A
hawk on North Korea
wants Bush to be a dove
By
Jonathan
Power
February 7, 2003
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
Copyright © 2003 By
JONATHAN POWER
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