LONDON – Let’s assume we are all hardliners. Let’s assume the worst about North Korea. But don’t be too surprised, as we analyse the situation as card-carrying hawks, if we end up in the same position as President Bill Clinton when he was thinking of bombing North Korea’s nuclear installations at the time of the last big crisis in 1994 and conclude that we have no choice but to heed the advice of the doves.
Victor Cha is a professor at Georgetown University, a North Korean specialist and a hawk. He has always believed the worst about President Kim Jong-il. Everything he says and writes is charged with an acceptance of worst-case scenarios. He takes nothing the North Koreans say or do at face value. He is suspicious of the regime’s apparent desire to be friendlier to South Korea, assuming that this is a tactical manoeuvre rather than a strategic shift. He assumes that this is a 100% pure Machiavellian regime. But in a long, thoughtful essay in Harvard University’s quarterly, “International Security”, he finds that the hawks fly themselves hard and fast into a concrete wall, wounding only themselves.
As a hardliner he rejects the hawk position: containment plus isolation or the even more hawkish one, containment plus coercion, and comes down on the side of most doves, containment plus engagement. The aim of U.S. policy, he argues, must be to make sure that this calculating regime of Kim Jong-il never concludes that aggression against South Korea is a “rational” course of action, even though it would in fact be irrational as it could never hope to prevail. After all states can choose war even when there is little hope of victory, as Saddam Hussein seems to be doing right now.
To clear our minds before we get down to the nitty gritty we should imagine how difficult the North Koreans might yet become. Since George Bush came to power with his hard line “axis of evil” approach, in short sequence the North has renounced the freeze on its nuclear program; it has threatened to reprocess nuclear waste; it has shut out the nuclear inspectorate; and it has renounced its own moratorium on test-firing new missiles. Perhaps its next moves could be even more outrageous: the lobbing of a few artillery shells into a southern city to create panic and chaos; launching a chemically-armed missile on a southern port; or infiltrating some suicide bombers into southern cities. Each provocation would be too minor to prompt all out war, Kim Jong-il might reason, but perhaps sufficient to drag Washington to the face-to-face negotiating table that he so obviously badly wants. The more difficult and intransigence policy in Washington is, the more appealing, in the North’s eyes, becomes such a double-or-nothing option.
Dovish engagement with an opponent of this mind set has a number of important points in its favour: it avoids the likelihood of war because it lengthens time horizons, it reduces the threat of imminent attack, and ultimately it changes the North’s terms of reference. This was what was so remarkable about the Clinton diplomacy. Built on Jimmy Carter’s pact with the late Kim Il-sung it achieved remarkable breakthroughs in the North’s posture on nuclear weapons. If a Republican Congress had not undermined the administration’s solemn promises made to the North on the speedy development of alternative power supplies and an end to the economic embargo, it is highly unlikely that the present crisis would have ever blown up.
Today’s carrots are tomorrow’s most effective sticks. But sticks will only work if the North has a stake in the status quo. Under the current administration in Washington the North began to feel it was losing everything- the completion of new power stations were being delayed yet again and Washington was refusing to let the South sell electricity to the North. Meanwhile the economic embargo continued. The policy should have been the other way round. Full throttle on all the 1994 promises and then the threat to reverse them if the North no longer cooperated.
Washington, if it wants positive results and wishes to avoid precipitating the very actions it says it is determined to avoid, must realize rather quickly that it has to double back on its tracks of the last two years. Unlike Clinton, Bush can carry Congress with him. Bush needs to give the North a hefty stake in the status quo. Kim Jong-il’s demands are not unreasonable. All he asks is for recognition and a non-aggression pact, and presumably a fast track on the lifting of sanctions and the provision of alternative sources of electricity. If not only the doves can see this but some important hawks too perhaps it is the right time for Bush to change his flight path away from hitting the wall.
I can be reached by phone +44 7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
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