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The Times
February 14, 2007
By Richard Lloyd Parry
Early on in his presidency, George W. Bush dropped a few broad hints that the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Il, was not quite his cup of tea. There was the time he described him as a "pygmy", for example, and compared him with "a spoilt child".
There was the famous occasion when he lumped North Korea in with Iraq and Iran as the "Axis of Evil". Or there was the moment when he put it most simply of all. "I loathe Kim Jong Il," he told the journalist Bob Woodward, who describes the President "waving his finger in the air".
So George Bush doesn't like Kim Jong Il - but Kim Jong Il doesn't care. And wherever he is lurking now, in the isolated, impenetrable dictatorship that he rules, Kim Jong Il must be laughing at the humiliation that he has heaped on the world's most powerful man. For that is what yesterday's six-party agreement in Beijing represents - a just humiliation for Washington, the collapse of four years of arrogance and misjudgment in a chaos of U-turns and compromises.
That is not how it will be spun, of course. In the version propagated in Washington it is North Korea that is stepping down, by agreeing to freeze its biggest nuclear reactor and allow in international inspectors, four months after carrying out its first nuclear test. Even this result is far from guaranteed - the Beijing agreement is no more than an outline, and many months of arduous haggling lie ahead. But even if were honoured in full, yesterday's document should be a cause of shame rather than satisfaction to the US Administration.
It will do no more than restore the relationship with Kim Jong Il that the US and its allies had six years ago. Back then, in the last days of Bill Clinton, there were international inspectors at the Yongbyon nuclear reactor, as there may soon be again. Back then the US and its partners supplied fuel and aid to North Korea - as they promised to do again in Beijing yesterday. Back then North Korea was a frightening totalitarian dictatorship in which free speech was a crime and people starved for lack of good government. Nothing has changed.
One thing is different in North Korea now - in contrast with 2001, when President Clinton left office, Kim Jong Il has built and tested nuclear weapons. This is the sum achievement of two terms of Bush policy on North Korea: to allow the world's most brittle and unpredictable state to acquire the Bomb.
A quick rewind may be necessary - from Europe and the United States, North Korea is a distant concern, and this has allowed the diplomatic absurdities of the past few years to slip by largely unremarked. By the mid1990s North Korea was an orphan of history - the last totalitarian Stalinist enclave in the world. Its former patrons, Russia and China, were hurrying to attract international capital. Kim Jong Il had a large, but steadily rusting army. But then it emerged that he had something else - a nuclear reactor capable of generating weapons-grade plutonium.
President Clinton took this seriously - at one point, as we now know, he was within hours of ordering an air attack on the Yongbyon reactor. But at the last minute a deal was brokered - fuel oil and "safe" light-water reactors in exchange for freezing the reactor. Over the next few years both sides breached parts of the agreement, but the seals stayed on Yongbyon. Even Kim Jong Il seemed to come out of his shell, holding a summit with the South Korean President and entertaining Mr Clinton's Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright. Then along came George W. Bush.
President Bush doesn't like Kim Jong Il. But to dislike an oppressive dictator is no mark of moral or intellectual distinction. The clever thing is to come up with ideas for dealing with him. And George Bush had none. Singled out as an evildoer, by a President who publicly espoused a policy of preemptive attack, Kim Jong Il not unpredictably became defensive. And, lacking adequate fuel for his tanks or spare parts for his planes, he took his nuclear programme out of mothballs. The international inspectors were expelled, the processing of the plutonium began. But beyond pronouncing him loathsome, Mr Bush had little more to say.
His policy expressed itself in negatives. Even before the Iraq debacle, a military attack was out of the question - North Korea could not win a fight with the US, but in losing it could devastate South Korea. The US vowed it would never negotiate with the North Koreans one-to-one - hence the six-party talks with China, Russia, South Korea and Japan. There the US demanded something known by the acronym CVID - complete, verifiable and irreversible dismantling of the North's nuclear programme. Until that happened, North Korea would be a pariah - in a much repeated phrase, there would be "no reward for bad behaviour".
What inducement was there in such circumstances for Kim Jong Il to give up his nuclear programme? He was like an outlaw urged by the sheriff to put down his gun so that he could be more safely shot. North Korea ignored the US demands and continued to process its plutonium and test its rockets. Sanctions have had little effect on a country whose economy has already collapsed - the Chinese Government, which controls the cross-border oil pipeline into North Korea, could have brought Kim Jong Il to his knees if it chose. But the risk of a civil war and an outpouring of refugees into their own territory was a price the Chinese were not prepared to pay.
Then came the nuclear test last October - the final proof that merely loathing Kim Jong Il did nothing to make the world a safer place. In Berlin last month US officials quietly began doing what they had said they would never do - negotiating bilaterally with their North Korean counterparts. Yesterday they agreed to a package of about $330 million of fuel and aid in return for the refreezing of the Yongbyon reactor - the reward that the US swore never to give. As for CVID, the irritating acronym has been quietly dropped.
Yesterday's agreement is good sense, in fact. It is painful to engage with a government as repressive as North Korea, but as the US Administration has demonstrated, there is no alternative. One should be experiencing relief that reason has returned to US diplomacy. But it is difficult not to feel a deep sense of waste, lost opportunity and anger.
Richard Lloyd Parry is Asia Editor of The Times
Copyright 2007 Times Newspapers Ltd.
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