U.S. May Drop Trade Ban for N. Korea Deal

The Clinton administration is trying to work out a deal in which North Korea would agree not to test-launch its new long-range missile and in return would be rewarded with an easing or lifting of a decades-old U.S. trade embargo, according to U.S. officials and North Korea experts.

Under this approach, North Korea would promise a moratorium on testing its new Taepodong 2 missile, which has a long enough range to strike many parts of Asia or even Alaska. In exchange, the United States would remove North Korea from the provisions of the Trading With the Enemy Act, which for the past 49 years has barred all U.S. trade with the isolationist communist regime.

Such an arrangement would resolve the immediate crisis over North Korea’s plans to test its new missile. But it would leave other issues unsettled and fall far short of the more comprehensive proposal, offered to North Korean officials last spring by U.S. envoy William J. Perry, that administration officials had hoped would change North Korea’s pattern of threatening behavior toward its neighbors.

“For regional peace and stability, the first thing we’ve got to do is to stop a launch,” said an administration official.

The new offer has not yet been accepted by North Korea, which U.S. officials say is still proceeding with preparations to test its new missile within a few weeks. Yet the prospect of such a limited bargain has triggered debate in Washington, where the administration’s policy toward North Korea has often been under attack in the Republican-led Congress.

Administration officials argue that heading off the North Korean missile test is an important objective in itself because it would calm growing anxieties in other Asian countries--particularly Japan, which was rattled last year when a missile from North Korea flew over its airspace.

However, critics are already complaining that the administration would be giving up too much to North Korea for merely a promise not to test the missile. The United States, they say, should obtain more important assurances that North Korea won’t deploy its new missile.

“The possibility of a [missile] test has been hyped up too much,” said Robert Manning of the Council on Foreign Relations. “The big issue is whether these missiles are operational or deployed.”

“Weapons systems can be deployed without testing,” asserted Douglas Paal of the Washington-based Asia Pacific Policy Center. “With computer simulation, less and less has to be tested. . . . The administration is taking on the immediate problem without dealing with the long-term problem.”

Both Paal and Manning were officials in the Bush administration.

Lifting the U.S. trade embargo against North Korea was one of the elements in the broad package of proposals put forward earlier this year by Perry, the former Defense secretary whom Clinton appointed to conduct a formal review of North Korea policy. Perry visited the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, in spring as a presidential envoy.

Perry’s approach--the details of which have not been made public--was to offer the Pyongyang regime an array of incentives in exchange for steps by North Korea aimed at reducing military tensions with South Korea, Japan and the United States.

Last spring, U.S. officials explained that the concept behind Perry’s approach was to bring about what they called a “fundamental change” in North Korea’s relations with the United States and its allies. They said they hoped to break the pattern of recent years in which U.S. officials acknowledged that they were drifting “from crisis to crisis” in their dealings with North Korea.

By contrast, the U.S. proposal that is now being considered would be a piecemeal one.

North Korea would get only a lifting of the trade embargo, and not the other elements in Perry’s package, such as moves toward establishing diplomatic relations. And North Korea would agree only to a moratorium on missile testing, and not to broader changes the administration has been seeking, such as limits on the range and payload of missiles and mutual reductions of military threats.

In that sense, the new approach would defuse the current crisis over North Korea’s threat to test its long-range missile but could leave open the possibility of a future crisis if North Korea should decide to deploy such missiles.

Analysts of North Korean behavior have long argued that Pyongyang is particularly adept at what are called “salami tactics”--that is, offering thin slices of concessions in exchange for rewards from those with whom it is negotiating.

Asked this week whether the North Korean regime has yet said for sure it will test its missile, a senior U.S. official said with a sigh: “They never give an answer on anything. They are continuous hagglers.”

The administration has been negotiating with North Korea in Geneva, where U.S. special envoy Charles Kartman has met several times with Vice Foreign Minister Kim Gye Gwan.

Any agreement by the administration to remove North Korea from the Trading With the Enemy Act, which provides the legal basis for the U.S. trade embargo, would have to be approved by Congress.

The administration was supposed to have submitted Perry’s report and recommendations on North Korea to Congress this spring. But it delayed doing so until after Perry and other U.S. officials could seek to work out some agreement in talks with the regime.

U.S. officials now say they plan to present their North Korea policy, including any agreement reached on missile testing, to Capitol Hill next month. “We’ll be laying things out publicly when the Congress reconvenes,” said the senior U.S. official.

In 1994, the administration negotiated a detailed accord with North Korea in which Pyongyang agreed to freeze its program to develop nuclear weapons.

Under that deal, the United States agreed to supply heavy fuel oil for North Korean factories and organize funding for two nuclear reactors to provide additional energy for North Korea. The reactor project is going forward, largely with Japanese and South Korean money.

But the earlier agreement covered only nuclear weapons and not North Korea’s missile program. Pyongyang officials argue that it is their sovereign right to develop missiles.

Some U.S. analysts believe that the North Korean leadership won’t be willing to give up the missile program because it believes the missiles are essential for security at a time when its conventional forces are losing ground to the United States and South Korea.