Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Disarming Strangers: Nuclear Diplomacy with North Korea
    Disarming Strangers: Nuclear Diplomacy with North Korea
    Disarming Strangers: Nuclear Diplomacy with North Korea
    Ebook568 pages8 hours

    Disarming Strangers: Nuclear Diplomacy with North Korea

    By Leon V. Sigal

    4/5

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    In June 1994 the United States went to the brink of war with North Korea. With economic sanctions impending, President Bill Clinton approved the dispatch of substantial reinforcements to Korea, and plans were prepared for attacking the North's nuclear weapons complex. The turning point came in an extraordinary private diplomatic initiative by former President Jimmy Carter and others to reverse the dangerous American course and open the way to a diplomatic settlement of the nuclear crisis.


    Few Americans know the full details behind this story or perhaps realize the devastating impact it could have had on the nation's post-Cold War foreign policy. In this lively and authoritative book, Leon Sigal offers an inside look at how the Korean nuclear crisis originated, escalated, and was ultimately defused. He begins by exploring a web of intelligence failures by the United States and intransigence within South Korea and the International Atomic Energy Agency. Sigal pays particular attention to an American mindset that prefers coercion to cooperation in dealing with aggressive nations. Drawing upon in-depth interviews with policymakers from the countries involved, he discloses the details of the buildup to confrontation, American refusal to engage in diplomatic give-and-take, the Carter mission, and the diplomatic deal of October 1994.


    In the post-Cold War era, the United States is less willing and able than before to expend unlimited resources abroad; as a result it will need to act less unilaterally and more in concert with other nations. What will become of an American foreign policy that prefers coercion when conciliation is more likely to serve its national interests? Using the events that nearly led the United States into a second Korean War, Sigal explores the need for policy change when it comes to addressing the challenge of nuclear proliferation and avoiding conflict with nations like Russia, Iran, and Iraq. What the Cuban missile crisis was to fifty years of superpower conflict, the North Korean nuclear crisis is to the coming era.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPrinceton University Press
    Release dateJul 1, 1999
    ISBN9781400822355
    Disarming Strangers: Nuclear Diplomacy with North Korea
    Author

    Leon V. Sigal

    Leon V. Sigal is a consultant at the Social Science Research Council in New York and Adjunct Professor in the School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University. A former member of The New York Times editorial board, he is also the author of Fighting to a Finish: The Politics of War Termination in the United States and Japan, 1945.

    Related to Disarming Strangers

    Titles in the series (65)

    View More
    View More

    Related ebooks

    International Relations For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Biden’s Stretch on Intellectual Property Theft

      Jul 10, 2019

      Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden says the Trump administration has not been fighting China on "stealing intellectual secrets," claiming that instead it has been "fighting in trade." But intellectual property issues have been part of ongoin

      5 min read

    • Article

      ‘Strategic Empathy’: H.R. McMaster On Foreign Policy And China

      Sep 22, 2020

      H.R. McMaster, former national security adviser to President Donald Trump, discusses new book “Battlegrounds” and U.S.-China policy with the Monitor.

      4 min read

    • Article

      The World In 2021 – How Global Politics Will Change This Year

      Jan 3, 2021

      A potent mix of hope and fear accompanies the start of 2021 in most of the world. Scientists have created several vaccines for a disease that didn’t even have a name this time last year. But many countries, including the UK and the US, are still stum

      13 min read

    • Article

      9 Science Stories To Watch In 2019

      Dec 28, 2018

      From the edge of Earth to the frontier of the solar system, there's plenty of science awaiting us in 2019. Some projects have been years in the making. Others were pushed to the forefront by the demands of a fast-changing world. Either way, they prom

      10 min read

    • Article

      How People’s Democracy Works in China

      May 13, 2021

      When King John of England agreed to the Magna Carta in 1215 to make peace with the rebellious barons, the royal charter was meant to protect the nobles’ property rights. The primacy of the privileged has since become a hallmark of Western democracy.

      5 min read

    • Article

      Begging for War

      Sep 7, 2017

      "There are no good options," Brian Williams said the other night on MSNBC, launching a discussion about North Korea with the implication that war -- maybe nuclear war -- is the only solution to the problem it represents. We've been cradling our own s

      3 min read

    • Article

      The Koreas Take Control

      Feb 21, 2018

      The Koreas Take Control
      5 min read

    • Article

      The Cold War Hasn’t Ended. It May Have Only Just Begun

      Mar 18, 2024

      The excellent, multiple Academy Award-winning movie Oppenheimer depicts the creation and testing of the world’s first nuclear weapon at the Alamogordo bombing range in New Mexico. The ‘Trinity Test’ was a turning point in human history. Days after th

      3 min read

    • Article

      High-stakes Summits

      Apr 9, 2018

      High-stakes Summits
      8 min read

    • Article

      20th Anniversary The Not-so-winding Road From Iraq To Ukraine

      Mar 19, 2023

      TODAY marks the 20th anniversary of the US and British invasion of Iraq. The seminal event in the short history of the 21st century continues to plague Iraqi society to this day and looms large over the crisis in Ukraine, making it impossible for mo

      5 min read

    • Article

      20th Anniversary The Not-so-winding Road From Iraq To Ukraine

      Mar 19, 2023

      TODAY marks the 20th anniversary of the US and British invasion of Iraq. The seminal event in the short history of the 21st century continues to plague Iraqi society to this day and looms large over the crisis in Ukraine, making it impossible for mo

      5 min read

    • Article

      20th Anniversary The Not-so-winding Road From Iraq To Ukraine

      Mar 19, 2023

      TODAY marks the 20th anniversary of the US and British invasion of Iraq. The seminal event in the short history of the 21st century continues to plague Iraqi society to this day and looms large over the crisis in Ukraine, making it impossible for mo

      5 min read

    • Article

      Trump, Kim And The Nuclear Status Quo

      Jun 21, 2018

      Peace, love and Donald Trump? I get the skepticism regarding the tentative nuclear disarmament agreement the president and Kim Jong Un reached last week, but not the cynicism -- not the outright dismissal. It's too easy to hate Trump, but he isn't th

      4 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Disarming Strangers

    4/5

    3 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Disarming Strangers - Leon V. Sigal

      DISARMING STRANGERS

      PRINCETON STUDIES IN INTERNATIONAL HISTORY AND POLITICS

      Series Editors

      Jack L. Snyder and Richard H. Ullman

      Recent titles:

      The Moral Purpose of the State: Culture, Social Identity,

      and Institutional Rationality in International

      Relations by Christian Reus-Smit

      Entangling Relations: American Foreign Policy in Its Century

      by David Lake

      A Constructed Peace: The Making of the European Settlement,

      1945-1963 by Marc Trachtenberg

      Regional Orders at Century’s Dawn: Global and Domestic

      Influences on Grand Strategy by Etel Solingen

      From Wealth to Power: The Unusual Origins of America’s

      World Role by Fareed Zakaria

      Changing Course: Ideas, Politics, and the Soviet Withdrawal

      from Afghanistan by Sarah E. Mendelson

      Disarming Strangers: Nuclear Diplomacy with North

      Korea by Leon V. Sigal

      Imagining War: French and British Military Doctrine

      between the Wars by Elizabeth Kier

      Roosevelt and the Munich Crisis: A Study of Political

      Decision-Making by Barbara Rearden Farnham

      Useful Adversaries: Grand Strategy, Domestic Mobilization, and

      Sino-American Conflict, 1947-1958 by Thomas J. Christensen

      Satellites and Commisars: Strategy and Conflict in the Politics

      of the Soviet-Bloc Trade by Randall W. Stone

      Does Conquest Pay? The Exploitation of Occupied Industrial

      Societies by Peter Liberman

      Cultural Realism: Strategic Culture and Grand Strategy

      in Chinese History by Alastair Iain Johnston

      The Korean War: An International History by William Stueck

      Cooperation among Democracies: The European Influence on

      U.S. Foreign Policy by Thomas Risse-Kappen

      The Sovereign State and Its Competitors: An Analysis of

      Systems Change by Hendrik Spruyt

      DISARMING STRANGERS

      NUCLEAR DIPLOMACY WITH

      NORTH KOREA

      Leon V. Sigal

      PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

      PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY

      COPYRIGHT © 1998 BY PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

      PUBLISHED BY PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS, 41 WILLIAM STREET,

      PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY 08540

      IN THE UNITED KINGDOM: PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS,

      CHICHESTER, WEST SUSSEX

      ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

      SECOND PRINTING, AND FIRST PAPERBACK PRINTING, 1999

      PAPERBACK ISBN 0-691-01006-4

      THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE CLOTH EDITION

      OF THIS BOOK AS FOLLOWS

      SIGAL, LEON V.

      DISARMING STRANGERS : NUCLEAR DIPLOMACY WITH

      NORTH KOREA / LEON V. SIGAL

      P. CM. — (PRINCETON STUDIES IN INTERNATIONAL HISTORY AND POLITICS)

      INCLUDES BIBLIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCES AND INDEX.

      ISBN 0-691-05797-4 (CL. : ALK. PAPER)

      1. NUCLEAR NONPROLIFERATION. 2. UNITED STATES—

      FOREIGN RELATIONS—KOREA (NORTH)

      3. KOREA (NORTH)—FOREIGN RELATIONS—UNITED STATES.

      4. DIPLOMACY. I. TITLE II. SERIES

      JZ5675.S55 1997 327.1'747—DC21 97-24502 CIP

      THIS BOOK HAS BEEN COMPOSED IN GALLIARD

      THE PAPER USED IN THIS PUBLICATION MEETS THE MINIMUM

      REQUIREMENTS OF ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R1997)

      (PERMANENCE OF PAPER)

      HTTP://PUP.PRINCETON.EDU

      ISBN-13: 978-0-691-01006-9

      ISBN-10: 0-691-01006-4

      eISBN-13: 978-1-400-82235-5

      R0

      CONTENTS

      PREFACE  ix

      ABBREVIATIONS  xiii

      1

      Uncooperative America  3

      A History of Failure  5

      Shared Uncertainty, Shared Certitude  10

      The Politics of Diplomatic Paralysis  13

      PART I: COERCION FAILS  15

      2

      The Bush Deadlock Machine  17

      Dealing with Korean Insecurities  20

      North Korea Reciprocates for U.S. Security Assurances  25

      One Meeting Means One Meeting  32

      Ignoring the North’s Offer  38

      Witnesses for the Prosecution  42

      Interregnum Politics: No One Stands Up to Team Spirit  44

      3

      The Clinton Administration Ties Itself in Knots  52

      Coaxing North Korea Partway Back into the Treaty  55

      The Reactor Deal Redux  65

      Empty Threats  71

      An Empty Package Deal 77

      Seoul Gets the Shakes  84

      4

      A Better than Even Chance of Misestimation  90

      The Collapse of Super Tuesday  95

      Let Bygones Be Bygones, for Now  108

      Stumbling to the Brink  113

      5

      Deadlock  124

      PART II: COOPERATION SUCCEEDS  129

      6

      Open Covenants, Privately Arrived At  131

      Private Contacts with Pyongyang  133

      Pyongyang Reaches Out  137

      The Hidden Hand in the First Joint Statement  140

      Two Foundations Try to Jump-Start Diplomacy  143

      Jimmy Carter Refuses to Take No for an Answer  150

      The Carter-Kim Deal  155

      The Bushmen Go on the Warpath  162

      7

      Getting to Yes  168

      Kim Il Sung’s Legacy  172

      Putting Some Chips on the Table 176

      The October Agreed Framework  184

      Decrying and Defending the Deal  192

      The Issue at Kuala Lumpur: What’s in a Name?  199

      PART III: CONCLUSIONS  205

      8

      Nuclear Diplomacy in the News—An Untold Story  207

      Unfamiliarity Breeds Contempt  208

      Explaining News on Nuclear Diplomacy  219

      Op-eds and Editorials  223

      Possible Consequences of News Coverage  225

      9

      The Politics of Discouragement  229

      No Interest in a Deal  229

      The Foreign Policy Establishment  236

      10

      Why Won’t America Cooperate?  244

      Realism  246

      The Liberal Challenge to Realism  250

      Cooperating with Strangers  251

      Appendixes  255

      Appendix I

      North Korea’s Tit-for-Tat Negotiating Behavior  257

      Appendix II

      Key Documents  260

      NOTES 265

      INDEX  307

      PREFACE

      IFIRST became interested in Korea when I joined the Editorial Board of the New York Times in June 1989. It was obvious that the end of the Cold War would greatly affect that divided land. I also knew from my experience in the United States government that the combustible combination of forward deployed forces on both sides of the Demilitarized Zone and our nuclear presence on the peninsula posed especially grave risks. One was that North Korea and South Korea would seek nuclear arms of their own. Another was that any crisis could get out of hand.

      With that knowledge, and little else in mind, I wrote an editorial that appeared on June 25, 1990, urging the United States to help the Koreas in from the cold by coaxing them into military disengagement and diplomatic reengagement. North Korea may accept international nuclear safeguards and is proposing new arms cuts, the editorial read. These steps could ease the military confrontation on the peninsula and allow the U.S. to reduce its force of 45,000 troops in the South. And there would be no reason to keep U.S. nuclear weapons there. In a December 13, 1990, editorial I went further, urging diplomatic and economic ties with the North. My original draft recommended unilateral withdrawal of U.S. nuclear arms from the peninsula, but it was cut in last-minute editing.

      I returned to the theme on February 4, 1991. Washington could meet Pyongyang’s concerns, I wrote, by beginning to withdraw its nuclear weapons. It could also reduce the scale and frequency of military exercises in the area. Editorial page editor Jack Rosenthal let me have my say, as he would until he left the Editorial Board to run the magazine at the end of 1993.

      After the December editorial, South Koreans, officials and former officials, began calling with invitations to lunch. A few Korea experts got in touch. The Asia Society invited me to a luncheon speech by Assistant Secretary of State Richard Solomon at the Waldorf Astoria. There I met Tony Namkung and we arranged to talk further. The South Korean ambassador to Washington invited me to lunch that April and a month later I met Ho Jong, a North Korean ambassador at the United Nations. I was soon in regular contact with American, South Korean, and North Korean officials, as well as a dozen experts on proliferation, in and out of government, and anyone knowledgeable about North Korea I could find, American, Japanese, and South Korean.

      For the next six years I wrote some sixty editorials on nuclear diplomacy with North Korea—all but two that the Times ran on the subject. I was free to write what I wanted on all but two occasions, in June 1994 and in April 1995, when my editorials were rewritten or scrapped.

      In the course of those six years I became intimately familiar with many of the nongovernmental contacts with North Korea, or Track II diplomacy. I thought the story was an important one that many people had misunderstood. When I left the Times I believed I was familiar enough with the details of U.S.-North Korean contacts to tell it right.

      Little did I know. Only after long and repeated interviews with nearly all the American participants and quite a few South and North Koreans did I begin to realize how much of the history I thought I knew was wrong.

      In trying to reconstruct the events of 1988 to 1995, I have benefited from the prior work of Mitchell Reiss, Michael Mazarr, and others. I also want to thank the many people in Washington, Seoul, and elsewhere whom I spoke to about the North Korean nuclear issue at one point or another from 1990 on: Gary Ackerman, Ahn Byung-joon, David Albright, Steven Aoki, Arima Tatsuo, Les Aspin, Bae Ho Hahn, Harry Barnes, Sandy Berger, Hans Blix, Stephen Bosworth, Robert Carlin, Ashton Carter, Dick Christenson, Gennady Chufrin, James Clapper, Marion Creekmore, Lynn Davis, James Delaney, Robert Einhorn, Steven Fetter, Thomas Finger, Stephen Flanigan, Steven Fleishman, Gary Foster, Leon Fuerth, Robert Gallucci, Robert Gates, Gong Ro-Myung, Donald Gregg, Vernon Guidry, Han Song Ryol, Han Sung Joo, Selig Harrison, Peter Hayes, Ho Jong, John Holum, Hyun Hong-Choo, Arnold Kanter, Charles Kartman, Spurgeon Keeny, Kim Dae Jung, Kim Kyung-Won, David Kyd, Anthony Lake, James Laney, Paul Leventhal, John Lewis, Stephen Linton, Thomas Longstreth, Winston Lord, Gary Luck, John McCain, Thomas McNamara, Gary Milhollin, Tony Namkung, Joseph Nye, Park Shun-Il, Park Soo-Gil, John Pike, Daniel Poneman, Nick Rasmussen, Roe Chang-hee, Roh Tae Woo, Jamie Rubin, Randy Rydell, Gary Samore, Brent Scowcroft, Larry Smith, Henry Sokolski, Stephen Solarz, Richard Solomon, Leonard Spector, Gordon Sullivan, Lynn Turk, Leonard Weiss, Frank Wisner, and Joel Wit, as well as two C.I.A. officials, two military officers, three Chinese officials, and two Japanese officials who must remain nameless. I interviewed many of them for this book.

      I have tried as much as possible to get my sources to speak on the record, but when they did not, I have tried to identify them as fully as I could in the text. I am grateful to the dedicated public servants who took the time to confide in me, especially to those who do not share my conclusions.

      I want to thank the Rockefeller Foundation, the W. Alton Jones Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council for their generous support, and especially Tom Graham, George Perkovich, and Ken Prewitt, without whom I could not have done this study. I also want to thank Richard Ullman, Bruce Cumings, and the editors at Princeton University Press, as well as Morton Halperin, Meredith Hyman, Judd Kahn, Michael McLean, Nicholas Rizopoulos, John Steinbruner, and others, who will have to remain nameless, for their comments and criticisms. Special thanks too to my wife, Meg, who was a tireless and supportive critic, and to my son, Jake, who will not have to worry about a nuclear North Korea.

      New York City

      31 July 1997

      ABBREVIATIONS

      DISARMING STRANGERS

      1

      UNCOOPERATIVE AMERICA

      If you fight a war to preserve the N.P.T., that’s like burning

      a village in Vietnam to save it.

      (Donald Gregg)¹

      THE TROUBLE with American foreign policy since the end of the Cold War is that the United States has been unwilling to use military force, or so the prevailing orthodoxy goes. American influence abroad is said to have waned because its threats are no longer credible. Yet that orthodoxy ignores another source of foreign policy failure—American unwillingness to cooperate with strangers. In a number of recent cases the United States has tried threats to get its way when promises seemed more likely to succeed. Whether with Russia or Japan, with Cuba or the Palestinians, we have recoiled from giving cooperation a chance. We have also had difficulty making promises and keeping them.

      That seems puzzling. Of course, cooperative strategies are not always appropriate for achieving American aims abroad. At times, too, conciliation alone will not suffice. It needs to be combined with coercion, or at least the threat of coercion. Yet a compelling case can be made for trying cooperation.

      Cooperation works. It can succeed where coercion would fail. It is also cheap by comparison. Coercive measures like economic embargoes are costly to the sanctioner as well as to the sanctioned. The costs often fall disproportionately on sectors of the American economy with the political power to undo sanctions. For example, the grain embargo imposed on the Soviet Union in 1980 after its invasion of Afghanistan was lifted by President Reagan in 1982 under pressure from the farm lobby.

      Military force is even more costly. The sacrifice of life and treasure give policy-makers pause. Yet they usually discount another substantial cost, erosion of public support for foreign involvement. A majority of the foreign policy establishment believes that the United States has less clout in the world today than it did a decade ago and wants it to play a much more assertive role abroad. The American public does not share that view.² Most Americans are much more amenable to other forms of overseas engagement, even foreign aid, than to military intervention.³ For foreign policy-makers to define America’s role in the world in military terms—to emphasize coercion instead of conciliation—may feed the fires of isolationism.

      Cooperation, or cooperative threat reduction in the well-chosen words of Senators Sam Nunn (D-GA) and Richard Lugar (R-IN), is essential in meeting what many consider the most critical foreign policy challenge facing the United States today: stopping the spread of weapons of mass destruction. The growing integration of economies through direct foreign investment and trade has sped up the diffusion of technology useful in bomb-making. Acting alone, the United States cannot impede the flow of equipment and material that countries need to manufacture nuclear arms. It has to have help from other countries to deny proliferators vital supplies.

      Denying them the means of bomb-making is inadequate by itself. Denial can buy time and provide early warning, but it cannot succeed forever. The interdiction of supply has to be supplemented by efforts to reduce demand. Unlike a strategy of pure denial, which threatens proliferators with economic and political isolation, convincing countries not to build the Bomb requires cooperating with them, however unsavory they may be. Countries that seek nuclear arms are insecure. Trying to isolate them or force them to forgo nuclear-arming could well backfire. They need reassurance to ease their insecurity.

      A strategy of diplomatic give-and-take that combines reassurance with conditional reciprocity, promising inducements on the condition that potential proliferators accept nuclear restraints, might just persuade them to give up their quest. The strategy requires identifying allies inside the target state who have no interest in nuclear-arming, probing their willingness and ability to attain common ends, and then working with them.⁴ Cooperative threat reduction may be especially difficult, yet all the more imperative, when the state in question has a history of egregious or seemingly irrational international behavior, when evidence of internal change is difficult to discern or deliberately obscured, and when contact with the country is so limited that potential allies within its political system are not easy to find.

      Cooperative threat reduction has a long record of accomplishment. American reassurances and inducements have helped convince South Korea, Taiwan, Brazil, Argentina, South Africa, Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan to abandon nuclear-arming in recent years.⁵ Only in Pakistan have inducements failed, although Pakistan has stopped just short of assembling deliverable warheads. Despite this history of accomplishment, the United States persists in choosing coercion instead of cooperation in trying to stop the spread of weapons of mass destruction.

      The American effort to keep North Korea from acquiring nuclear arms is a case in point. In the end, the United States did reach an accord with the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea (D.P.R.K.) which, if fully implemented, will leave Korea nuclear-free and begin to relax the military confrontation on the peninsula. That accord satisfied all of Washington’s security requirements and at modest cost.

      Yet the tortuous path that the United States took to reach an agreement is much less praiseworthy. After three years of failure after failure with coercive diplomacy, it finally tried cooperation and succeeded.

      Nuclear diplomacy with North Korea is representative of a class of cases the United States is likely to face frequently after the Cold War. North Korea’s nuclear program had to compete for attention with many other countries and problems, domestic as well as foreign. During the Cold War, any country or problem that touched on the Soviet-American conflict dominated the concern of policy-makers at the rank of assistant secretary and above. Now, without the framework of the Cold War to set priorities, they find it difficult to decide what to do with their scarce time and political capital. More than ever before, they jump from issue to issue, paying only intermittent attention to any of them. That makes them especially susceptible to the influence of their own predispositions and the domestic politics of the moment.

      Putting together a deal with Pyongyang, despite the risks that nuclear-arming by North Korea posed to American interests in Asia, did not get the sustained attention it deserved from top officials until 1994. With Congress unwilling to spend money on foreign programs, policymakers were reluctant to expend time and political capital mustering support for any policy as unpromising as nuclear deal-making with North Korea. Threats seemed cheaper and more expedient than promises, at least in the political currency of Washington. Unfortunately, the strategy of coercion ran a significant risk of failure, even war.

      A History of Failure

      The standard American account of nuclear diplomacy with North Korea goes something like this: Despite having signed the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in December 1985, North Korea remained determined to develop nuclear arms. In an effort to reassure the North, the United States withdrew all its nuclear warheads from the Korean peninsula. Appeasement failed. North Korea signed an agreement with South Korea on December 31, 1991, pledging a nuclear-free peninsula, but refused to carry it out. It signed a nuclear safeguards agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency, only to renege on inspections. The United States then adopted a strategy of threats and inducements, resuming Team Spirit military exercises with South Korea, while at the same time making numerous concessions, without success. North Korea kept denying full access to inspectors. When North Korea began remov ing spent fuel rods from the Yongbyon reactor in May 1994, the United Nations Security Council moved to impose sanctions. Only under duress, the standard account has it, did the D.P.R.K. relent. With sanctions about to enter into force, former President Jimmy Carter went to Pyongyang and won a pledge from Kim Il Sung to freeze the North’s nuclear program. The D.P.R.K. signed the Agreed Framework with the United States on October 21, 1994, committing itself to give up nuclear-arming in return for replacement of its nuclear reactors, a supply of fuel oil, security guarantees, an end to the American economic embargo, and gradual diplomatic normalization—a deal that will take years to fulfill. The Agreed Framework is the product of months of determined diplomacy and firm negotiation, Secretary of State Warren Christopher testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. We negotiated from a position of strength.⁶ Senate Minority Leader Robert Dole drew a very different lesson, It is always possible to get an agreement when you give enough away.⁷

      The standard account is wrong.

      Its major premise, that North Korea remained hell-bent on nuclear-arming, is open to question. Although that intention could not be ruled out, evidence of North Korean intentions was more ambiguous than the worst-case analysis suggested. To build bombs, it needed plutonium. The explosive ingredient for nuclear weapons, plutonium is produced by all nuclear reactors as a by-product of fission and deposited in the spent nuclear fuel. A country determined to make bombs would want to unload spent fuel rods from its nuclear reactor as soon as possible and reprocess them, extracting the plutonium from the rest of the nuclear waste. Yet North Korea has done no reprocessing since 1991. It also delayed discharging spent fuel, at least from the spring of 1993, when the I.A.E.A. expected the reactor to be refueled, until May 1994. While it resisted full international inspections, it did permit I.A.E.A. inspectors to verify that it was not removing spent fuel from the reactor or reprocessing it. The partial freeze was a sign that North Korea might be willing to give up nuclear-arming in return for American security assurances and political and economic benefits. But the D.P.R.K. was unwilling to give something away for nothing.

      That posed a fundamental choice of how best to stop North Korea from nuclear-arming. Of course, it would have been preferable for the D.P.R.K. to live up to its obligations under the Nonproliferation Treaty. But what if it did not? What if it demanded inducements for complying? Vocal sentiment in the American foreign policy establishment, this book will demonstrate, overwhelmingly favored enforcing the treaty instead of offering inducements to North Korea. Many denounced inducements as appeasement. In their logic, making a deal meant yielding to nuclear blackmail. Yet appeasement of the weak by the strong promotes peaceful change. Appeasement, while it is a term of opprobrium around Washington, would have been wrong under two conditions, neither of them applicable: if North Korea had had unlimited ambitions and the means to pursue them, and if North Korea had been stronger and inducements would have further strengthened it at American expense.⁸

      To other opponents of conciliation, offering inducements to North Korea for fulfilling its Nonproliferation Treaty obligations seems morally unconscionable. They ignore that the treaty itself embodies inducements for signing, most notably, help with nuclear power in return for forgoing nuclear-arming.

      Those who opposed conciliation and instead wanted the treaty enforced assumed that if the United States bribed North Korea to refrain from nuclear-arming, it would set a dangerous precedent, undermining efforts to curb proliferation. Surely, a nuclear-armed North Korea would have set back the nonproliferation cause more than the precedent of inducing Pyongyang to disarm. Contrary to conventional wisdom, such inducements would not have set a dangerous precedent, inviting other countries to reap the benefits of bomb-making. The world is not full of nuclear-arming countries. Potential proliferators are few in number, none of them eager to start nuclear-arming for the primary purpose of being bought off. Indeed, the offer of benefits for North Korea to disarm would set no precedent at all. The United States has repeatedly used inducements in the past to get countries like South Korea and the ex-Soviet states to ban the bomb. Compelling North Korea to comply could prove more costly, and hardly more certain of success, than giving it what it wanted.

      Instead of engaging in diplomatic give-and-take, however, Washington insisted that Pyongyang comply fully with the Nonproliferation Treaty as a precondition for negotiations and threatened it with economic sanctions, even air strikes, if it did not. The United States drew attention to North Korea’s nuclear past and its nuclear potential and ignored its nuclear self-restraint. In an attempt to compel compliance, it adopted what became known as the carrot-and-stick policy. That policy was aptly characterized by one proponent: To get a mule to move, you have to show it the carrot and hit it with a stick at the same time.⁹ The mule may be struck repeatedly, but is fed the carrot only when it reaches the mule-driver’s destination, if at all.

      The metaphor was not lost on the D.P.R.K. In May 1993, just before high-level talks resumed in New York, North Korean negotiators asked an American visitor in Pyongyang, What is the meaning of sticks and carrots? One of them showed the visitor the entry in an old Merriam-Webster dictionary, which had a drawing of a donkey with a bunch of carrots dangling beyond its reach. Next to the donkey stood its master, stick in hand.¹⁰

      Holding out the promise of talks as a reward for good behavior deprived the United States of a way to resolve its nuclear differences with North Korea. From 1988 until late 1993, even when the United States entered into talks, it did not negotiate. Diplomatic dialogue without give-and-take is a prescription for deadlock. As chapters 2-4 show, that is just what happened in five years of fitful talks between the United States and North Korea. Worse yet, the few promises Washington did make were not always carried out, often because it was dependent on others, South Korea and the I.A.E.A., to fulfill them.

      Like a porcupine encountering an eagle, North Korea bristled at American threats. It followed a strategy of tit-for-tat, reciprocating American gestures of cooperation and retaliating when the United States reneged on its promises. (The interaction is summarized in chapter 5. Readers may also want to refer to the chart in appendix I.) As the D.P.R.K. repeatedly said, It is the disposition and will of our people and army to answer dialogue with dialogue and strength with strength.¹¹ The vicious cycle of renege and reprisal came perilously close to spiraling out of control in June 1994, provoking a war neither side wanted. That such a tit-for-tat pattern emerges from the history of nuclear diplomacy from 1988 to 1995 may seem surprising to most observers, who have concluded that North Korea alone was the culprit, breaking its non-nuclear pledges and trying desperately to keep on building bombs.

      It took three years of failed attempts at coercive diplomacy before Washington finally began cooperating with Pyongyang in the summer of 1994. Even then, the breakthrough came as the result of a private initiative—Track II diplomacy by former President Jimmy Carter. Chapter 6 describes how Carter, backed by a handful of nongovernmental organizations, overturned American policy by undercutting the sanctions strategy and revived chances for a diplomatic deal. Yet his efforts were widely disparaged, even by some top officials of the Clinton Administration.

      President Bill Clinton, to his credit, took advantage of the Carter initiative to change course and engage in diplomatic give-and-take. He was bitterly assailed for doing so. In the face of severe criticism, with little support from the foreign policy establishment, the administration eventually got North Korea to agree to halt and roll back its nuclear arms program in return for gradual normalization of political and economic relations, construction of replacement reactors to generate nuclear power, and a supply of heavy fuel oil in the interim (see chapter 7). The agreement could be the start of a fundamental transformation on the Korean peninsula, ending the Cold War confrontation there.

      The Clinton Administration, belatedly, claimed success for its negotiating strategy, but it attributed much of that success to coercive diplomacy. Officials still do today. That claim is dubious. Coercion had only led to North Korean recalcitrance, raising the risk of war. By publicly disavowing the sanctions strategy and trying cooperation, Jimmy Carter opened the way to a settlement. Even before he did so, that strategy had become a dangerous bluff. Sanctions might have spurred North Korean bomb-making; they could not prevent it. Even a total trade embargo could not have kept North Korea from making nuclear arms since it already had whatever it needed to make them. Denying it oil might eventually have caused its economy to collapse, but this prospect worried South Korea, Japan, and China, which would have to suffer the consequences—mass migration, instability, and possibly war. They were unwilling to enforce sanctions stringent enough to strangle North Korea.

      The threat of military force was no more credible than sanctions. If North Korea had nuclear arms or enough plutonium to make them, U.S. intelligence had no idea where they were, and air strikes could not target what could not be found. Even striking the reactor at Yongbyon risked spewing radiation on Japan. That left the option of conquering North Korea, but for good reason, neither the United States nor South Korea wanted to take that risk, especially with a potentially nucleararmed North. Economic sanctions and military force were empty threats.

      North Korea was not about to be bluffed. Nor was it about to comply first and hope to reap the benefits later. Only when Washington satisfied its concerns did Pyongyang relent. A strategy of cooperative security, not coercive diplomacy, accounts for the success of diplomacy in Korea.

      The cost of cooperative threat reduction on the Korean peninsula is comparatively modest. The total price of replacing the nuclear reactors, plus the supply of oil, is reckoned to be $5 billion, almost all of it borne by South Korea, Japan, and others. The U.S. contribution is about $30 million a year, which Congress has balked at financing. In contrast, the direct operating cost of maintaining the current American troop presence in Korea is $2.5 billion a year and the costs of stationing U.S. forces there instead of at home is another $800-900 million.¹² The costs of retaining forces to meet a Korean contingency runs into the tens of billions of dollars. Team Spirit joint military exercises in 1993 cost the Pentagon $900 million.¹³ Stationing a carrier battle group in the Sea of Japan could run around $900 million a year in operating and maintenance costs alone—$1.8 billion a year if the cost of procuring the ships and aircraft and paying for manpower are taken into account.¹⁴ A precautionary buildup in South Korea in the event of sanctions would have cost the Pentagon a few hundred million dollars a year, according to the estimate of the Secretary of Defense. The costs of a war on the Korean peninsula would be prohibitive—as many as one million military and civilian casualties, including 80,000 to 100,000 American lives lost, and $100 billion, by one worst-case U.S. military estimate cited in Congressional testimony.¹⁵

      Why the United States found it so difficult to cooperate with North Korea and nearly stumbled into war is initially a story of failure—the failure of the Bush and Clinton Administrations to get the policy right, the failure of President Clinton to get the politics right, and the failure of much of the intelligence community to get the assessments right. Not only the American government was at fault. South Korea and Japan failed to come to terms with their neighbor. International institutions failed as well, particularly the International Atomic Energy Agency, which seemed more concerned about having North Korea strictly abide by its safeguards agreement than about inducing it to abandon nucleararming. Nuclear diplomacy with North Korea is also a story of failure of most American experts on Korea and nonproliferation, who opposed conciliation and instead promoted reckless alternatives, and failure of much of the press, which misinterpreted events and misled readers. Above all, it was a failure of an American foreign policy establishment that discouraged cooperation at every turn.

      For too long U.S. policy toward North Korea was muscle-bound and brain-dead. The question is why. The answer begins with uncertainty about North Korea’s intentions and capabilities.

      Shared Uncertainty, Shared Certitude

      North Korea could have been on Mars for all that the United States knew about it. It was a faraway land of unknowns and unknowables explored mostly by space probes, in this case, spy satellites. Few Americans had ever visited North Korea or talked to a North Korean, not to mention its leaders. In their efforts to get to know one another, it was not clear whether North Korea or the United States was more of a hermit kingdom.

      For American policy-makers as well as much of the foreign policy establishment, North Korea was a blank screen on which to project their own predispositions and prejudices. The arguments in Washington were largely projections by Americans with strong views about how they thought it would react, one highly placed Clinton Administration official recalls. Nobody knows what’s going on in North Korea. Nobody knows who decides things there.¹⁶

      North Korea’s history of bizarre and brutal behavior and its highly adversarial style of bargaining sowed uncertainty about what it was doing and how best to respond. Its habit of floating concessions on a sea of threats and vituperation alarmed and dismayed even those who favored conciliation. A pragmatic and prudent response to uncertainty would have been to treat estimates of North Korean nuclear capabilities and intentions as rough guesses rather than facts, to probe North Korean intentions through diplomatic give-and-take and avoid running a high risk of war. The response, instead, was worst-case assessments and rash policies—threats of economic coercion, even armed force.

      Why were policy-makers and the people who tried to influence them so unwilling to countenance negotiating with North Korea before reaching for their guns? Efforts to deal with North Korea’s nucleararming were impeded by four beliefs that were widely shared in the foreign policy establishment. These beliefs, or shared images, informed the politics of nuclear diplomacy both in and out of the American goveminent. ¹⁷

      A key belief, or shared image, is that proliferation is just too difficult to prevent—that once a nation decides to build the Bomb, it cannot be persuaded to stop. Top officials, who already have plenty to do, are unwilling to tackle problems deemed too daunting. Without their sustained involvement, officials who have day-to-day responsibility for preventing proliferation are often marginalized and find it difficult to implement workable strategies, especially ones that require inducements rather than threats and exact economic and domestic political costs. The belief that proliferation is unstoppable is an article of faith to so-called realists, who assume that all states seek military security in preference to any other value and that nuclear-arming makes states secure. This belief is bolstered by pessimistic assumptions about the ease of building the Bomb because of the diffusion of nuclear know-how and nuclear technology and material. The belief persists despite the fact that the number of nuclear-armed states remains far lower than was widely predicted in the 1960s and despite recent successes in persuading countries to dismantle their nuclear programs.

      A second shared image is that North Korea was a rogue state, the last redoubt of Stalinist-style communism, motivated to build bombs by hostility to the outside world. Much of North Korea’s own behavior reinforced its image as an archetypal rogue: its 1950 aggression that led to a brutal war, its acts of terrorism including the 1983 bombing in Rangoon that barely missed South Korean President Chun Doo Hwan but killed seventeen members of his entourage, its internal regimentation, its dogmatism and harsh diatribes against the United States and South Korea, and its bizarre bargaining and brinkmanship. Although it had ceased acts of terrorism and muted its anti-American rhetoric by 1988, the image of a communist rogue state ruled by a latter-day Genghis Khan was difficult to shake. That image inspired officials to fill in the blanks about North Korea. They treated it as an outcast, implacable and inimical, with a master plan to deceive the world and acquire nuclear arms. That made it an easy target for demonization. Belief in this image also blinded observers, including much of the U.S. intelligence community, to contrary evidence of Pyongyang’s efforts to accommodate Washington. It led many to conclude that the only way to stop North Korea’s bomb program was to compel the collapse of the communist regime in Pyongyang.

      A third shared image is that the main proliferation menace comes from rogue states like North Korea, Iran, and Iraq. Russia, China, Israel, India, and Pakistan are not considered rogue states. Yet some of them pose even greater proliferation risks by stimulating their neighbors to acquire nuclear arms and serving as sources for nuclear know-how and technology. Moreover, even if U.S. intelligence estimates were correct, as of 1995 North Korea may have amassed a bomb’s worth or two of nuclear material. Iran had none and would not be able to produce a bomb on its own for at least seven years—five years for Russia to build a reactor at Bushehr begun by West Germany, plus at least two more years to generate a bomb’s worth of plutonium from the reactor’s spent fuel and fabricate it into a warhead.¹⁸ By comparison, Russia had 24,000 warheads and enough nuclear material—plutonium and highly enriched uranium—to make tens of thousands more. With corruption rife, loosening controls especially at Russia’s civilian nuclear installations, there is a serious risk that weapons-grade material could be smuggled out and end up in, say, Iran. Yet some in Congress, outraged at Russia for its reactor sale to Iran, tried to cut off aid for dismantling Russian warheads and controlling the extracted nuclear material.

      The fourth and most pernicious belief is that the way to get states to abandon their nuclear ambitions is to demonize them as outlaws and force them to disarm—the crime-and-punishment approach to preventing proliferation. Yet there is no global sheriff to enforce international law and it is difficult to round up a posse to mete out punishment. When Washington has tried this approach, as it did with North Korea, coercion and threats proved counterproductive. Instead of discouraging insecure states from nuclear-arming, this strategy may give them more of a reason to do just that. Even those who reject demonization believe that cooperation cannot work and that coercion is the only way to disarm potential proliferators. It is rooted in their belief that America’s influence in the world rests ultimately on its weapons and not on its wealth or its ideas.

      Especially for those who view the world as a Hobbesian war of all against all with little prospect of cooperation and who believe that the unilateral display of muscle is the surest strategy for the United States to get its way in the world, the necessity for cooperation is a difficult lesson to absorb. Failure to absorb it has impeded nonproliferation efforts with North Korea and will continue to do so with Iran and others.

      These shared images of nuclear diplomacy shaped the politics of dealing with North Korea within the American government. Primitive realism took the place of pragmatism.

      That led officials to certain conclusions about North Korea’s intent to develop nuclear arms and the dim prospects for dissuading it. Their mind-set made them inattentive to contrary evidence and disinclined to probe North Korean motives. In particular, it led them to ignore the question why, if North Korea was determined to acquire a nuclear arsenal and had the means to do so, did it not just go ahead and build bombs? Why did it instead delay unloading spent nuclear fuel from its reactor, stop reprocessing plutonium, and invite I.A.E.A. inspectors into its nuclear facilities to verify that it had?

      The same shared images of nuclear diplomacy also informed most of those in the foreign policy establishment and Congress who took an active part in the public discourse on North Korea. These beliefs became important domestic political impediments to deal-making with North Korea.

      The Politics of Diplomatic Paralysis

      It used to be axiomatic around Washington that politics stops at the water’s edge. Like most Washington axioms, the notion that foreign policy was insulated from domestic politics never could withstand close scrutiny. In nuclear diplomacy with North Korea, it was demonstrably false. Time and again, domestic politics prompted the Bush and the Clinton Administrations to adopt a posture of toughness and inhibited them from making anything like acceptable offers to North Korea. The result was diplomatic deadlock, and worse, a crisis that nearly got out of hand.

      The politics of confrontation was of a narrow sort. The American public was largely inattentive; when polled, it was sharply divided over going to war to prevent North Korea from making nuclear arms. The pressures that put both administrations in uncompromising positions came from members of Congress and the foreign policy establishment, including nongovernmental and academic experts on nuclear and Korean affairs. Chapters 9 and 10 will explore some reasons for that.

      Few in Congress or the foreign policy establishment believed that a diplomatic solution was possible. Far fewer were willing to defend dealmaking in public. More outspoken members favored economic and military pressure on North Korea. Their views registered with special force because they were routinely quoted in the news. Chapter 8 will examine why. Institutional changes in Congress and the electoral process also favored the outspoken. These institutional changes, while tightening up party lines and intensifying partisanship, privileged those members of Congress who stood out in the crowd instead of going along with it. The way to stand out in a cast of hawks was to advocate force.

      Senior officials in the Bush and the Clinton Administrations were themselves skeptical that diplomacy could succeed. Given the doubt and hostility in Congress and in the foreign policy establishment, both administrations were loath to try. Until the spring of 1993, they sought to avoid talks. When they did negotiate, they shied away from tabling specific offers. When they did make proposals, they cloaked concessions in threats. When they made promises, they did not always keep them.

      Both administrations were particularly vulnerable to hard-line pressure on the North Korean nuclear issue. President Bush’s failed attempt to appease Iraq was an Achilles heel that, some administration officials feared, Democrats and right-wing Republicans were eager to exploit. The Clinton Administration, accused of vacillation and weakness from its inception, felt similarly constrained. Yet war posed much greater political risks for a president who was elected on a platform of domestic renewal and a commander-in-chief who had troubled relations with the armed forces.

      Most senior officials did not try to discern North Korea’s motives, difficult as that may have been, or to design probes of its intentions. Doubtful

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1