[Marxism] "No Good Options" (WSJ commentary on DPRK nuke test)

[Walter Lippmann <walterlx@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

(Washington's defiant unilateral refusal to negotiate with the DPRK over
its nuclear weapons production has led to the sharpest escalation in the
struggle between North Korea and the United States probably since the
Korean War itself, over half a century. But Washington's unilateralism i
leaving the United States more and more isolated internationally as the
WSJ column here, and the Christian Science Monitor report which then
follows the WSJ indicate. With Korea, Russia, China and Vietnam letting
the world know they won't endorse Washington's program of obtaining
UN sanctions against the DPRK, Washington is left holding the bag now
filled to the brim with Washington's very own empty threats. Cornered
yet unwilling to back off, even Washington's staunchest supporters, as
at the WSJ, are trying to warn the U.S. it hasn't got what is necessary 
to stop, not to speak of overthrowing the DPRK. It's quite a moment!


Walter Lippmann

==============================================

October 10, 2006
        
COMMENTARY

No Good Options
By ANDREI LANKOV
October 10, 2006

For years, the U.S. and other nations have warned in the most unequivocal terms 
that they would never tolerate North Korea's possession of nuclear weapons. But 
now that Pyongyang has announced that it has conducted a nuclear test, the 
options for dealing with this newly proclaimed nuclear power remain as 
unattractive as ever.

No one is seriously talking of an Iraq-style invasion. Quite apart from 
America's commitments elsewhere, any ground war would require cooperation from 
Seoul, which is unlikely to be forthcoming. Most South Koreans would much 
prefer to live with the remote possibility of a North Korean nuclear strike 
than risk starting a war on the Demilitarized Zone, just 40 kilometers north of 
downtown Seoul. Even a speedy victory in toppling Kim Jong Il's regime is not 
necessarily a good thing as far as the average South Korean is concerned. Many 
shudder at the cost of overhauling North Korea's decrepit infrastructure that 
is entailed by reunification.

Nor are more limited air strikes a realistic option. That tactic may have 
succeeded in destroying much of Iraq's nuclear program when the Israelis bombed 
Baghdad's main atomic research center in 1981. But it only works when we know 
where the nuclear weapons are. The nuclear reactor at Yongbyon, which produced 
Pyongyang's plutonium, could easily be destroyed. But there's little doubt 
that, anticipating this possibility, North Korea long ago moved its fissionable 
material elsewhere. It's believed to be stored in secret underground bunkers, 
of which there are hundreds scattered across the country. The lack of reliable 
human intelligence, a perennial problem when it comes to North Korea, makes 
locating them all but impossible. Even if they could be found, their depth 
underground would also pose practical problems in destroying them through air 
strikes.

A naval blockade would be unlikely to work either. The vast majority of 
Pyongyang's imports and exports pass through its land borders with China and, 
to a lesser extent, Russia. Those that do move by sea could easily be diverted 
to ground routes in the event of a blockade. So unless North Korea's two 
northern neighbors agree to seal their frontiers, a step which both have 
shirked from so far, the effect of stopping North Korean ships at sea would be 
fairly minimal.

Which leaves economic sanctions as the only remaining option. It's one that is 
likely to take center stage in the coming days, not because they are likely to 
have much impact, but rather because at least they allow the international 
community to show it is doing something. However, there is a fundamental 
problem with using sanctions against Pyongyang. From apartheid South Africa to 
Fidel Castro's Cuba, the aim of an embargo is usually to encourage the 
population to agitate for change, or even rise up and overthrow their 
government. But that won't work when it comes to North Korea, where agitators 
and dissenters quickly face the firing squad. A regime that sacrificed at least 
half a million of its citizens during the famine of the 1990s is hardly likely 
to care if their plight is now further worsened by sanctions.

There's also good reason to doubt how long any embargo would last. China, South 
Korea and Russia have long expressed opposition to imposing sanctions on North 
Korea. Although yesterday's expression of outrage suggests sentiments may 
change in the light of the reported nuclear test, it's questionable whether the 
change will be a lasting one -- especially given China's strategic interest in 
having a friendly buffer state in the North.

All this means outside pressure is unlikely to be of much use in bringing down 
Kim's regime. But that does not mean it cannot crumble from inside. Countries 
that resort to nuclear weapons often do so to mask their own failures. If there 
was one lesson from the West's victory in the Cold War, it is that no amount of 
nuclear weapons can stop the disintegration of an anachronistic and inefficient 
social and political system. If thousands of nuclear warheads did not save the 
Soviet Union from collapse, there's no reason to believe that a handful of much 
smaller ones can save Kim's decaying system from ultimately imploding -- thus 
solving the North Korean nuclear problem.

Mr. Lankov teaches East Asian and Korean history at Kookmin University in Seoul.


from the October 13, 2006 edition - 

http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/1013/p01s03-usfp.html

US no-talks policy comes under fire
North Korea's reported nuclear test has renewed calls for changing diplomatic 
course.

By Howard LaFranchi | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
WASHINGTON

President Bush has made his stance clear: The US doesn't negotiate directly 
with its enemies.

But after North Korea's apparent nuclear test this week - and problems with 
getting severe sanctions approved by the UN - that stance is now setting off a 
vigorous debate.

"In my view, it is not appeasement to talk to your enemies," James Baker, 
secretary of State for the former President Bush, said this week.

In key election states, the Republican National Committee is offering a 
different view. It's airing TV ads showing Madeleine Albright, secretary of 
State for former President Clinton, clinking glasses with Kim Jong Il and 
presenting the North Korean dictator with a basketball signed by Michael 
Jordan. Its point: "basketball diplomacy" doesn't work.

The debate shows how the White House's policy of not directly engaging 
adversaries - whether North Korea, Iran, Syria, or organizations like the 
Palestinians' Hamas and Lebanon's Hizbullah - is under intensifying fire, 
including from friendly circles.

Now is probably not the moment for the United States to approve the kind of 
bilateral negotiations North Korea wants, many agree. "There's going to have to 
be a timeout chair for North Korea," says Michael Green, who served as Asia 
director in the Bush White House's National Security Council until last 
December.

But others say the North Korea nuclear crisis, following questionable US 
diplomacy on this summer's war in Lebanon and a stalemate with Iran over its 
nuclear ambitions, is raising new challenges for the Bush administration's 
"no-talk-with- enemies" diplomatic approach.

"The reason we're hearing so much about this right now is that the policies 
towards Iran and North Korea are not working," says Geoffrey Kemp, a national 
security expert at the Nixon Center in Washington.

The Bush administration in its second term has embraced "multilateralism" - 
six-party talks with North Korea and the European Union as a go-between with 
Iran - without accepting direct talks with parties President Bush has termed 
"evil," Kemp says.

He adds, "if the multilateral approach is not going anywhere either, that 
really does lead you back to bilateral discussions."

Some appear to think snubbing adversaries was invented by the Bush White House, 
while the more adamant Bush advocates would have us believe the Clinton White 
House never had a foreign enemy it didn't cozy up to. But some say the seesaw 
of pragmatic engagement with adversaries balancing a moralistic refusal to talk 
has been teeter-tottering at least since the triumph of the Bolshevik 
revolution.

"There is a moralist streak in American foreign policy, this idea that you 
don't talk to bad people, that is not new," says Kemp, who served on the 
National Security Council in the Reagan White House.

Indeed President Reagan was famous for calling the Soviet Union "the evil 
empire" - but then embracing Mikhail Gorbachev, saying "I can work with this 
guy." Kemp says the Reagan administration was "initially standoffish" towards 
the Soviet Union and took years to receive a Soviet leader. But things changed, 
he adds, after the president was "won over by the leading pragmatists around 
him - those being Nancy Reagan and George Schulz."

For years it was taboo for US leaders to speak with the Palestinian Liberation 
Organization - so much so that Andrew Young lost his job as US ambassador to 
the United Nations for doing just that. Kemp remembered Alexander Haig's first 
Middle East trip as secretary of state, when Mr. Haig's insistence that he 
wouldn't stop in Damascus became the trip's major topic.

The seesaw tipped by the time Clinton took office when PLO Chairman Yasser 
Arafat, having renounced the doctrine of Israel's destruction, was a repeat 
visitor to the White House and "official visits to Damascus were almost every 
hour on the hour," Kemp quips.

In a news conference Wednesday President Bush fielded questions about his 
refusal to directly engage with Kim Jong Il's regime, saying the Clinton 
administration's approach "just didn't work."

Clinton administration officials refute this. Ms. Albright said in a statement 
Wednesday that "through our policy of constructive engagement, the world was 
safer" because North Korea did not develop new nuclear weapons or proceed to a 
nuclear test. Former Clinton Defense Secretary William Perry said it's a "lost 
cause" for the the US to try to deal with North Korea unless it agrees to 
one-on-one talks.

Bush emphasized Wednesday that his approach to North Korea is to rely on 
diplomacy. That suggests the debate over talking or not talking comes down to a 
definition of diplomacy. Administration hard-liners have argued against direct 
talks with the North because they say it would legitimize an abhorrent regime. 
But critics of the Bush approach say diplomacy is not only about dealing with 
allies.

Kurt Campbell, who served in both the White House and Pentagon under Clinton, 
says he would not "view diplomacy as a gift or as something we bestow on 
others, but [as] really designed for dealing with bad people on issues you care 
about."

Still, for others, the attraction of the Bush approach is not that it shuns 
talking, but that it offers talks in the context of broader bilateral 
negotiations - so that success or failure does not ride exclusively on American 
shoulders.

"The question is how do you rein in rogue regimes, and in the case of both 
North Korea and Iran the Bush administration has this exactly right," says 
Raymond Tanter, a professor at Georgetown University in Washington who served 
under the first President Bush.

Mr. Tanter says the Clinton administration's engagement with North Korea did 
not prevent the North from cheating, and exposed the US to the full blame for 
that. "But if North Korea is cheating on five countries, that isolates them 
much more, it prevents them from blaming just the US," he adds, "and it makes 
them subject to the weight of the international community."





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