What Goes Around
June 27th, 2008A couple of nights ago I commented on the “Merry-Go-Round” pace of our negotiations with North Korea over their nuclear program. Tonight, I want to refer you to this Fred Kaplan analysis of the situation, especially these paragraphs:
Daniel Sneider, assistant director of the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford University, calls the deal “a plutonium-containment program” and adds: “That’s fine. But it’s not what it was supposed to be.” Scott Snyder, senior associate at the Asia Foundation (and author of Negotiating on the Edge, the best book about North Korea’s diplomatic strategy), agrees: “The scope of this agreement does not match what we signed up for.” He also says, “As always with North Korea, it’s disappointing and frustrating.” Still, he says, “It’s better than nothing.” Both Sneider and Snyder, it should be noted, have been strong advocates of arms control and critics of the Bush administration’s earlier approach.
Two questions arise. First, could Rice and Hill have managed a better deal? It’s hard to say. In his book, Scott Snyder writes that the North Koreans typically adopt a very hard line toward the end of a negotiating session. At that point, the other side has to be willing to stand firm and walk away. Clinton’s emissary did just that toward the end of the Agreed Framework talks, after the North Koreans announced a signing ceremony then told the puzzled American that the five remaining disputes would simply be settled in Pyongyang’s favor. (They relented when he said he was going home.) Should Hill, too, have taken his car to the airport? Would the North Koreans have backed down? Who can say?
There is one big difference between 1994 and 2008: The United States had lots of leverage back then—and it has very little now. There are two reasons for this. First, when Clinton dangled the threat of force in front of the North Koreans in ‘94, they might have believed he’d really use it; Bush never even dangled a threat, and, with military forces stuck in Iraq and Afghanistan, such growling wouldn’t have been credible anyway. Second, and more important, by 2008, the North Koreans had already reprocessed plutonium and set off an atomic bomb; they were a bona fide “nuclear state.” They could walk away from the table with a more sincere shrug than we could.
He goes on to note that the problems we have with North Korea have their roots in several different dirt-patches, but that John Bolten and his ilk in the Administration made it almost-impossible for us to achieve our diplomatic goals.