North Korea
By I don’t think most people understand just how colossally the Bush administration has fucked up the North Korea situation. The media story suggests that is has been an intractable problem and that Bush has done neither better nor worse than Clinton did. Fred Kaplan shows how this is wrong:
When Bush came to the White House, he aggravated tensions by disavowing the Agreed Framework, criticizing South Korea’s new policy of détente with the North, and advocating regime change in Pyongyang. The rupture came in October 2002, when U.S. intelligence discovered that North Korea was secretly enriching uranium—an alternative method of making nuclear bombs. The intelligence also indicated that the covert enrichment had begun during Clinton’s presidency.
Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly confronted North Korean diplomats with the evidence. They confessed, and Bush cut off all ties. Some penalty had to be inflicted. But at least enriching uranium takes a very long time compared with reprocessing fuel rods into plutonium. Keeping those 8,000 fuel rods locked up in a pool and guarded by international inspectors, therefore, should have been Bush’s prime concern. If those rods were unlocked, North Korea could have a dozen nuclear bombs within a year.
After Bush cut off the ties in the fall of 2002, North Korea reacted by threatening to abrogate the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, kick out the international inspectors, unlock the rods, and haul them to a nearby reprocessing facility. Bush called these threats “blackmail” and said that even sitting down to talk about them would constitute “appeasement.” The North Koreans went ahead and did what they said they would do. Bush did nothing, diplomatically or militarily.
In short, both sides violated the Agreed Framework established in 1994 between North Korea and the Clinton administration. Most people don’t understand how close the Korean peninsula came to a war in 1994; if the North Koreans had begun the reprocessing of fuel, the US would have responded with cruise missiles, which might well have sparked a general war. In 2002, we find that the North Koreans have been trying the nuclear back door; uranium enrichment. We call them on it, and they admit it, demanding a new agreement. In his infinite wisdom, GW says no, that we’ll hope for regime change instead. The North Koreans proceed to reprocess the fuel rods that they still have from 1994. The US can do nothing about it, because most of the army is preparing to invade Iraq. Now, the North Koreans quite likely have plenty of nukes, and we have nothing.
It didn’t have to be this way. The Bush people approached foreign policy with the mantra “Anything but Clinton”. An agreement with North Korea was by definition bad. Now, Bush has offered North Korea more than Clinton ever did, and is probably going to get shafted by Kim Jong-Il anyway.
Grown ups. In charge. Glad.