A rchive Date
[ 18-01-2003 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ U.S ]
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[http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/story.hts/editorial/outlook/1730276
ANSWERING NORTH KOREA
A unified 'no' to nuclear blackmail
By HENRY A. KISSINGER
Jan. 10, 2003, 8:06PM
THE North Korean nuclear weapons program is a direct challenge to the international system, not primarily to the United States. None of the treaties inhibiting nuclear proliferation will be worth the paper they are written on if a nation whose conduct is so universally regarded as beyond the pale succeeds in openly producing nuclear weapons in the teeth of freely accepted international obligations. And when scores of countries can threaten each other with nuclear weapons, global catastrophe and seepage of these weapons into terror operations beckon.
This is the nightmare scenario currently confronting the world. But the public debate on it has taken an odd turn. The crisis began when North Korea informed U.S. Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly, on a visit to Pyongyang in pursuit of a political dialogue, that it had evaded an 8-year-old agreement with the United States not to produce weapons-grade nuclear materiel by secretly engaging in a uranium enrichment program. And, shortly afterward, Pyongyang evicted the U.N. inspectors and restarted its plutonium reactor. Increasingly, however, diplomatic and media attack has been not on the violator of agreements but on the Bush administration's reluctance to talk with Pyongyang until North Korea returns to the nuclear status quo ante.
The administration has now gone the extra mile in offering to "talk" to North Korea about the implementation of its signed agreements, warning at the same time that it will agree to no quid pro quo. But the fundamental problem has not changed. The only outcome of these talks that will not constitute a major setback to the cause of nonproliferation is a restoration of North Korea's previous nuclear status by shutting down its plutonium reactors, returning their fuel rods to storage under international inspection and readmitting IAEA inspectors to all facilities. Any quid pro quo - however disguised - would represent a triumph for North Korean nuclear blackmail.
And blackmail seems to be North Korea's principal negotiating tactic. This is a regime that sent a missile over Japan while the agreement was in force - clearly implying a nuclear threat. It launched a war of aggression against the South a half-century ago; set off a bomb in Burma that assassinated half of the visiting South Korean government; placed a bomb on a South Korean airliner, killing 115 people; admitted kidnapping more than a dozen Japanese citizens and is suspected of kidnapping many more, as well as hundreds of South Koreans.
Over the last decade, Pyongyang has been driving toward a nuclear military capability. Missiles that can carry weapons of mass destruction have become its principal export. Making concessions under its nuclear threats would establish nuclear blackmail as a permanent recourse and not only in North Korea's relations with the rest of the world; it would create incentives for other nations to follow a similar path.
The key members of the international community - and particularly those with special responsibility for international security - must unite in quelling the danger. America's critics seem to forget that it is other nations that would bear the principal burden of failure. The combination of missile defense and a vast retaliatory arsenal enables the United States to manage a world of nuclear proliferation better than any other country and to protect its allies. Any diplomacy that begins with stigmatizing the United States as the principal cause of tensions evades the issue. This is a case, if there ever was one, for a multilateral approach.
This is why the United States should begin urgent consultations, looking toward an international conference on the North Korean nuclear program, composed of the countries most affected - the United States, Japan, China, Russia and South Korea - to decide on a common strategy. In its first phase, this conference should endorse the restoration of the nuclear status quo ante. When that has been accomplished and verified, North Korea should be invited to join to discuss the ultimate destruction of its nuclear capability.
In that context, the political assurances it has requested for its security can be discussed. In pursuing such a course, the United States has to navigate between two extremes: Pre-emption is prevented because North Korean artillery is holding Seoul hostage, but appeasement would hold the world community hostage to perhaps the most brutal and repressive regime in the world.
The challenge to American diplomacy is to distill the overriding common interest in preventing nuclear proliferation from the partially competing interests of the various nations affected by North Korea's nuclear program. On the one hand, the vital interests of many countries intersect in Northeast Asia. Located at the border of China, Korea also faces Japan, which for centuries has considered its security closely related to the Korean peninsula. For Japan and China, Korea is like Mexico to the United States, a permanent factor beyond even the most crucial immediate disputes. Since the end of the 19th century, Russia has competed for influence in Korea. Since the end of World War II, the United States has borne the principal burden in defending South Korea with the troops it has maintained there and the 40,000 deaths it incurred during the Korean War. And most intensely, the future of North Korea is inseparable from the politics and security of our ally in South Korea.
But for some of these countries, the fear of the proliferation of nuclear weapons to North Korea is almost matched by the fear of the consequences of chaos were the North to implode. While no neighbor of Korea will officially oppose unification, most would prefer to postpone it to an indefinite future. China does not want a major industrial power armed with nuclear weapons on its borders. And it knows that if a nuclear weapons capability remains on the Korean peninsula, the nuclear rearmament of Japan is nearly certain. Yet China would prefer to thwart North Korea's nuclear ambitions by methods that do not jeopardize the survival of the Pyongyang regime.
Japan's perceptions are likely to be comparable. Because of the history of Japanese colonialism in Korea, Japan calculates that the main thrust of a unified Korea's foreign policy will be suspicion of Japan. Moreover, if the world acquiesces in a nuclear North Korea and if, as a result, the presence of American forces in South Korea becomes doubtful, Japan is likely to conclude that independence requires turning its already significant nuclear industry toward weapons production.
For Russia, the emergence of a North Korean weapons capability has a primarily symbolic significance. It magnifies the impetus behind potential nuclear programs along its southern borders. And from a geopolitical point of view, Russia prefers a divided Korea to one allied with the United States or China.
As for the United States, it has a stake in a prosperous and stable Asia, especially since the region is far behind Europe in the development of regional mechanisms to cope with disputes. And it has two major long-standing alliances - with Japan and South Korea - directly affected. America favors the unification of Korea and the end of nuclear proliferation but in a manner that does not destabilize Northeast Asia.
South Korea's position is the most complex of all. Nuclear weapons do not add a great deal to the threat of the thousands of artillery pieces located along the Demilitarized Zone within reach of Seoul. In these circumstances, to many Koreans, unification seems more important than denuclearization. Leftist groups treat the United States as the source of tensions; pacifists justify the North's nuclear program as a response to American threats; nationalists see in the North Korean program as an affirmation of Korean dignity. A combination of these trends dominated the recent South Korean election and has seeped into the South Korean establishment.
The new South Korean government seems to imagine itself as an intermediary between North Korea and the United States. It has sent emissaries to China, Russia and Japan, asking these countries to mediate the dispute as if South Korea were a bystander. This is an expression of the so-called sunshine policy, which, in some of its formulations, implies unification under the aegis of the South at the price of a reduction of U.S. influence in Korea.
The United States has no reason to oppose the sunshine policy so long as it involves reasonable reciprocity; it is, in its way, a tribute to the success of a half-century of alliance. America supported a similar approach on German unification a generation ago - albeit after some hesitation and in the framework of a continued alliance. But such a strategy can work only on the basis of close coordination between Washington and Seoul, as it did in the German case. A South Korean policy that bases domestic politics on finding a position between Washington and Pyongyang will erode the very basis of the alliance.
South Korea's leaders must not forget that a primary purpose of the American deployment in Korea is to maintain the local strategic balance in Asia and to prevent Korea from becoming engulfed by the conflicts of three powerful neighbors whose competition produced five conflagrations in the last century. The United States should be prepared to adjust its arrangement in South Korea to the heightened sense of autonomy of its ally. But if the South Korean government maneuvers itself into a position whereby the price of the alliance is American acquiescence in a nuclear weapons program in the North, this deployment cannot be sustained, either in South Korean or American public opinion. If North Korea agrees to return to the nuclear status quo ante, and after it has implemented it, it should be invited to preparatory talks regarding three principal agenda items:
- The destruction of North Korea's nuclear military capability.
- If North Korea is genuinely concerned about its security, some multilateral formula similar to that which evolved from the European Security Conference by which the parties renounce the use of force for the purpose of changing frontiers, but the United States has no reason to stigmatize itself by signing a separate nonaggression pledge;
- And, if North Korea were prepared to become a normal nation seeking to raise the standard of living of its population, possible economic cooperation. But it must be clear that there are limits that can only be modified by an improved human rights record in Pyongyang. The outside world must not be asked to sustain one of the most brutal dictatorships in the world.
It will be argued - as it was a generation ago - that such a renunciation of force would legitimize the partition of Korea. In fact, the European Security Conference marked a major step toward Germany's unification. For its Final Document included the phrase that "frontiers can be changed in accordance with international law by peaceful means and by agreement." And it is the peaceful evolution that will bring about the collapse of the North Korean dictatorship - as it did in Eastern Europe - rather than military confrontation.
What if North Korea refuses such an approach, or it proves impossible to organize a multilateral consensus? I cannot believe that nations on which the security of the world depends will tolerate the permanent possession of nuclear weapons by the most ruthless contemporary nation. If that were to happen, the United States would be obliged to find its nuclear partners where it can and reserve its freedom of action for when its fundamental security is challenged. And then the world will be in the position described more than two centuries ago by the philosopher Immanuel Kant. He predicted that the world would ultimately achieve universal peace either by human insight or, failing that, by catastrophes that leave it no other choice.
This is another in the series of articles that Kissinger, the former secretary of state, is writing for the Chronicle and other major newspapers.
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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