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Bush holds hard line, North Korea raises stakes

December 28 2002

Washington has put away its basket of incentives to deal with a dangerous regime, explains Paul Richter.

In years of confrontations with North Korea, it was almost always the Americans who blinked.

US leaders believed that a regime that would starve its people, assassinate foreign leaders and risk war through military provocations could not be rational and had to be placated with concessions.

Today, the Bush administration faces a deepening crisis with a new attitude: Pyongyang's leaders are sane and, under pressure, will realise that they must give up their nuclear program and illicit arms trade if they want their government to survive.

This view marks a revolution in official US thinking about a regime that some people consider the most dangerous in the world.

And it explains why the White House has been able to look on with seeming serenity in recent days as North Korea has taken step after step toward restarting the nuclear program that was halted in 1994 in a US-brokered aid deal.

"They've turned the old philosophy on its head," said Gordon Flake, executive director of the Mansfield Centre for Pacific Affairs, a research organisation in Washington. Bush administration officials believe that North Korean leaders "are rational to the point that they wouldn't do anything that would risk suicide . . . and we can ratchet the pressure up as much as we want."

Perhaps the clearest example of the traditional US view was the 1994 Agreed Framework, the international energy aid package that was worked out when the Clinton administration confronted circumstances much like those today.

Amid signs that Pyongyang was forging ahead with a nuclear program, the Clinton administration considered putting various kinds of pressure on North Korea. President Clinton even thought seriously about a military strike on Pyongyang's nuclear facilities.

But officials feared that if backed into a corner, Pyongyang's Stalinist regime could respond by unleashing an artillery attack on Seoul - only about 50 kilometres from the North Korean border - that could conceivably kill hundreds of thousands in its first few hours.

"The tolerance of risk was always much lower on our side," Mr Flake said.

In the 1994 deal, the North Koreans were promised supplies of fuel oil, and construction of two civilian "light-water" reactors to produce energy, if they suspended work on reactors and a reprocessing plant that were suspected of being part of a covert nuclear weapons program.

At the same time, the impoverished country continued to receive supplies of food from international donors, including the US.

But US President George Bush, who in his last State of the Union address identified North Korea as one of three members of an "axis of evil", made it clear that he was offended by this approach. From the earliest days of his administration, US officials have described North Korea's efforts as intolerable "blackmail diplomacy".

When North Korea revealed two months ago that it had maintained a nuclear program in violation of the 1994 deal, US officials refused to offer Pyongyang any new incentives to halt the program again, and insisted that new negotiations must come on US terms.

This week, as North Korea removed UN surveillance cameras from its nuclear complex and took steps to resume production of nuclear materials, US officials have renewed their denunciations of North Korean "blackmail" attempts.

US officials have made it clear that, united with key Asian countries, they can apply powerful economic and diplomatic pressure to make Pyongyang give in. North Korea badly needs trade, and one-third of its population may die this year without international food aid, experts say.

Former officials of the Clinton administration call the Bush team's approach a policy of attempted strangulation.

"It serves a very cynical purpose on their part, which is to push all other countries into our lap," said Joel Wit, a former State Department official who was coordinator of the 1994 Agreed Framework deal. "According to our cynical game plan, then (the North Korean regime) will collapse."

In his view, the administration's seeming lack of concern that North Korea could soon have a handful of bombs "is the shocking part of this story".

While analysts do not believe a nuclear-armed North Korea would necessarily bring war in the short term, it could set off an arms race in the heavily armed region and increase the spread of weapons technology worldwide.

- Los Angeles Times



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