Abstract
When Bill Clinton hosted Presidentelect Bush at the White House in December, he said he hoped the United States would help end North Korea's missile program.
So much for bipartisan foreign policy. Just before the November election, North Korea agreed to freeze its medium- and longer-range missile program and end all exports of missiles and related technology. It invited President Bill Clinton to come to Pyongyang to close the deal, a giant step toward eliminating its missile threat and redrawing the political map of northeast Asia. Such a deal was of obvious benefit to U.S. security. As Secretary of State Madeleine Albright put it last November 2 at the National Press Club:
“We would be irresponsible if we didn't take advantage of a historic opportunity to move beyond 50 years of Cold War division and reduce the danger that the North Korean missiles pose to us and others around the globe.”
But “Call Me Irresponsible” could be the theme song of the passionate partisans who dominate Washington today. While the foreign policy establishment, Democrat and Republican, looked on, clueless as usual about how to deal with North Korea, Clinton sought support from George W. Bush for the visit. Bush, reluctant to enrage right-wing Republicans in Congress by endorsing the trip but not about to attack it either, remained noncommittal. Clinton, lacking the courage of his convictions, never went.
Now, it could take months for the new administration to get its house in order and set policy toward North Korea.
Pyongyang plays tit-for-tat
To Pyongyang, a visit by the president would have represented the culmination of a 10-year campaign to end its lifelong enmity with the United States, as well as with South Korea and Japan.
North Korea began reaching out to all three countries between 1988 and 1992, only to have the first Bush administration impede closer South Korean and Japanese ties. The Bush administration insisted that the North end its clandestine nuclear weapons program before it would even hold talks.
Concluding that Washington held the key to opening doors to Seoul and Tokyo, Pyongyang decided to trade its nuclear arms program in return for amity with Washington. At the same time it tried to keep its nuclear option open as leverage on Washington to keep its end of the bargain.
Pyongyang's unconventional bargaining behavior led critics to conclude that it was engaging in blackmail in an attempt to coerce “Washington into providing economic aid without giving up anything in return. It was not. It was playing tit-for-tat, cooperating whenever the United States cooperated, retaliating when the United States reneged, in an effort to get Washington to put an end to enmity.
Misreading that strategy, the Clinton administration nearly stumbled into unintended war with North Korea in June 1994. But cooler heads prevailed and, thanks to an extraordinary mission to Pyongyang by former president Jimmy Carter, got Kim II Sung to suspend nuclear arming. It took just four months of negotiating to conclude the Agreed Framework of October 1994, by which the North agreed to freeze and eventually dismantle its nuclear arms program in return for two new nuclear power reactors, an interim supply of heavy fuel oil, some additional relaxation of U.S. economic sanctions, and modest movement toward diplomatic ties.
The Republicans, who won control of Congress a few weeks later, denounced the deal as appeasement and impeded its implementation.
Pyongyang was deeply disappointed. After all, if “Washington was willing to supply nuclear reactors, it would surely put an end to enmity. When the United States was slow to live up to the terms of the October 1994 accord, North Korea threatened to break it. Pyongyang also resolved to try again to improve relations, this time by using missiles as the inducement.
Had Pyongyang wanted missiles worth deploying or selling, it should have been testing and perfecting the No Dong, Taepo Dong I and Taepo Dong II during the 1990s. Yet it conducted just two longer-range missile tests of its own during that time (both of them failures).
The two tests were examples of tit-for-tat. On May 29, 1993, shortly after the United States intervened to stop Israel from negotiating an end to North Korean missile exports to the Middle East, Pyongyang conducted its first and only test of the medium-range No Dong. Washington opened missile negotiations of its own with Pyongyang in 1996, but in the ensuing two years it held just two rounds of talks. On June 16,1998, North Korea made public an offer to negotiate an end not only to its missile exports, but also to testing and production.
“With that offer came a threat to resume tests—a threat the North carried out on August 31, 1998, when it launched a three-stage Taepo Dong I in a failed attempt to put a satellite into orbit.
North Korean President Kim Jong Il and Madeleine Albright meet in Pyongyang, October 23, 2000. A visit by President Clinton was expected to follow, but the administration “ran out of time.”
Washington tries cooperation
This time, the tit-for-tat strategy worked as the North had hoped, thanks to South Korea's president, Kim Dae Jung, and William Perry, former U.S. secretary of defense. The South's aim had long been reunification, which meant the collapse of the North. In contrast, from his inauguration as president in February 1998, Kim Dae Jung's “immediate objective” was “to put an end to the Cold War confrontation and settle peace rather than attempting to accomplish reunification.”
Food aid and engagement, he believed, would reassure the North that the South did not seek its collapse. In turn, that would lead to an end to adversarial relations. Kim Dae Jung stayed his cooperative course in the face of intense partisan attacks.
In November 1998, Clinton asked Perry to begin an interagency review of North Korea policy. The following October, Perry issued his findings and recommendations. He concluded “that the urgent focus of U.S. policy toward the dprk must be to end its nuclear weapons and long-range missile activities.” Instead of coercing Pyongyang, Perry chose to cooperate with it. “In a step-by-step and reciprocal fashion,” he said, Washington should “move to reduce pressures on the dprk that it perceives as threatening,” starting with the economic embargo.
Perry sold the new policy to Seoul, which was enthusiastic, and to Tokyo, which was less so. For the first time in a decade, all three began working in tandem to reassure North Korea and provide the necessary inducements.
Months before his report was publicly revealed, Perry was following the new strategy. In Pyongyang in May 1999, Perry proposed high-level talks to convene in Washington, affirming that the United States was at last ready to negotiate in earnest and make good on its promises. The Perry policy paid off in September 1999 when North Korea agreed to suspend its missile tests while negotiations proceeded. In return, the United States promised to end sanctions under the Trading with the Enemy Act, a pledge it was slow to carry out.
The deeper purpose of reconciliation, left unstated by Perry but understood by Kim Dae Jung, was that North Korea, in reaching an accommodation with its one-time foes, would realign relations in northeast Asia and defuse the Cold War confrontation in Korea, where rival armies have stood toe-to-toe for half a century. Kim Dae Jung showed the way in his June 2000 summit meeting with North Korea's Kim Jong II. The two pledged to reconcile, an irreversible step toward ending hostility on the peninsula.
In a step never before disclosed, Washington helped make the June summit possible by signaling Pyongyang in late March that it was ready to cooperate. It handed over a draft communique for a proposed visit by a high-level North Korean to Washington. It declared an end to enmity. Washington also set a date for issuing new trade regulations that would relax sanctions under the Trading with the Enemy Act. The North wanted a firm date on the sanctions issues before agreeing to the visit.
The missile deal
As soon as the June summit between the North and South ended, the Clinton administration carried out its promise to relax sanctions. It linked further easing of the embargo to the renunciation of terrorism by North Korea. During talks in mid-March 2000, the United States asked the North to condemn terrorism and sign international conventions on terrorism, which it had long been ready to do. On October 6 the two sides issued a joint statement to that effect.
The relaxation of sanctions prompted Kim Jong II to send his second in command, Vice Marshal Cho Myong Rok, to Washington on October 10. After three days of talks, the two sides pledged that they no longer harbored any “hostile intent” toward one another. That opened the way not only to a missile deal, but also to conventional force negotiations, once a missile deal was reached.
Cho, who had met the diplomats in civilian dress, donned full military regalia when he came to the White House to hand President Clinton a letter from Kim Jong II, inviting him to Pyongyang. The uniform was a sign that the North Korean military was firmly behind a missile deal.
For once, the Clinton administration wasted no time taking advantage of the opening. On October 23, Secretary of State Albright became the first American official to meet with Kim Jong II. Kim kept China's defense minister cooling his heels while holding three hours of talks with her.
That evening, Albright accompanied Kim to a stadium jammed with 100,000 people celebrating the fifty-fifth anniversary of the Korean Workers' Party. At one point, the multitudes held colored placards aloft in the shape of a Taepo Dong missile. Albright said later, “He immediately turned to me and quipped that this was the first satellite launch and would be the last.” The other clue to the terms of trade came in her exchange of toasts with Vice Marshal Cho the next day. “I believe,” said Cho, “that our meetings during these two days will help us to move further down the road of cooperation.”
Kim Jong II agreed to end exports of all missile technology, canceling existing contracts, and to freeze testing, production, and deployment of all missiles with a range over 500 kilometers. That would cover the No Dong, Taepo Dong I and II, and even the Scud-C, but not the shorter-range Scud-B. In return, Kim wanted Clinton to visit Pyongyang to mark the end of enmity.
Kim also wanted the United States to arrange to launch North Korean satellites. And to replace the revenue it would forgo by halting missile exports, the North would agree to accept compensation in kind, not cash. The United States said in turn that it was ready to create a better atmosphere for investment.
Although the United States did not say so during the talks, it was prepared to arrange for two or three satellite launches a year and an undisclosed amount of aid and investment. President Clinton described the deal to a reporter on November 14: “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.”
Snags and roadblocks
The deal was a tribute to the perseverance of a handful of mid-level officials, many of them in the foreign service, in the face of vituperation in Congress and scant support in the foreign policy establishment. It was also a testament to Kim Dae Jung's faith that cooperation with North Korea would work. As Secretary Albright put it at the National Press Club: “The North should find it easier to address concerns about the size of its military and the status of its weapons programs if tensions with the South relax and fears about its own security diminish.” As if to underscore the point, North Korean Foreign Minister Paek Nam-sun told a visiting Chinese delegation that very week that it was ready to resume Four-Party talks.
As long as the United States remained an enemy, said Kim Jong II, U.S. troops must leave Korea. Once the relationship was not hostile, they could remain.
The American troop presence in Korea would not be at issue in the talks. In June, Kim Jong II told Kim Dae Jung what Pyongyang had been saying to Washington since 1992— that as long as the United States remains its enemy, U.S. troops are a threat and must leave Korea. But once the relationship is no longer hostile, U.S. troops could remain.
Some North Koreans even speak of Washington as a “harmonizer” of relations between North and South. They have in mind not Camp David, where the United States mediated between former enemies, but something more subtly supportive of reconciliation between North and South Korea. They see U.S. troops remaining in Korea as peacekeepers, still allied with the South. That would rearrange the geopolitics of northeast Asia, another good reason for having the president of the United States go to Pyongyang.
With President Clinton due in Brunei for an Asian economic summit meeting one week after the November 7 presidential election, the issue was whether to tag a visit to Pyongyang onto the end of his trip. The overall shape of the deal had been worked out in Pyongyang but talks to iron out the details and the sequencing were held in Kuala Lumpur November 1-3.
The negotiators made little headway in Kuala Lumpur, although Assistant Secretary of State Robert Ein-horn put the best face on them in a press statement: “The delegations further clarified their respective positions on the full range of missile issues and continued to expand areas of common ground, although significant issues remain to be explored and resolved.”
The “significant” issues to be “explored and resolved” were extending the freeze to cover shorter-range Scud-B missiles, “elimination” of North Korea's missiles, and on-site monitoring to verify the freeze on missile production and deployment— what negotiators were calling “transparency” and “confidence-building measures on missiles.”
The United States wanted to ban all missiles with a range greater than 300 kilometers, the standard used in the Missile Technology Control Regime. But Pyongyang considers Scud-Bs as part of its conventional arsenal, and it was not ready to give them up except as part of a conventional forces agreement.
North Korea is also likely to withhold its commitment to dismantle No Dong missiles as leverage on Japan, a potential source of the lion's share of compensation for the missile deal. It will not yield until Japan accelerates normalization talks and declares an end to enmity.
The United States can monitor a freeze on testing and deployment by surveillance and other satellites, but unless the North is willing to freeze production of all Scuds, effective verification of a freeze will require monitoring at production sites. Although it has yet to say so in negotiations, Pyongyang may be induced to accept on-site monitoring along the lines of the access it allowed to a suspected nuclear site at Kumchang-ni.
Pyongyang let U.S. inspectors visit the Kumchang-ni site twice in the spring of 1999, where they ascertained that nothing was amiss. North Korea has also expressed willingness to set up a joint venture that would provide permanent monitoring at the site. Extending such arrangements to missile factories and other sites would take time to work out.
The United States, in turn, held back commitments of its own, to arrange for Pyongyang to be provided with $200 million to $300 million a year for ending its missile exports. Compensation in kind, not cash, could take the form of investments in agriculture and energy and forgiveness of North Korea's debt. The aid would be phased in and could be stopped if Pyongyang proved not to be forthcoming on elimination and transparency.
At a November 6 Principals Committee meeting, Defense Secretary William Cohen, a Republican who had fought hard to get Clinton to deploy missile defenses and lost, wanted to insist on an upfront North Korean commitment to dismantle its missiles. The administration resisted what one official later called “the temptation to overreach.”
North Korean soliders being trucked into Pyongyang after attending Madeleine Albright's arrival at the airport on October 22, 2000.
The principals decided, instead, to link the elimination of missiles to diplomatic recognition of the North and to have Amb. Wendy Sherman, who had succeeded Perry as policy coordinator on North Korea, meet once more with the North Koreans. She would attempt to persuade the North to extend the freeze to Scud-Bs, and she would seek a commitment from them to negotiate on transparency and elimination. The North would probably have agreed, had it had President Clinton's promise to come.
At the time of the Kuala Lumpur meeting, a presidential election too close to call loomed dead ahead. Many Clinton advisers, some of whom hoped for jobs in a Gore administration, did not want to commit the president to go to North Korea before the vote. They feared a Republican backlash.
The Florida vote-count debacle put everything on hold. Without knowing who the next president would be, and not wanting to undercut Gore by consulting with Bush, National Security Adviser Samuel Berger briefed neither candidate, and Ambassador Sherman was never sent to close the deal. With no commitment from Clinton that he would come, Pyongyang was unwilling to take the initiative.
The White House gets cold feet
Once Gore had conceded, the issue was whether to consult with President-elect Bush regarding a Clinton trip to Pyongyang, or merely to inform him. “We obviously would take into consideration the prerogatives of the next administration,” Ambassador Sherman had told reporters in Brunei on November 15. “But the president of the United States is the president of the United States, and he has an obligation to pursue what is in the best interests of the United States and our national security.”
In reality, Berger had misgivings. “Sandy was uneasy that if the president went he would be hotly criticized,” said one source who was privy to Berger's thinking. A letter to President Clinton denouncing the trip from Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott and House Speaker Dennis Hastert during the week of December 13 confirmed that suspicion.
Berger began excusing inaction on North Korea with the claim that restarting Middle East peace talks, a high priority with Clinton, and the Pyongyang trip, another high priority, were an either-or proposition, as if there were not time to do both.
The heated partisanship in the wake of Florida did not help. “The issue is whether Bush will attack the presidential visit,” said a source who was aware of the president's thinking. “He can't go under those circumstances. He won't go without assurance of no attack.” Sandy Berger wanted more than that. He wanted Bush to “support” the visit, not just refrain from attacking it. That was more than the national security adviser had any right to expect.
The Bush crowd was cool to the trip. A few thought they could get a better deal from North Korea and preferred to give Bush the credit. Some were skeptical of deal-making with North Korea. Others did not want to pick a fight with the Republican right wing. Still others sided with the right wing and wanted North Korea as the poster child for its campaign to deploy missile defenses against so-called rogue states.
On December 15 the election was finally over. That weekend Ambassador Sherman and Jack Pritchard, senior director for Asia on the National Security Council, briefed Con-doleezza Rice and Colin Powell, whom Bush had just named national security adviser and secretary of state. “We're consulting and have been consulting with the presidentelect's team on this,” White House spokesman Jake Siewert said on December 18.
That afternoon Berger met with Rice and Powell. The readout from the session was “pretty positive,” said an official in the Clinton administration. They said, “It's our decision to make,” that the country had “only one president at a time.” If asked to support a deal, they would “need to look” at the details but they expressed “no reservations.”
The president-elect took a hands-off position. Bush's spokesman, Ari Fleischer, said: “We won't weigh in on decisions the administration has to make between now and January 20.” Unfortunately, an op-ed in the next day's Washington Times by Doug Bereuter, chairman of the House Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific, suggested Bush's restraint might not extend to Republicans in Congress.
That morning Clinton played host to Bush. On their way into the White House, he told reporters: “It's interesting, when I had this meeting eight years ago with the president-elect's father, he told me the biggest problem we were facing was the nuclear program in North Korea, and we were able to build on the work they had done and put an end to that. And now the big problem there is the missile program. We may have a chance to put an end to it. And if we can, I think we should.”
Just over a week later, on December 28—and without having made any serious attempt in eight weeks to finalize the deal with the North—the “White House announced that Clinton would not go to Pyongyang. The official statement said: “Chairman Kim put forward a serious proposal concerning his missile program. Since then, we have discussed with North Korea proposals to eliminate its missile export program as well as to halt further missile development. While there is insufficient time for me to complete the work, there is sufficient promise to continue this effort. The United States has a clear national interest in seeing it through.”
The Lombardi doctrine—as in Vince, the former Green Bay Packers coach—was much in vogue in judicial circles to justify not recounting the vote in Florida. Now it was being invoked by Bill Clinton, of all people, to justify inaction on a missile deal with North Korea: “We didn't lose the game; we just ran out of time.”
The China factor
Clinton administration attempts to cooperate with North Korea did not play well with missile-defense enthusiasts, who are in a rush to deploy a system against the supposed North Korean threat. But there are no proven defenses worth deploying yet. Long before such defenses are fully tested and ready to be fielded against North Korea, a missile deal could dispose of the threat. That would expose the core issue in the missile defense debate: relations with China.
Albright dances with North Korean kindergartners during her visit in October.
A decision to deploy defenses is a decision to pick a fight with China, without allowing time for the policy of engagement begun by the elder George Bush to bring about the desired internal changes there. Whether or not engagement will succeed, containment is premature. China is still militarily too weak to retake Taiwan by force or to become a regional hegemon. And it has yet to decide to acquire a sizable missile force capable of threatening the United States.
In 1995, Beijing sent a subtle warning to Washington not to proceed with missile defenses, when a Chinese national “under the direction of prc intelligence” (in the words of the May 1999 “Cox Committee Report” on Chinese espionage) turned over a document containing stolen data on the W88 nuclear warhead.
Why did China “tell” the United States it had data on the W88? That year was a watershed in the politics of missile defense. In 1994 the Republicans adopted missile defense as a major plank in their “Contract With America,” subsequently capturing both houses of Congress. To defend itself against right-wing Republican attack, the Clinton administration stepped up spending on both theater and national missile defenses. China's W88 disclosure most likely was its way of saying, “Don't deploy defenses because we have the means to defeat them.” An easy way for it to do that is to deploy more warheads.
The conventional wisdom around Washington is that China is intent on modernizing its missile force regardless of what the United States does about missile defenses. That wisdom is fatally flawed because it ignores the potential magnitude of China's response and the political ramifications for the U.S. position in Asia.
As of 1995, China had deployed just 18 missiles capable of reaching the United States. It had not even installed nuclear warheads on the missiles; they were stored separately. China has long had the capability to build more missiles and keep them on higher alert. Why didn't it?
One reason is China's strategy of minimum deterrence. A more telling reason is that the People's Liberation Army prefers to spend its scarce funds to modernize conventional forces, which are equipped largely with relics of the 1940s and 1950s. China is now buying 1970s aircraft, tanks, ships, and submarines at fire-sale prices in Russia and elsewhere.
China recently announced a 17.7 percent a year increase in military spending over the next five years, much of it for military pay. If the United States decides to deploy missile defenses, China's armed forces will not only deploy more warheads (and decoys) to counter them, but it will also demand a much larger hike in defense spending to pay for them rather than cut back on conventional arming.
At a time of slowed economic growth, such a reallocation of resources from domestic needs to defense will set off an intense struggle with regional leaders who urgently need more investment. The only way for the military to win that struggle is to cast the United States as China's implacable foe. That would make Sino-American cooperation all but impossible and set off a new Cold War in northeast Asia.
This possibility puts America's allies in Asia, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, in a bind. While they are reluctant to offend a Congress or a Pentagon that makes missile defenses the litmus test of alliance, they do not want to provoke China's hostility, either.
Despite the grumbling in the Bush camp that Clinton was “grandstanding,” Clinton would have been doing the president-elect a favor by locking in a missile freeze before he left office. It would have allowed Bush to improve on the deal in the coming months by getting the North to dismantle their No Dongs and Taepo Dongs and to allow on-site monitoring.
Making a final deal is more difficult now. Having put its missile program on the negotiating table without obtaining a presidential visit in return, Pyongyang may regard this as yet more American backpedaling and retaliate by sending missile salesmen to the Middle East, say, or by resuming work at a missile test site.
On February 22, North Korea warned that absent negotiations it was not obliged to refrain from testing missiles “indefinitely.” It wanted assurance that the engagement policy would continue. Pyongyang may forgo tit-for-tat for a time, knowing that American missile defense advocates would use any incident to advance their cause.
What North Korea is more likely to do is to slow the pace of North-South reconciliation until it is sure that George Bush will cooperate. But that would encourage the opposition in the South, which has been accusing Kim Dae Jung of giving away the store and getting nothing in return. What worries Kim Dae Jung's opponents is that his engagement strategy with the North is making headway on the issue of paramount concern to Seoul—the danger of war on the peninsula. Conservatives have used the North Korean threat against liberals in South Korean politics for years.
Meanwhile, Seoul's conservatives have assiduously sowed fear in Washington that accommodation with Pyongyang will only intensify political pressures in the South to compel the withdrawal of American troops with the alleged waning of the threat from the North. Instead, Pyongyang is offering a new rationale—reconciling the two Koreas— for the continued American presence.
A missile deal with North Korea could thus secure the American position in northeast Asia for years to come. It would end the missile threat to the United States and Japan. It would ease hostility on the Korean peninsula, where 37,000 U.S. troops and their dependents remain in harm's way. It would also benefit Israel and other American allies in the Middle East and Europe who want a halt to further missile proliferation.
Finally, the missile deal would transform the geopolitics of northeast Asia, opening up opportunities for multilateral security cooperation in the region. If China chooses not to cooperate, others would be more inclined to join together against it.
The idea that cooperative threat reduction works will not win easy acceptance among the “realists” who dominate the Bush team and the American foreign policy establishment. But it is the best way to enhance American security in Asia.