부시행정부의 실패한 대북 정책
-워싱턴한미기업연구소 책임연구원, 피터 벡
부시 행정부가 사담 후세인과 MD에 집중함으로써 미국 안보의 최대 위협이 될 수 있는 북한 핵위협을 등한시하고 있다. 문제해결을 위한 잘못된 우선 순위와 의미있는 외교정책의 실패로 미국은 위기를 맞고 있다. 조만간 맞이하게 될 이 위기는 부시 행정부의 세가지 실패한 대북정책에 기인한다.
첫째로, 미국은 북한을 있는 그대로 이해하고 받아들이는데 실패하였다. 그동안 북한 김정일정권의 생존능력은 과소평가되어 왔었다. 1994년을 전후하여 예상되었던 김정일 정권의 붕괴는 일어나지 않았으며 현재, 오히려 미국의 정권 교체가 임박한 상황이다. 또한 2002년 여름, 북한은 괄목한 만한 경제개혁 조치를 북한 경제에 도입하였으며 이는 20년전 중국의 경제개혁과 비슷한 양상을 띄고 있다.
둘째로, 북한과의 의미있는 협상에 실패하였다. 부시대통령은 취임직후부터 클린턴의 대북정책을 전면 부정하며 북한과의 협상과 대화를 거부하였다. 하지만 부시 행정부는 지난 6개월간의 대북정책을 점검해 본 이후 1994년 제네바 합의틀을 마지못해 수용하면서 ‘언제 어디서든 조건없이 만날 것’을 북한에 제안하고 있다.
셋째로, 북한의 핵개발을 부축였다는 점이다. 미국은 계속해서 북한이 ‘리비아식 모델’을 따르기를 촉구하고 있으나 이는 리비아식 문제해결이 수년간의 협상과 대화의 결과였다는 점을 간과하고 있는 것이다.
THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION’S FAILED NORTH KOREA POLICY
by Peter M. Beck, inspired by presentation at Ecumenical Advocacy Days,
6 March 2004, revised 14 April 2004.
The United States is currently engaged in a vigorous debate as to whether President Bush’s obsession with a severely weakened and contained Saddam Hussein and the building of a missile defense system that may or may not work in my lifetime blinded him from dealing with the most serious threat to America’s national security, Al Qaeda, and (until recently), Osama bin “Forgotten.” I would argue that the Bush Administration’s mishandling of the North Korean nuclear threat has left us with a looming crisis that if not managed properly could be many times more horrific than the tragedy of September 11. Thanks to misplaced priorities and an utter lack of meaningful diplomacy, we are left between Iraq and a hard place (pardon the pun) when it comes to North Korea.
I would like to focus on three failures of the Bush Administration’s North Korea policy that are responsible for the crisis we will soon face. The first failure is the inability to understand and accept North Korea the way it is, not the way we would like it to be. There is no question that Kim Jong Il heads a brutal and odious regime. For the second year in a row, Parade Magazine recently selected him as the world’s worst dictator. One of the newsweeklies had an absurd cover featuring “Dr. Evil.” Even the New Yorker, the bastion of America’s liberal intelligentsia, had a cover story last fall with the title, “Kim Jong Il: How Crazy is He?” The American media has so thoroughly demonized Kim Jong Il that he is clearly America’s public enemy number one. President Bush told the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward that he “loathes” Kim Jong Il. Yet, we must ask ourselves if such caricatures and emotionalism serve America’s national interest.
To borrow a word coined by President Bush, North Korea watchers have consistently “misunderestimated” the North Korean regime’s capacity to survive since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Hope springs eternal, especially inside the Beltway, that the North will be the next regime to quietly and neatly fall, solving all of our problems. This inability to correctly understand North Korea cripples us from developing effective policies for dealing with it. Many analysts and politicians paid little attention to the wording of the Agreed Framework that was signed in 1994 to end our last crisis with North Korea because it was assumed the regime would be long gone before the two nuclear reactors the framework promised would be finished. Ten years and over a billion dollars later, regime change is much more likely to occur in Washington before Pyongyang.
Misjudging North Korea continues unabated. In the summer of 2002, the North implemented its most significant economic reforms since the founding of the regime in 1948. Yet, the currency, wage and price reforms, as well as the official recognition of thriving private markets, were dismissed by most analysts as being too little, too late. In 2003, the Institute for International Economics’ Marcus Noland went so far as to argue that the reforms could be the beginning of the end because they would lead to instability and bring down the regime. Today, analysts like Dominique Dwor-Frecaut in Hong Kong, Special Administrative Region of China are arguing that the reforms have had a positive and stabilizing effect on the economy. Change in the North is unlikely to occur at the pace the outside world would prefer, but significant changes are taking place. Moreover, these are precisely the types of reforms we encouraged another brutal, nominally Communist regime to undertake more than 20 years ago, the People’s Republic of China.
I should point out that our government does have people at the State Department and intelligence agencies, who understand and can interpret North Korea’s words and actions properly. From Secretary Powell (who served in Korea) down to the working level, we have a good dozen people at State alone with a deep, balanced and nuanced understanding of North Korea, but as we saw in the case of Iraq, this is an administration that is so ideologically driven that it has already made up its mind and does not want to listen to alternative views. Sadly, our diplomats and intelligence analysts are generally unable to do their jobs or are ignored when it comes to North Korea.
A second and more serious Bush Administration failure is the inability to engage in meaningful negotiations with North Korea. When the Bushies took power in 2001, there was a clear aversion to continuing the policy of engagement with the North begun by Bill Clinton. The attitude became known as the “Anything but Clinton” (ABC) approach to policymaking. However, after a six-month review, the Bush Administration reluctantly decided to uphold the 1994 Agreed Framework and supposedly offered to meet with the North “anytime, anywhere, with no preconditions.” Amazingly, it took another year before such flexibility led the two sides to hold an actual meeting. By then there was growing evidence in the intelligence community that the North was cheating on the Agreed Framework. It had begun a heavily enriched uranium program thanks to the help of our good friend Pakistan, using our very own donated C-130 cargo plane. Consequently, the first meeting turned into a confrontation rather than a dialogue. However, the stage had already been set months earlier for a spiralling downward thanks to President Bush’s former speech writer, [Canadian] David Frum.
Soon after President Bush gave his 2002 State of the Union speech in which he declared North Korea to be a charter member of the “Axis of Evil” (Frum’s wife later boasted to friends that he had coined the expression), I wrote a column in the Korean daily Dong-a Ilbo in which I stated that if the Bush Administration needed a lesson in name-calling and brinkmanship, the North Koreans will be more than happy to provide it. They did not disappoint. The North proceeded to cross several red lines that under the Clinton Administration would have led to a pre-emptive strike, which would have more than likely led to a devastating war. As the Nautilus Institute’s Peter Hayes put it at a Washington conference earlier this year, the United States was hit over the head with a plutonium hammer and the Bush Administration just sat there.
China became so worried that the deepening crisis would lead to war that it decided to take the unprecedented step last year of twisting Pyongyang and Washington’s arms to come to the negotiating table. Bush’s former point person for North Korea, Jack Pritchard, has stated that there would be no talks were it not for Beijing’s active intervention. Unfortunately, one round of three-party talks and two rounds of six-party talks have accomplished little, if anything. Our lead negotiator, Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly, for whom I have the utmost respect, has entered into the meetings with both hands firmly tied behind his back. He has been reduced to reading statements
prepared by the most hawkish elements of the administration. At the second round of six-party talks in February, news reports have suggested that when the North Koreans asked what they would receive if they gave up their nuclear programs, they did not receive an answer. Until the Bush Administration decides to engage in serious negotiations with the North, the Six Party Talks will be virtually meaningless. As Pritchard himself put it in an op-ed for the New York Times, it is time for Washington to stop hiding behind China’s skirt and actually talk to the North. Unfortunately, the neocons refuse to allow the State Department to engage in meaningful negotiations.
At the heart of the Bush Administration’s current objective vis-a-vis North Korea is a slogan that all officials are required to repeat over and over in public: “the complete, verifiable, irreversible dismantlement” (CVID) of North Korea’s nuclear programs. Such a policy begs a question?given the thousands of tunnels and holes in the ground that North Korea has dug over the years, short of regime change, just how exactly can we verify that any dismantlement is complete, much less irreversible? Moreover, the Bush Administration refuses to explicitly state what the North will receive in return for compliance. In a sense, we are telling the North, take off your clothes, and then we can talk. As if this were not enough to block any potential breakthroughs, the State Department’s director of policy planning, Mitchell Reiss, set the bar even higher on March 12 in a speech at the Heritage Foundation. In order to gain economic assistance from the United States, he insisted that the North must completely revamp its economy. How many adjustments can we expect North Korea to undertake all at once? Or, like pressing North Korea on its human rights record, is this just a signal that short of regime change, there can be no deal with the North?
Bush Administration officials like to cite the example of Libya’s decision earlier this year to unilaterally give up its entire WMD program almost as much as chanting the CVID mantra. There are just two not insignificant problems with the Libyan model. First, given the much more advanced stage of North Korea’s WMD programs, it has much more to lose domestically and internationally if it were to capitulate to the United States. Second, one significant aspect of the “Libyan model” is that the breakthrough was preceded by years of talks and months of intensive negotiations, something that has not and is not occurring with North Korea. Divisions within the Bush Administration over how to deal with North Korea have led to mixed signals that have severely undermined efforts to get North Korea to comply with our wishes. One day the message is “let’s talk,” the next it is a reversion to name-calling and threats. According to Chris Nelson’s Nelson Report, one Washington wag has found a more accurate meaning for CVID: Confusion, vacillation, indecision and delay.
This leads me to the third Bush Administration failure, which is the most serious of all, namely, North Korea’s nuclear breakout. I have discussed the Administration’s unwillingness to engage in negotiations with North Korea.
What are our other options? I am quite sure that if the neocon chicken hawks could have their way, they would favor a pre-emptive strike on the North. The problem is, not only would we risk a cataclysmic war, our intelligence agencies do not know where the heavily enriched uranium program (not to mention the 8,000 spent fuel rods that had been monitored by the IAEA) is located. Moreover, given the quagmire in Iraq, even the most rabid hawk recognizes that the United States has all of the regime change it can handle right now. The third option is to try to place an economic noose around North Korea’s neck and attempt a strangulation through sanctions and coercive diplomacy, but without the active participation of China and South Korea such a strategy would more than likely fail. At present, Beijing and Seoul are equally frustrated with Washington and Pyongyang’s intransigence. The fourth and final option is the one being followed at present, which I call the “Waiting for Godot” approach: Allow the North to continue its nuclear programs and pray that the North will capitulate or collapse. By the end of this year, the North could go from having zero to two nuclear devices to having 8 to 10. Not knowing what North Korea has already produced or is currently developing is yet another intelligence debacle in the making. I am not worried about North Korea being able to strike the United States with an intercontinental ballistic missile anytime soon, but I am very concerned that the North could try to sell a device or reprocessed nuclear material to the highest bidder. Given the North’s track record of selling drugs, missiles and other illicit goods, we must assume that nuclear material would expand their limited product line. This is utterly and completely unacceptable. Unfortunately, refusing to use carrots and lacking the proper sticks has eviscerated the efforts of the Bush Administration to defuse the looming crisis with North Korea.
It should be pointed out that the Clinton and Kim Dae-jung Administrations’ approaches to North Korea also fell well short of achieving our goals. Clinton’s policy of benign neglect was only a marginal improvement over the current Bush policy of malign neglect. The Clinton team only devoted attention to North Korea when it engaged in bad behavior. After the crisis of 1994, the North was essentially ignored until it test fired a missile over Japan in 1998. Despite a useful roadmap crafted by former Secretary of Defense William Perry, Clinton dropped the ball again until the waning days of his term when he was scrambling to try to build a foreign policy legacy. The Kim Dae-jung Administration’s approach of throwing money at the North also did not yield an era of peace and prosperity that the South Korean public had hoped for. Opponents of engagement draw on the Clinton-Kim record to conclude that this decade of disappointment means that we should not negotiate such an odious and untrustworthy regime. Pessimists like the American Enterprise Institute’s Nicholas Eberstadt argue that the North’s track record proves that the North is not engagable, but he has yet to offer an alternative solution that will allow us to achieve our goal of a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula peacefully. I would argue that the proper lessons to take from the past decade are that any future deals must be front-loaded, rather than back-loaded like the Agreed Framework was, and assistance to the North should be conditional and not take the form of cash.
Negotiating with the North is exasperating and difficult under the best of circumstances, but that does not mean that we should just give up. The alternatives, a nuclear breakout or war, are unacceptable. As flawed as the Agreed Framework was, at least it froze the North’s most immediate nuclear breakout threat. Ultimately, engagement with North Korea is an uncertain proposition. It is entirely possible that the North will not give up its nuclear option under any circumstances, but we will not know until we try.
I would argue that we have been undertaking just such a gamble with the People’s Republic of China for the past 30 years. President Nixon (of all people) decided that it was in America’s national interest to engage China. Yet, despite having the fastest growing economy in the world, China remains a brutal dictatorship. I would venture that if we added up the number of people actively opposed to the Chinese regime who are being jailed, re-educated, and/or repressed, including residents of Tibet, Xinjiang, Hong Kong, Special Administrative Region of China members of Falun Gong, and democracy advocates, it would exceed the entire population of North Korea. Not only is there no guarantee that China will remain our ally or become a democracy anytime soon, but if it follows through on its threat to invade Taiwan(Province of China), then our engagement gamble will clearly have failed. However, it is a risk that a majority of both Democrats and Republicans have been willing to take because it is deemed in America’s national interest to do so. America has plenty of unsavory allies. Pakistan, The leader of the world’s worst nuclear proliferator over the past 50 years (as the New York Times’ David Sanger put it), had the red carpet rolled out when President Musharaf visited Washington last year because he is supposedly helping in the war on terrorism. As the saying goes, with friends like this, who needs enemies?
I would like to close on a more positive note. Despite our own government’s failure to engage North Korea, a whole range of American, European and South Korean humanitarian groups are trying to help the North Korean people and coax the country to take the path of peace. I would like to just mention a few groups that I am personally familiar with. The East Coast-based Eugene Bell Foundation has been working tirelessly to fight TB in North Korea. Caritas, the humanitarian relief arm of the Catholic Church, has been providing food to hungry North Korean children for almost a decade through its office in Hong Kong, Special Administrative Region of China. The heads of both programs have made dozens of trips to North Korea and are two of the greatest resources for understanding North Korea. The Korea Society in New York is helping Syracuse University and the Kim Chaek University of Technology develop an educational exchange program. Through patience and persistence, these organizations have built the type of trust that is so lacking between our two governments.
The Bush Administration seems content to essentially ignore North Korea until after the presidential election. Given the preferences of the neocons, “Waiting for Godot” is better than a horrific war. At a minimum, this gives Americans an opportunity to vote for leaders committed to pursuing peace rather than war, whether that war is by design, default, or miscalculation. We must support people like Republican House member Kurt Weldon of Pennsylvania, who has steadfastly tried to engage North Korea despite endless roadblocks put up by the Bush Administration, and groups trying to help build pathways to mutual understanding with North Korea. We must not let the Bush Administration’s foreign policy failures become a tragedy for the Korean Peninsula and yet another nightmare for the world.
정부지원금 0%, 회원의 회비로 운영됩니다
참여연대 후원/회원가입