$25 Million a Year Is Pin Money

Republicans in Congress, scratching for campaign issues against the poll-leading president, have zeroed in on the nuclear pact between Japan, South Korea and the U.S., on the one side, and North Korea, on the other. Not good. This controversial but essential deal, if successfully implemented, would cleanse the pivotal Korean peninsula of nuclear weapons, salve arms-buildup stress in Japan, perhaps prompt even Beijing to reconsider its nuclear weapons needs and establish a notable Asian precedent that just possibly could ripple onward to the shores of such places as India, Pakistan and Iran. If America were to renege on the deal, it might very well prove our biggest foreign policy blunder in Asia since Vietnam.

The “agreed framework,” negotiated in Geneva by the Clinton administration in 1994, induced North Korea, not ordinarily the world’s most agreeable state, into agreeing to abandon its burgeoning nuclear weapons program and to accept tough, unfriendly visits by international inspectors. In return, North Korea was to get about $55 million to $60 million annually in heavy oil to cover its interim energy needs until two multibillion-dollar South Korean nuclear reactors, to be financed mainly by Seoul and Tokyo, are built and become operational in the North.

The oil cost to Washington this year was set at a measly $25 million. This is chump change in Congress. Barely covers postage stamps. Besides, there’s plenty wrong with the Democrats for the GOP to have fun with--why harp on the North Korean nuclear deal? Yet, unconscionably, the House and a key Senate subcommittee have voted to slash the $25 million in half, causing the South Koreans, the Japanese and everyone else to wonder whether the United States can be relied on to stay the course on sensitive and complex deals.

Now meet KEDO, the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization, the tiny international agency representing almost a dozen concerned countries that was founded last year by Japan, South Korea and the U.S. It was created to arrange the construction of those two proliferation-resistant nuclear power plants and has its headquarters in New York, where the North Koreans have a U.N. mission, and where I interviewed its executive director, Stephen Bosworth, a veteran U.S. diplomat.

Is the North as impossible as its reputation? Not so far, says Bosworth: “They are reaching out; they have been negotiating with an absence of polemic and hyperbole. But remember that they come to the table with a suspicion, if not a paranoia, about the outside world. [If this deal falls apart], who can speculate about what they will or won’t do?”

Bosworth doesn’t say anything about Congress. He’s not allowed to; the KEDO crew can’t lobby or complain. But I can. So can President Clinton, who says he may veto the entire 1997 foreign aid bill over this. And so can Japanese Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto. He knows that both Koreas need to be kept non-nuclear if Japan itself is to avoid a costly,destabilizing arms race. “There is a move in the U.S. Congress to cut back on the U.S. contribution to KEDO,” Hashimoto was quoted as saying to Clinton at the recent G-7 meeting in Lyons, France, “but please make sure this will not happen.” And on Monday, North Korea’s official news agency also responded, saying: “If the heavy oil is not supplied in time as scheduled, we will be compelled to reconsider our nuclear freeze.”

You don’t much like North Korea? Look at it this way: New missile defenses, whether gigantic as originally proposed by the Reagan administration, or more local, focused ones, as suggested by Bob Dole, would every year cost many billions of dollars, not just millions. The community of nations, led by the U.S., should approach any and all such nuclear countries with practical deals along the lines of North Korea’s.

Republicans are an interesting bunch. In the White House, they conceive bold and sometimes brilliant foreign policy paths (e.g., Nixon to China; Reagan and Gorby). But when out of the executive mansion, they go for the cheap political point over almost any new development they themselves would otherwise drool over.

This deal is too important to play partisan games with: A congressional visit to Hiroshima or Nagasaki would show why. KEDO isn’t soft-minded and it isn’t soft on communism; in fact, it isn’t anything but smart. It represents the best $25 million a year we’ll ever spend. So go ahead, congressional Republicans, have your fun, but the whole world is watching.