-Caveat Lector-
Hawks vs. Wimps
The White House blames the Clinton administration for appeasing North Korea. But is
Bush softer than his predecessor on Pyongyang?
NEWSWEEK WEB EXCLUSIVE
Jan. 7 — At some point, foreign policy always boils down to sheer machismo: who has
the biggest army, the biggest economy, the biggest allies or the biggest bluff. You can
dance around with diplomatic niceties, but there is also something much more basic
behind the scenes of international affairs.
SO WITH A LOOMING war against Iraq and a
showdown with North Korea, what seems most likely to trigger the most swaggering
displays of machismo? The number of names we can call Saddam Hussein? The
number of nukes in Pyongyang? No. The most bitter and personal dispute rumbling
through Washington is the age-old battle between the Clinton and Bush
administrations.
This time the battleground is North Korea, and it has two main fronts. The first
is the
Republicans’ finger-in-the-eye taunt that the Democrats were soft on the Stalinist
state.
The second is the more meaningful Dem hand-wringing over Washington’s worsening
relations with its long-standing allies in the South.
So who’s more hawkish and who’s more wimpish against the North?
In 1994, as the Clinton folks got their first taste of a nuclear crisis on the
Korean
peninsula, the Pentagon drew up plans to launch strikes on the North’s Yongbyon
nuclear plant. Former Pentagon officials from that era say they were ready to take out
the nuclear plant if diplomacy failed, even if that triggered a devastating attack by
the
North on the South.
Whether or not President Clinton himself was in fact ready to trigger a war —and
huge bloodshed—in the South remains open to debate. Either way, the Clinton White
House faced the same problems as the Bush White House: tepid support from the
region. Japan, then struggling with a new government, expressed its serious doubts
about U.S. forces using Japanese bases to strike at North Korea. Tokyo was even soft
on the lesser steps of imposing a trade embargo or maritime blockade.
The Bushies’ response to that bit of realpolitik: what was the point of drawing up
strike plans if you could not put them into effect?
According to conservatives, what took place instead was a self-delusional act of
appeasement by the Clinton administration. The 1994 negotiations bribed the North to
mothball its nuclear program in exchange for huge amounts of aid. Part of that package,
enshrined in the so-called Agreed Framework, was international support to build two
supposedly safer civilian nuclear reactors. For those conservatives, the only thing
worse
than the deal was the fact that former President Jimmy Carter was its initial broker.
“These are the people who created this problem,” says one. “Goebbels would be proud
of this stuff. They are trying to reinvent themselves.”
The Bushies’ disgust at these Clinton-era policies was clear throughout the 2000
presidential campaign. When 100,000 North Koreans entertained Madeleine Albright,
then Secretary of State, in Pyongyang sports stadium in October 2000, Bush’s advisers
were spitting with fury. “Dancing with slaves,” is what Paul Wolfowitz, now deputy
Defense Secretary, fumed on the campaign trail.
So the Clintonistas were the wimps, right? Not exactly. Those plans to launch
military
strikes were real, and reflected just how serious a threat the North’s nuclear program
posed to U.S. national security, according to senior Clinton officials.
As for the negotiations, they were far more realistic than the current
administration’s
no-talks policy, the former Clinton folks insist. The Bush administration’s hard-line
position is only serving to alienate our allies in the South and will finally give way
to a
negotiated deal, they argue. Their view: if you’re not going to war, you have to talk
with
your opponents.
Would President Bush consider military strikes? Is he really more dovish than his
predecessor? According to White House officials, the Clinton-era military plan is not
even on the list of ideas under discussion.
“What they are trying to avoid at all costs is looking like the Clinton
administration,”
says Kurt Campbell, a senior Clinton Pentagon official for Asia and now senior vice-
president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “You
can’t imagine how much they hated everything the Clinton administration stood for.
There is a personal dimension, because of the defeat of [Bush’s] father, that cannot be
underestimated. But they are starting to finesse the line that they don’t negotiate,
and
that is a smart thing to do. There will be informal talks, then some multilateral
arrangement, with China, Russia and Japan negotiating together with the U.S.”
In the meantime, the Bush administration’s tough talk is serving to strain ties
further
with Seoul. Relations with the South were hurt in the first months of the Bush
administration when President Kim Dae Jung visited the White House in 2001.
Secretary of State Powell pledged to pick up where the Clinton officials had left off,
suggesting more engagement with the North. But the next day, sitting alongside
President Kim, President Bush dismissed the idea of talks until there was “complete
verification” of previous agreements with Pyongyang.
Administration officials did little to hide their glee at the prospect of
President Kim
being replaced with a conservative hardliner, Lee Hoi Chang, in last year’s elections.
Instead Roh Moo Hyun, a center-left former human rights lawyer, won power with the
promise of greater dialogue with the North.
“In reality the Bush administration faces not one crisis but two,” says Campbell.
“One
is the crisis involving nuclear weapons in the North. The second is the crisis of
confidence with our allies in the South.”
State Department officials dismiss such talk, citing Seoul’s agreement to cut fuel
oil
shipments to the North last year and frequent contacts between U.S. and South Korean
officials throughout the current crisis. “The bottom line is that we in the U.S.
government
have expressed support for the South Korean policy of dialogue with North Korea,” said
one senior State Department official.
Up to a point. Dialogue is fine as long as it does not tip into negotiations or, in
diplomatic terms, quid pro quos. But for many in the White House and State
Department, even such a basic dialogue with one of the founder members of the axis of
evil remains unpalatable. While that remains the case, Seoul’s negotiations may never
win the critical support they need in Washington, and the U.S. dialogue may never
reach a successful conclusion.
“There is something about the way they are approaching Korea that strikes me as
being fundamentally driven by the ideology of moral clarity,” says Robert Gallucci, the
Clinton official who negotiated the 1994 agreement with the North. “That is limiting
flexibility and limiting their options. What it’s not producing is clarity of purpose,
or
analysis of the importance of the tensions our allies feel.”
On that point there may be some agreement between the Clinton folks and at least
some of the Bushies. Clarity, both sides agree, is lacking in U.S. policy to North
Korea.
Just this week, Washington agreed to allow United Nations nuclear inspectors to delay
referring Pyongyang’s violations to the Security Council for sanctions. That breathing
space appears to undermine the administration’s stated desire of maintaining the
pressure on Pyongyang.
Then there was the case of the shipment of Scud missiles from North Korea to
Yemen last month. When Spanish forces intercepted the Scuds in the Arabian Sea at
the request of the U.S., the White House subsequently let the ship go free. The
decision had more to do with Yemen than Pyongyang: the Bush administration realized
late in the day that it needed to keep the Yemeni government happy as it pursued Al
Qaeda terrorists in the region. But the stern message to North Korea—and other rogue
states trading in weapons—was deeply compromised.
President Bush repeatedly says he will not allow “the world’s most dangerous
regimes to threaten us with the world’s most dangerous weapons”. How he goes about
doing that in North Korea is likely to be as tough a test of machismo as any military
conflict in Iraq.
http://www.msnbc.com/news/856221.asp?cp1=1
© 2003 Newsweek, Inc.
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