London – At first the news from North Korea seemed like an almighty setback to thoIse who believe we can deal with grave security problems more by engagement rather than confrontation. Not only did it appear to knock the shine off Jimmy Carter’s Nobel Peace Prize, since his greatest achievement, apart from Camp David, was his successful diplomacy that brokered the 1994 freeze on the country’s nuclear bomb making, it appeared it might well open the doors again to those Republicans who eight years ago were arguing for the U.S. to bomb North Korea.
A strange thing appears to have happened in those eight years. For all the bluster with President George Bush’s notion of an “axis of evil”, no longer is the talk this wild. The accent is all on diplomacy and an emphasising of what is still apparently being honoured in the old 1994 agreement, the freezing of plutonium production, the most potent raw material for nuclear bomb manufacture.
Eight years ago, Brent Scowcroft, the former National Security Advisor to president George Bush senior (and now the dove on going to war with Iraq) said that President Bill Clinton would be making a terrible mistake if the U.S. did not immediately bomb the North Korean reprocessing plant before the cooling rods containing plutonium, sufficient to make half a dozen nuclear weapons, could be transferred to it.
In the end Carter was able to pull off his remarkable diplomacy because Clinton feared the consequences of war. The Pentagon told him that the U.S. could lose 50,000 troops. Also that it was possible that North Korea already had in its arsenal two or three nuclear weapons and that if the regime thought it might lose the war it would use these.
Nothing has really changed in the interim to alter the dangers of going to war. The U.S. many times broke its side of the bargain. At various times a Republican dominated Congress made it impossible for the Administration to deliver on various parts of the U.S. side of the bargain, in particular the ending of the trade embargo. And now the North has broken in the most blatant manner possible an important element in the nuclear freeze, (although it should be stressed it doesn’t appear to have actually gone into nuclear bomb production).
The war option is no more viable than it was eight years ago. It comes as no surprise that Japan, the country, apart from South Korea, that has the most to fear from North Korea’s nuclear armament and missile programs, is arguing that the 1994 agreement needs to be revitalised not abandoned. And perhaps indeed the North Korean admission of its clandestine activity is more a cry for openness and creative diplomacy than a new threat to deliver nuclear annihilation.
Here in Taiwan there is a sense of wait and see. Taiwan is used to living under threat. The antagonist it faces across the Taiwan Strait is far larger, better armed and in every way more formidable than North Korea. It is five years since the last blow up in this delicate relationship. Angry at Taiwan’s attempt to break out of its diplomatic isolation with a quasi-official visit of Taiwan’s president to America China “test-fired” missiles in the Taiwan Strait, only to be met by a dramatic show of U.S. naval strength in the same waters. But since then, and particularly with the electoral victory of the long time opposition, the Democratic Progressive Party, the relationship has quietened. It may not be harmony and it is still subject to sudden flair ups, as when President Chen Shui-bain in August spoke of their being “one country on each side” of the Strait. But each crisis seems to occur at more distant intervals and the wind goes out of them quicker each time.
There are some here who argue that Taiwan is being slowly throttled by the Chinese diplomatic embargo, but it’s hard to believe that when the Taiwanese economic presence in the mainland is growing by leaps and bounds and China is becoming increasingly reliant on Taiwanese high-tech expertise and when Chinese tourists in droves can be seen milling around the Chinese art treasures in the National Palace Museum. There is the occasional voice in the legislature arguing for Taiwan to develop its own nuclear weapons so that China would no longer dare intimidate the island. And there are those, like Vice President Annette Lu who, in an interview with me, try to fudge the one China issue by saying “we are one Chinese”. All such voices tend to have somewhere at the back of their mind an independent Taiwan as their goal.
But this will never work out. China is too vast and too powerful to be deflected from its goal of a unified China (which the U.S. formally supports)- even if Taiwan started to build nuclear weapons. Indeed, that would provoke China to move pre-emptively.
The issue is more subtle: how to make sure China respects the individuality and personality of Taiwan. This means above all respect for Taiwan’s democracy, rule of law and total autonomy in domestic affairs- not like Hong Kong where since re-union some important principles have been undermined, not least the commitment to proceed to democracy.
The main goal for Taiwan must be the same goal as in America’s dealing with North Korea- the avoidance of war. There is no point in standing up for human rights and benign principles if the method chosen is so antagonistic it leads to war. War is the worst of all human wrongs and as it runs its course every human right in the book is smashed to pieces.
As with North Korea engagement rather than confrontation is the path to take.
I can be reached by phone +44 7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
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40th Anniversary of Amnesty International
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