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Outside Publications by CNS Staff

An op-ed for the San Jose Mercury News.
Jan. 12, 2003

When it comes to handling the North Korea conflict, senior officials in the Bush administration would be wise to consult a prescient 1999 study that critiqued the Clinton administration's approach toward Pyongyang. It's a study Richard Armitage and Paul Wolfowitz seem to have forgotten -- even though they were among its principal authors.

The March 1999 study, published in the National Defense University's Strategic Forum, highlights the need for crafting a less reactive and more comprehensive policy toward North Korea and argues forcefully that the security threat on the Korean Peninsula should be the highest priority for the president.

The study also provides compelling reasons for why a policy of "buying time" -- putting off hard decisions in the hopes the North Korean government will collapse -- does not work in favor of the United States.

Many of the study's recommendations are as relevant today as when Armitage and Wolfowitz were out of government. Less apparent is the degree to which Armitage, chairman of the working committee that prepared the report and now deputy secretary of state, and Wolfowitz, now deputy secretary of defense, are following their own, earlier advice with respect to North Korea.

One of the report's key premises, which has been vindicated, was skepticism that the 1994 Agreed Framework had ended the North Korean nuclear program. That agreement with the United States promised oil and nuclear power plants in return for North Korea's halting its plutonium production.

In a section of the 1999 report titled "Reality Check," the authors observed that Pyongyang might have frozen only a portion of its nuclear program and could be pursuing a weapons capability covertly. North Korea confessed several months ago to pursuing a uranium-enrichment program.

The authors also challenged the assumption that North Korea was a failed state on the verge of collapse. In this respect, time was not necessarily on the side of the United States, since North Korean leader Kim Jong Il could exploit Washington's interest in avoiding a confrontation on the peninsula to consolidate his rule, continue Pyongyang's nuclear weapons program, and build and export new generations of missiles.

'Tailored containment'

This forceful argument from the past about the limits of hoping for "regime change" in North Korea has yet to resonate in the Bush administration. Not surprisingly, it has met strong resistance from those who believe that Kim's government will topple if pushed hard enough. It also finds little support among advocates of the administration's modest objective of "tailored containment" -- a plan to use political and possibly economic pressure to induce North Korea to give up its nuclear ambitions.

While the report criticized a strategy of "buying time," the Bush administration's currently relaxed attitude about the non-crisis nature of the North Korean nuclear gambit is doing precisely that. Indeed, it is hard to find words more at odds with the 1999 report's verdict -- that U.S. acquiescence to North Korean belligerence encourages brinkmanship -- than Secretary of State Colin Powell's recent public anointment of North Korea as a nuclear weapons state: "They have had these couple of nuclear weapons for many years. . . . And if they have a few more, they have a few more, and they could have them for many years."

As of Friday, Washington was still not even prepared to push for the immediate consideration by the U.N. Security Council of the issue of Pyongyang's non-proliferation transgressions, including its announcement last week that it would immediately withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Another important element of the 1999 report was its suggestion that U.S. policy toward North Korea should be guided by clear answers to two questions: What do we want from North Korea? And what price are we prepared to pay?

The authors believed that the Clinton administration had failed to address directly those questions and, as a consequence, had pursued a policy that was fragmented, unpredictable and reactive.

Interagency disputes

The Armitage report's critique of past U.S. policy toward North Korea could not be more apt today. Fierce interagency disputes continue to frustrate administration efforts to reach agreement on the answers to either of those two core questions, a predicament that impedes the communication of U.S. intentions to Washington's allies and Pyongyang.

The answer to the first question -- what do we want? -- should be relatively easy for the Bush team, even if the authors of the Armitage report could not have foreseen the precise nuclear scenario the United States faces today. Given the report's emphasis on the multiple security challenges to the United States and its allies posed by a nuclear-armed North Korea, one would expect a recommendation that made the prompt and verifiable dismantlement of Pyongyang's nuclear weapons program the very highest priority.

The joint statement issued after last week's trilateral meeting in Washington with U.S., Japanese and South Korean diplomats moves in that direction. But the opposite tendency was reflected in U.S. support for the "go slow" approach adopted by the International Atomic Energy Agency in its response to the recent expulsion of the agency's inspectors from North Korea. (The agency decided to give North Korea one last chance to change its policy before bringing the matter to the U.N. Security Council.)

The more difficult question to answer concerns the costs Washington should be prepared to pay to achieve North Korean nuclear disarmament. According to the Armitage report, the United States should be willing to meet Pyongyang's legitimate economic, security and political concerns, including full normalization of relations. It also, the report advises, should be ready to invest considerable diplomatic capital to build a coalition of active partners, including China, and to harmonize the positions of the United States, Japan and South Korea.

Little is said, however, about what military costs are acceptable if diplomacy and economic pressure fail to achieve the objective of North Korean nuclear disarmament.

Broadens strategy

The Bush administration is striving, without great success, to forge the kind of coalition envisaged by the Armitage report. It even has broadened the strategy to include Russia as a key player. The administration, however, refuses to put any incentives on the table to entice North Korea to end its nuclear program, saying it doesn't want to reward bad behavior.

The current strains in the U.S.-South Korean relationship are much deeper than was anticipated in 1999. The inclusion of North Korea in the "axis of evil" and President Bush's personal disdain for Kim Jong Il inhibit the administration's willingness to accept North Korea as a fully legitimate negotiating partner. Bush's views also affect Pyongyang's readiness to accept as sincere the president's statements that he has no intention of invading North Korea.

The authors of the Armitage report did not provide a clear road map for how to proceed if diplomacy toward North Korea fails, other than to recommend possible interdiction of North Korean missile exports on the high seas. Their emphasis on fairly testing Pyongyang's intentions through diplomacy, however, remains a very sound strategy. The current architects of U.S. policy toward North Korea would do well to recall and heed this wise, if old, advice.