The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History (71 page)

Until the events of October, virtually no progress had been made in six years of talks about curbing North Korea’s missiles, perhaps not least because Washington never seriously committed itself to those talks, which were held only about once a year. Suddenly, the prospect of nearly limitless agreement had opened up at the eleventh hour of the Clinton administration, with only two weeks to go before the election of a new president and less than three months before Clinton would leave office. Although many concessions and compromises had been outlined by Kim Jong Il, most details remained to be worked out. As Albright knew from watching decades of US-Soviet arms control negotiations, the devil is in the details, especially in such matters as limitations on weapons and the verification thereof. Among the “details” to be ironed out were the terms of compensation by the United States and other nations, precisely which weapons would be covered, what would happen to missiles already produced or deployed, and the whole issue of verification.

It was clear that Clinton could neither sign nor endorse with his presence any vague or loosely worded agreement on such weighty matters; the signing of any agreement in North Korea, particularly in the final days of his presidency, would carry an additional political burden. Time was of the essence if a deal was to be struck. The Americans suggested Kim send missile negotiators to Kuala Lumpur seven days later to discuss the details, with no expectation they would be able to settle the outstanding issues. In the rush of events, Kang Sok Ju was apparently not fully consulted. When told by the Americans at a dinner that night of the plan, he threw up his hands. “I don’t have enough people for that,” he said. In Seoul Kim Dae Jung strongly endorsed the idea of a Clinton trip to Pyongyang, but many experts in Washington told Albright the time was too short and the gamble too great.

It was not to be. Instead of learning the identity of the new president a few hours after the polls closed on November 7, the disputed election dragged on for five weeks in the state of Florida. The president-elect, Governor George W. Bush, indicated to the White House that he was not in favor of further negotiations with North Korea, though he was not similarly negative on Clinton’s continuing efforts on the Mideast, where serious violence had erupted between Israelis and Palestinians. On the final weekend before the New Year of 2001, the State Department notified North Korea that it was now impossible for the outgoing US president to travel to Pyongyang. Clinton telephoned Kim Dae Jung in Seoul to break the news, and the State Department notified all the other countries that had participated in the effort to capitalize on the dramatic opening in North Korea.

North Korean diplomats in New York expressed disappointment at the news and said a great opportunity had been missed. Shortly before turning over her office to a new administration, Wendy Sherman received a New Year’s card postmarked Pyongyang from Kang Sok Ju. It was the first such missive she had ever received from North Korea, and she took it as a positive sign.

On January 20, as Bill Clinton was turning over the US presidency to George W. Bush, Kim Jong Il was ending a six-day visit to China, his second in less than a year, during which he visited the Shanghai stock market and a General Motors joint-venture plant making Buicks in China’s largest city. The bustling Shanghai Kim experienced, with its towering skyscrapers and torrid industrial pace, was a far cry from the city he had seen during his only previous visit there in 1983, near the start of China’s market-oriented reforms. Beijing’s Foreign Ministry spokesman said the North Korean leader praised what had been accomplished by policies of economic reform and opening up. At the dawn of 2001, there was widespread hope that Kim Jong Il would steer his country in the same direction.

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The sanctions were finally lifted in June 2000 after the North-South summit meeting and after DPRK diplomats furnished their American counterparts at a bilateral meeting in Rome with a restatement of the missile-test moratorium that was used to gain the acquiescence of Senate leaders. The Italian Foreign Ministry made available the sixteenth-century Villa Madama for the talks, a gracious setting for negotiations normally held in more straitened circumstances.

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As it happened, Kim Yong Nam’s visit to New York was interrupted in Germany when, while changing planes, he was ordered by airport authorities to undergo a security search. He protested and, when that made no difference, turned around and went home. The United States quickly delivered a message of apology to the DPRK UN Mission in New York, which obviously mollified the North. The incident caused bemused satisfaction to officials in the Foreign Ministry’s American section. They had advised that Kim travel to New York via a well-worn route through Beijing on United Airlines, which was familiar with the drill of screening officials from the DPRK. However, the ministry’s International Bureau (which had the lead because Kim was going to a UN meeting) insisted it knew better and that the routing, though unusual, should go through Germany to connect with the US “flag carrier,” American Airlines.

17

THE END OF THE AGREED FRAMEWORK

W
HEN THE ADMINISTRATION OF
George W. Bush came to office in January 2001, it inherited a better situation than any US administration in the past fifty years in regard both to Washington’s sometimes troublesome ally in the South of Korea and to its long-term adversary in the North. By 2000 Seoul felt that the United States, even while it moved ahead in relations with Pyongyang, had wisely given the overall lead to the South—a sentiment that seemed to guarantee an increasingly harmonious partnership. There were no more issues with the Republic of Korea on human rights, and any problems about the status of US troops were on a low simmer. Above the thirty-eighth parallel, the North’s nuclear center at Yongbyon was frozen and under continuous monitoring by inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency. An initial proposal for limiting North Korea’s ballistic-missile program was on the table. North-South tensions were low, interchange between the two sides was growing, and prospects for the future looked promising. The Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization was functioning well as a multilateral organization and making progress at the construction site for the light-water reactors on North Korea’s east coast. The Kim-Albright exchange combined with the October 2000 joint communiqué had provided a plateau from which Washington and Pyongyang could negotiate new, more stable arrangements. If the Agreed Framework, now almost seven years old, needed updating and improving, the way seemed open for doing so.

As Bill Clinton left office, the one cloud on the horizon as far as Washington was concerned was hardly minor, but neither was it seen as unmanageable. The US government was fairly sure that the North was working on uranium enrichment, probably with help from A. Q. Khan, the Pakistani nuclear scientist whose network was clandestinely supplying nuclear know-how and material to a number of countries. Midlevel officials
in the State Department were already devising a strategy to address that problem with the North once the intelligence community gave the okay to raise the issue in the diplomatic arena. That assumed US policy would stay on course, slowly improving relations with Pyongyang as North Korea addressed issues of priority concern to Washington and Seoul.

Things began to veer off track, however, as soon as the new president took office. Intense, poisonous disagreement within the administration hobbled policy discussions about Korea at every turn. Several top-level officials came to office thoroughly opposed to the Agreed Framework, determined to do away with it. Even those prepared to live with the agreement thought it failed to get at the nuclear problem decisively enough and avoided forcing the North Koreans to make a strategic choice to give up the program soon enough, leaving Pyongyang with a dangerous nuclear capability while supplying the regime with aid that prolonged its life.

This idea of forcing the North to make a “strategic choice” was pervasive in the administration and one of the few points of agreement between the warring parties in Washington. Without pressure on the North Koreans, the thinking went, they would never be forced to choose between nuclear weapons or regime collapse, and if they were not forced to choose, then they would never give up their nuclear program. In a sense, pressure was the easy choice, negotiations the more difficult one. The latter required understanding Pyongyang’s perspective. The South Koreans wrestled with that challenge constantly, but it was not the sort of contemplation the Americans, who tended to think of North Korea as a “black box,” did very well or, indeed, cared to do at all. Moreover, many of the US government’s officials with the longest experience dealing with the North fled to posts overseas to escape the fetid atmosphere in Washington or left the government altogether. Whether intentional or not, beginning in 2001, a climate of intimidation descended over the policy process that closed off the possibilities for calm discussion or dispassionate consideration of options. Anyone connected with the Clinton administration was suspect by the new administration’s appointees; anyone attempting to discuss policy options toward North Korea that resembled those of the Clinton years was told in no uncertain terms that this was “not the president’s view.” The suspicions and ill feelings were reciprocated, with the result that the administration was soon, and virtually for its entire term in office, at war with itself over North Korea policy.

In October 2002, less than two years after they took office, those who thought the Agreed Framework had been a bad idea could congratulate themselves for having swept it away. Only a few more months passed before it became obvious that there was no serious plan for what to do next. Moreover, the ad hoc steps that Washington did take—over the strenuous objections of Seoul and Tokyo—ended up, in short order, precipitating
exactly what the United States said it did not want to see, that is, the restart of the North’s plutonium production facilities at Yongbyon. From that point, the progress from 1994 to 2000 on limiting the nuclear program unraveled at a breathtaking pace.

Overall, in regard to Korea, the Bush administration’s eight years in office fall roughly into three phases: pre-9/11/2001, when after internal battles (largely between those focused on global nonproliferation objectives and those focused on regional East Asia concerns) the policy toward North Korea appeared to be settling on a somewhat rocky and constricted diplomatic path; from 9/11 through 2005, when there was a rigid, almost theological cast to the administration’s approach; and from 2005 to 2008, when, in his second term, President Bush became convinced that a more normal diplomatic track was necessary in order to present the North with a “strategic choice.”

To review the record of the Bush administration’s first-term approach toward North Korea is to summon up eerie reminders of President Jimmy Carter’s ill-fated stance on US troop withdrawals, only this time with more serious consequences. Once again, an American president entered office with an almost messianic belief in the rightness of his position, prepared to roll over South Korean sensibilities, and deaf to the advice of his experienced Asia hands. The major difference is that in the Carter administration, persistent efforts by senior officials managed to blunt and eventually reverse the president’s single-minded impulse. In Bush’s case, his senior staff was engaged in open internecine warfare, with those counseling caution usually outmaneuvered and overwhelmed by those advocating hardline policies. Even when the president made the “right” policy decision from the standpoint of the experienced Asia hands, the hard-liners found ways to hammer it into a different shape at the operational level.

Personally, George Bush was not nearly as extreme on North Korea as the administration’s rhetoric often was. As John Bolton, then undersecretary of state and one of the hardest of the hard-liners, says in his memoirs, “Ironically, Bush is blamed for following confrontational policies he didn’t follow.” Fundamentally, the president grasped the dangers of a war in Korea, an understanding sharpened by the downward course of US fortunes in Iraq after the 2003 invasion. While intensely opposed to US–North Korea talks, and genuinely repelled at the thought of doing anything that might help perpetuate the North Korean regime, Bush was willing to put his money on the efficacy of multilateral negotiations. When those bogged down, he was finally convinced to fall back to where he had insisted he would never go, bilateral diplomacy with Pyongyang.

Where the administration’s first term was dysfunctional in dealing with North Korea, the second term saw major efforts to correct the distortions in policy. Yet these efforts, too, were riven with contradictions and
suffered from a fundamental lack of understanding of what worked with the North Koreans and what did not. In any case, by January 2005 the damage from earlier decisions had been done, and once Pyongyang tested a nuclear device in October 2006, America’s Korean problem became significantly more difficult to solve.

A ROCKY START

Weeks before George W. Bush’s inauguration, South Korean president Kim Dae Jung was anxious to get to Washington to talk to the new US president as soon as possible. Based on reports he received of early conversations between ROK and US officials, Kim was concerned that his policies toward the North—policies he was convinced had led to considerable progress on both the North-South and the US-DPRK fronts—were not getting the right reception from his ally. In an interview with the
Washington Post
on January 8, Kim noted with utmost understatement the existence of “different voices” in the new administration.

In his usual fashion, Kim thought it would be little problem personally for him to convince the president that Seoul was on the right track and that the United States only had to stay the course. Even an early, sobering report from South Korean intelligence chief Lim Dong Won, who went to Washington in February to see the situation for himself, did not change Kim’s mind. The Americans who met Lim immediately sensed his concern that the momentum of the past several years in engaging the North needed to be maintained. The first question he asked, according to one US official, was when would George Bush go to Pyongyang? Lim says that in his meetings, he encouraged the new administration to follow through on the progress made to date with North Korea, singling out the missile issue. He portrays Secretary of State Colin Powell’s response as encouraging, though he admits Powell also warned that the administration was suspicious of the North Koreans and “not in a hurry” to reengage Pyongyang. Other administration officials were decidedly more negative, so much so that in his memoirs, Lim says he was “shocked” by their attitude toward the North. He quotes National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice as telling him, “We should seek North Korean change not through the leader’s change of belief but through a collapse of the failed system.”