Pride, Politics Hamper Bush Approach to N. Korea
The following OpEd by Center analysts Steve LaMontagne and Matt Martin appeared in the April 14 edition of Defense News.
The bureaucratic paralysis in President George W. Bush’s administration in the face of a mounting nuclear crisis with North Korea is a disturbing example of how pride and politics get in the way of protecting the interests of U.S. and global security.
In the near term, the best option available to the United States is to begin direct bilateral negotiations with North Korea. With nearly 1 million North Korean soldiers and thousands of artillery pieces pointed at Seoul, and with war raging in Iraq, military action against North Korea is nearly unthinkable.
A policy of economic isolation is unworkable without the support of key regional powers, notably South Korea and China, both of which prefer direct talks between Washington and Pyongyang.
Yet, the Bush Administration continues to rule out bilateral negotiations. After including North Korea in the “axis of evil,” branding Kim Jong Il as a “pygmy,” charging him with “nuclear blackmail,” and denouncing negotiations as “appeasement” President Bush has become a prisoner of his own loaded rhetoric. Such feel-good pronouncements may appeal to a domestic audience, but limit U.S. options in dealing with the North Korean threat.
Rather than swallow its pride, the Bush administration is doing nothing by default. It appears willing to allow North Korea to escalate the crisis until South Korea and China are alarmed enough to cooperate with the United States in isolating Pyongyang, and possibly pressuring Kim Jong Il’s regime to collapse.
However, doing nothing is tantamount to accepting the reality of a nuclear-armed North Korea, one that could sell nuclear weapons, materials, or technology to terrorists or other rogue states. Doing nothing sends a message to other proliferators that they can get away with clandestinely developing nuclear weapons if U.S. attention is focused elsewhere, as is currently the case with Iraq.
Doing nothing will make the prospect of a second Korean War even more real and frightening. Doing nothing also creates a false sense of urgency about deploying ballistic missile defenses before the 2004 elections. Recently, Bush promised to “accelerate the development of an anti-ballistic missile system” in response to the potential threat from North Korean missiles.
CIA Director George Tenet reminded Congress in February that North Korea possesses the capability to hit the United States with a long-range ballistic missile, despite that fact that the missile in question has only been flight tested once—a failed launch in 1998.
On March 18, Edward “Pete” Aldridge, defense undersecretary, made the specious claim that the missile defense test bed set for deployment in Alaska next year will be able to shoot down a North Korean missile with 90 percent effectiveness.
However, he could not explain how a system with only a 60 percent success rate under highly scripted, dumbed-down testing conditions could miraculously achieve a 90 percent success rate under much more difficult and uncertain real-world operational conditions. Sen. Carl Levin advised, “I think you’ll want to correct the record after you read the classified numbers.”
The reality is that, after decades of research and more than $100 billion spent on technology and engineering development, it remains doubtful whether missile defenses will ever work well enough to provide any real protection against long-range ballistic missiles. Although Bush has promised an effective missile defense system by 2004, most of the pieces of that system will not even be built by that date, let alone successfully tested under real world conditions.
The Fiscal Year 2002 Annual Report from the Pentagon’s Director of Operational Test and Evaluation, publicly released in February, concluded that missile defense “has yet to demonstrate significant operational capability” and warned that premature deployment could put Americans at risk.
Moreover, North Korea will not wait for years or decades until the United States can field even a rudimentary missile defense system. It will likely seek to ratchet up tensions at the most inconvenient time for the United States.
In dealing with North Korea, it is not enough to hide behind missile defenses that do not exist and to hope for regime change that may never occur. The Bush administration should put pride and politics aside and begin direct bilateral negotiations with Pyongyang. North Korea should freeze its nuclear and missile activities and promise not to reprocess existing spent fuel during the course of negotiations, and the United States should offer to suspend all threatening military maneuvers in return.
Once direct negotiations begin, China, Japan, South Korea, and Russia can be brought into the process. If negotiations fail, the United States will be in a better position to coordinate other multilateral responses to North Korea’s nuclear brinkmanship.
Steve LaMontagne is a senior analyst at the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation in Washington DC. Matt Martin is Assistant Director of the organization’s Missile Defense Project.