Good news in North Korea

Despite predictions from hawks that it would never happen, North Korea shut down its only working nuclear reactor over the weekend, in exchange for 50,000 tons of fuel oil.

Next step: Getting them to reverse earlier statements and admit they have a uranium-enrichment program, in exchange for another million tons of oil. Talks to that end begin tomorrow.

I hope John Bolton is eating a large helping of crow. Caution and skepticism is always a good idea where North Korea is involved. But Bolton proceeded from the assumption that soft diplomacy would never work -- and, thus, it never did on his watch. In this instance, at least, it appears the Bush administration has learned from its mistakes. Let's hope it continues -- and North Korea continues to meet its obligations.

nuclear, North Korea, politics, midtopia

North Korea roundup

Some good news, bad news out of North Korea.

First, the bad news. Despite promising to come clean on its nuclear program, North Korea is denying that it has an uranium-enrichment program.

Now, maybe it doesn't. The intelligence on the matter isn't bulletproof, and we have a pretty bad track record when it comes to assessing nuclear capabilities. But their uranium program is the reason we pulled the plug on the Clinton-era Agreed Framework, and there has been some pretty compelling circumstantial evidence that at the very least they were trying to set up such a program. Given that history, I'm not willing to give the North Koreans the benefit of the doubt; it is up to them to provide enough access that inspectors can satisfy themselves that no such program exists.

The good news is that North Korea met with South Korea today and reaffirmed its committment to dismantle its nuclear program -- all part of a bid for humanitarian aid from the South.

The North Korean language was unusually clear and strong:

"President Kim Yong-nam said the denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula was late President Kim Il-sung's last guidance and they would make efforts to turn it into reality," a South Korean official involved in the talks said on Thursday....

"(Unification) Minister Lee Jae-joung said strongly that it was very important to conscientiously implement the initial steps for the dismantlement of the North's nuclear programs by soundly complying with the February 13 agreement," the official told reporters in Pyongyang.

Invoking Kim Il-sung strikes me as a particularly important step, but I'm no Korea expert.

North Korea has to be enjoying the fruits of its agreement: besides meeting with South Korea, it has scheduled talks with both Japan and the United States on normalizing relations. Such positive reinforcement offers both practical advantages and a facesaving way for them to claim benefits from the agreement. Playing nice is a cheap way to encourage compliance -- as long as we continue to insist on a robust inspection scheme to verify the destruction of their program.

The real test comes in the next 50 days or so, when North Korea is supposed to take the first concrete steps and shut down its main reactor. But for now, everyone's saying the right things.

nuclear, North Korea, politics, midtopia

North Korea agrees to shut down reactor

Wow.

North Korea promised Tuesday to close down and seal its main nuclear reactor within 60 days in return for 50,000 tons of fuel oil as a first step in abandoning all nuclear weapons and research programs.

North Korea also reaffirmed a commitment to disable the reactor in an undefined next phase of denuclearization and to discuss with the United States and other nations its plutonium fuel reserves and other nuclear programs that "would be abandoned" as part of the process. In return for taking those further steps, the accord said, North Korea would receive additional "economic, energy and humanitarian assistance up to the equivalent of 1 million tons of heavy fuel oil."

A State Department outline of the deal is here.

After years of doing nothing, this represents actual progress in North Korea -- assuming North Korea actually follows through on its promise.

This is essentially a watered-down version of the deal the Clinton administration gave North Korea in the 1990s -- energy assistance in return for abandoning its nuclear program. But there's a key difference: the Clinton agreement included an agreement to build a couple of modern, proliferation-resistant light-water reactors in North Korea. This deal doesn't include that. So the North Koreans appear to be settling for less than they got before.

The reason for that appears to be twofold. First, they cheated on the earlier agreement, and there was no way we were going to resurrect it. Second and most importantly, their semi-failed detonation of a nuclear weapon last fall cost them much of the diplomatic protection that Russia and China had been giving them.

U.S. pressure on North Korea's various smuggling and weapons-sales schemes surely helped, too, by causing pain directly to the Great Leader's pocketbook.

But let's not be too hasty in breaking out the champagne. North Korea has 60 days before it has to shut down the reactor, and its promise to eventually dismantle it depends on later negotiations. The agreement also put off discussion of what to do about North Korea's existing nuclear stockpile. So there is plenty of room for backsliding.

Then there's the matter of verification. North Korea also said it would let U.N. inspectors return, but the effectiveness of that will depend on the conditions those two bodies negotiate.

Still, give credit where credit is due: after repudiating and harshly criticizing the Clinton approach and following it with five years of mostly empty saber-rattling, the administration finally decided to put results ahead of ideology and develop a workable -- and ironically Clintonian -- solution.

It also raises some questions about the administration's approach in the Middle East, where Bush has categorically ruled out talks with Iran or Syria. But how do we expect to achieve results if we refuse to talk to your adversaries? North Korea demonstrates that sometimes you have to talk to your enemies -- and that such talks can bear fruit. Perhaps this will lead the administration to re-examine it's actions elsewhere.

The deal could face some opposition at home, largely from conservatives who basically don't think we can ever reach a diplomatic solution with North Korea. Prime among them is John Bolton, demonstrating once again why his name and "diplomacy" never really belonged in the same sentence. He's right that the program doesn't address North Korea's uranium program. But he seems to think that that should be enough to destroy the deal. It's a classic case of letting the perfect get in the way of the pretty good. And never mind that Bolton's "no compromise" approach, though it may have felt good, went nowhere. The only good thing to be said about the confrontational approach is that it led North Korea to overreact and actually test a nuke -- a move that backfired on them. But that was luck, not a U.S. policy goal.

So such complaints are so much useless hand-wringing. How else do they suggest we address the problem? The only real alternative is sanctions and military strikes. The former are already in place; the latter have a limited chance of being effective, and are so provocative that they should be a tactic of last resort. This deal is worth a shot, and it doesn't take any options off of the table: we could always bomb them later if we must.

Now we cross our fingers and hope the untrustworthy Kim Jong-Il can be trusted....

nuclear, Bolton, North Korea, politics, midtopia

The name of the game is escalation

Oh, goody. Japan is considering whether it should launch pre-emptive strikes against North Korean missile sites.

Japan was badly rattled by North Korea's missile tests last week and several government officials openly discussed whether the country ought to take steps to better defend itself, including setting up the legal framework to allow Tokyo to launch a pre-emptive strike against Northern missile sites.

"If we accept that there is no other option to prevent an attack ... there is the view that attacking the launch base of the guided missiles is within the constitutional right of self-defense. We need to deepen discussion," Chief Cabinet Secretary Shinzo Abe said.

Japan's constitution currently bars the use of military force in settling international disputes and prohibits Japan from maintaining a military for warfare. Tokyo has interpreted that to mean it can have armed troops to protect itself, allowing the existence of its 240,000-strong Self-Defense Forces.

A complicating factor is that Japan doesn't have much in the way of weapons to conduct such a strike. But that's not going to deter them if they really, really feel they have to take out the sites.

Japan certainly has a right to feel threatened, and they can plausibly make a case that they are no longer the most dangerous long-term threat in Asia (neither is North Korea; from a military standpoint, neither is going to be able to touch China in the long-term).

But the specter of a remilitarized Japan is a diplomatic nightmare in a region where the U.S. has many strategic interests and where memories of Japanese atrocities are still fresh. And if that remilitarized Japan's first action is a pre-emptive strike, that will go over very poorly in the region.

Which is why South Korea, arguably the other country most threatened by North Korea, told Japan to cool it -- though they withdrew the statement the next day.

"There is no reason to fuss over this from the break of dawn like Japan, but every reason to do the opposite," a statement from President Roh Moo-hyun's office said, suggesting that Tokyo was contributing to tensions on the Korean Peninsula.

Abe said Monday it was "regrettable" that South Korea had accused Japan of overreacting.

"There is no mistake that the missile launch ... is a threat to Japan and the region. It is only natural for Japan to take measures of risk management against such a threat," Abe said.

For the sake of regional stability, we should do what we can to resolve the issue without Japan having to take action on its own. Otherwise we risk an escalation of tensions in the region that helps nobody not named Kim Jong-il.

Japan's saber-rattling could have a diplomatic purpose. The Security Council is considering a resolution to impose sanctions on North Korea. In an acknowledgement of the limited effect such sanctions would have, they've delayed the vote in order to give China time to convince North Korea to give up missile tests and return to the six-party talks they walked away from in November. But Japan could be trying to put pressure on the UN to take action of some sort and not just let the issue die.

China, North Korea, Japan, politics, midtopia

North Korea's Fourth of July

Apparently inspired by all the bottlerockets we Americans were preparing to send skyward, North Korea launched seven missiles yesterday.

After firing six missiles over four hours early Wednesday, North Korea continued its unprecedented series of tests by sending a seventh into the Sea of Japan some 12 hours later during rush hour in Japanese cities.

Most of the missiles were known short-range weapons. They weren't test flights; they were demonstrations of North Korea's missile capacity.

One of the missiles was the new Taepodong-2, which some analysts fear can hit the United States.

But the missile considered most dangerous to the United States -- the long-range Taepodong-2 potentially capable of hitting targets on the U.S. West Coast -- appeared to fail on its first test flight after only 35 seconds and before it entered the second of two-stages, dealing a blow to the North Korean missile program, Japanese and U.S. officials said.

Before we go much farther, let's put some of these worries into perspective. The estimated range of the Taepodong-2 is thought to be between 2,500 and 2,800 miles. That's not far enough to hit the United States. There is worry that future versions of the missile could have extra stages that would boost the range to as much as 5,600 miles. But what all that boils down to is that we have no real idea of the missile's range, and it poses no current threat.

Second, while the missile exploding is better news than a successful test flight, North Korea would still have gotten useful telemetry out of it. The data they glean from the failure will increase the odds of success the next time they test it.

On the other hand, the failure could show the deterioration of North Korea's missile program:

Dan Goure of the Lexington Institute, a Virginia-based think tank with ties to the Pentagon, said the failure of the first stage of the Taepodong-2 missile -- after working in 1998 -- could underscore that North Korea "hadn't done much with this missile in ten years."

"The possible bright spot is maybe they're really losing their edge. Of course, errors do happen. And it's not impossible that this was just a technical glitch, and they could put another one on the launch pad in a month, let's say," Goure said.

Of course, a conspiracy theorist might consider the possibility that North Korea blew up the missile intentionally. I'm not sure why they would do that, but with North Korea it's best not to rule out such things.

Meanwhile, the U.N. Security Council is meeting to discuss the development (with China resisting strong measures and even South Korea opposing economic sanctions), Japan has imposed limited sanctions and just about everybody is condemning the launches.

So what does it mean? I'm inclined to consider it an Ann Coulter-like cry for attention, a bid for direct talks with the United States. That seems a bit pointless on one level: I wouldn't expect such talks to produce anything useful, given North Korea's past willingness to ignore treaties and agreements. But perhaps they think such talks might lead to U.S. concessions, and maybe they just want the prestige of being treated seriously by the United States.

As long as North Korea remains under China's wing, there's little serious pressure we can bring to bear. On the plus side, North Korea continues to be more buffoon than bear, wanting to be taken seriously but not truly interested in igniting a shooting war or doing anything that will cause China to withdraw support.

In the end I'm less worried about North Korea's own missiles than I am about their eagerness to sell their missiles and technology to anyone who wants them (hey, maybe that's what this was: a sales demonstration). It's bad enough for one crazy dictator to have such weapons; it's worse when he shares them with the other crazy dictators.

The one meaningful sanction we might try imposing is a ban on North Korea missile sales. That would hit them in their hard-currency soft spot, and also allow us to legally intercept shipments like the one that got away back in 2002.

After that, we can get back to worrying about their claims to have nuclear weapons.

Taepodong, missiles, North Korea, politics, midtopia