Bluff and Bluster Never Are Effective With North Korea

It is no surprise that North Korea is reviving efforts to reconcile with South Korea and will soon reopen long-stalled normalization talks with Japan. North Korea has even been waiting since April to resume arms talks with the United States. Yet North Korea is now warning that it may break the October 1994 “agreed framework” with the U.S. that froze its nuclear arms program. What is the North up to?

North Korea’s talks with South Korea, Japan and the U.S. are a continuation of a decade-old effort by North Korea to end enmity with its Cold War rivals. In the late 1980s, the North’s longtime ruler, the late Kim Il Sung, decided to give up his country’s nuclear arms program in return for ending adversarial relations with the United States. At the same time, Pyongyang has threatened to resume nuclear bomb-making as a way of pressuring Washington to live up to its end of the bargain--delivering a replacement reactor by 2003, easing economic sanctions and taking other steps to end enmity.

When Washington was slow to do so from 1995 to 1998, Pyongyang threatened to break the accord. It has now also demanded electricity to compensate for the delay in constructing the reactor.

Pyongyang has now been applying the same tactics with its missiles. Starting in 1998, it expressed readiness to freeze its missile program. It may eventually be willing to give up that program and ease its artillery threat to Seoul as well, but North Korea’s tough bargaining has led many foreign policy observers to accuse Pyongyang of engaging in blackmail to coerce economic aid without giving up anything significant in return. It is not. It is simply playing a diplomatic game of tit for tat, cooperating whenever the U.S. cooperates and retaliating when Washington reneges.

Over the years, the U.S. did improve relations with North Korea, and in October 2000 the two countries issued a joint communique declaring that “neither government would have hostile intent toward the other.” North Korea’s latest threat to renege on the October 1994 agreed framework is its response to a Bush administration campaign to repudiate the “no hostile intent” pledge and unilaterally rewrite the agreed framework.

The Bush administration signaled this most clearly at a ceremony Aug. 7 in North Korea to mark the belated pouring of concrete for the first light-water nuclear reactor to be built under the accord. It was here that administration officials renewed their insistence that Pyongyang cooperate immediately with inspectors of the the United Nations’ International Atomic Energy Agency, or IAEA, who want to determine how much plutonium North Korea has produced.

However desirable knowing that may be, the North is not obliged to do so until 2005, when construction of the long-delayed reactor nears completion, according to Robert Gallucci, chief U.S. negotiator with North Korea during the Clinton administration. The Bush administration’s “unilateral reinterpretation of the agreed framework

It seems as if the unilateralists on the right wing of the Bush administration are eager to trash the agreed framework, no matter what. That would be foolish because last year Pyongyang hinted that it was willing to make a deal to trade electricity for inspections. Its latest statement on this subject, on Aug. 13, makes that offer more explicit and adds that the North “will move if the U.S. does.” It also reiterates its tit-for-tat threat to break the accord if Washington proves unwilling to deal.

Diplomatic give and take also offers the best way to address the administration’s other nuclear concerns. Undersecretary of State John Bolton has accused North Korea, along with Iraq, of having “covert nuclear weapons programs, in violation of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.” On June 1, referring to North Korea as well as Iraq, President Bush threatened to “confront the worst threats before they emerge.”

But even if other nuclear sites do exist in North Korea, how can they be attacked without knowing their precise location? Saber rattling also puts the U.S. squarely in the way of North-South reconciliation and antagonizes Japan and China as well.

Bluffing has never worked before with Pyongyang, and it won’t work now. Sooner or later, every president since Ronald Reagan has given diplomatic give and take a try, to good effect. President Bush needs to take a lesson from his predecessors and do the same.

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Leon V. Sigal is director of the Northeast Asia Cooperative Security Project at the Social Science Research Council in New York and author of “Disarming Strangers: Nuclear Diplomacy With North Korea” (Princeton University Press, 1998).