start and was very pleased in April 2006 that the president welcomed to the White House, with a public expression of commiseration, the family members of a victim of North Korea's abduction activities. For Japan, the abduction of its citizens by North Korean agents decades ago has been the most serious unresolved problem it has faced with the DPRK until the latter's recent nuclear test, and so Tokyo was pleased that Bush helped to internationalize the issue. Moreover, both Washington and Tokyo have maintained that together they will continue to work hard to enforce the U.N. Security Council Resolution that imposed sanctions on North Korea in the wake of its nuclear test, something that Pyongyang is not at all happy about.

A More Conciliatory Policy

At this time, whether the six-party talks will result in the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula remains an unanswered question. Because Pyongyang is especially troubled by the financial sanctions, a significant concession by Washington on this matter would likely break the diplomatic ice and give Pyongyang a reason to remain committed to the six-party talks. While the shared goal of the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula is laudable, the Bush administration's refusal to abandon its hard-line DPRK policy and work in a manifestly conciliatory manner has thus far consistently created obstacles that have helped forestall the resolution of the North Korean nuclear crisis.

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