Redstate

The Truth Gets in the Way of a Legacy Project

By Mark I Posted in Condoleezza Rice | Foreign Affairs | North Korea | six-party talks — Comments (10) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

Jay Lefkowitz is President Bush’s Special Envoy to North Korea on human rights issues. As such, he has had a chance to study the way the North Korean regime operates, often from the inside, and has formulated some conclusions about the six-party talks on North Korea’s nuclear weapons programs. He is not optimistic.

In a speech at the American Enterprise Institute last week, Mr. Lefkowitz called for a new strategy in dealing with North Korea’s intransigence on both the human rights and nuclear front. But before that can happen, there must be an understanding that the current negotiating framework is failing. Mr. Lefkowitz delivered a sober, rational, and convincing speech that examined the history of negotiations with Pyongyang and looked at the underlying reasons why North Korea, and indeed all dictatorial regimes, behaves the way it does.

His reward for his insights and his calm and reasoned look at U.S. policy toward North Korea was a public rebuke from none other than Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Secretary Rice, it seems, is increasingly becoming a creature of the establishment at the State Department, unwilling to sacrifice talking for the sake of concrete actions.

Read on…

Here is the primary offending passage from Mr. Lefkowitz’s speech:

About this time last year, the North Korean regime and the other five negotiating parties reached the February 13 agreement, under which North Korea promised the abandonment of one of its known nuclear facilities and the full disclosure of all nuclear activities in return for economic and energy assistance and other inducements, including the normalization of relations. An initial requirement that North Korea “discuss” all its nuclear activities within 60 days of the agreement was not met, and it has since missed a December 31 deadline to disclose fully its activities. Recently, the regime said it will strengthen its “war deterrent.”

This is rather unfortunate as it signals that North Korea is not serious about disarming in a timely manner. It is a regrettable development for our security, but it is also bad for North Korea. It is unlikely the regime will get from the international community a better deal than the current one.

In other recent developments, the Congressional Research Service noted in a study last month that there are “reports from reputable sources that North Korea has provided arms and possibly training to Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka… two of the most active terrorist groups…” This comes on the heels of widespread reports that North Korea may have been engaging in nuclear proliferation to Syria, which likely prompted the preemptive air strike by Israel four months ago.

Taken together, these developments should remind us that North Korea remains one of the hardest foreign policy problems for the U.S. to solve. Its conduct does not appear to be that of a government that is willing to come in from the cold. Moreover, it is increasingly clear that North Korea will remain in its present nuclear status when the Administration leaves office in one year. (my emphasis)

But Lefkowitz isn’t just a pessimist. He bases his criticism on an understanding of dictatorships, their motivations, and North Korea in particular. Later in his talk, he examines North Korea’s record on human rights in the context of its threats to its neighbors and concludes, rightly, that the two are not unrelated.

[W]ith a government such as North Korea’s, an inherently fragile regime desperately clinging to power, the same forces that drive it to mistreat its own people also explain its threatening conduct toward its neighbors. Often, we find that repressive regimes create enemies abroad to justify their authoritarian rule at home. Certainly North Korea does this. If you look at the Korean Central News Agency, its propaganda organ, seldom does a week go by in which it does not allege plotting by forces in the U.S., Japan or South Korea to invade the country and place it under imperial rule. Citizens are warned that they should be ever-watchful. Under such conditions, which the regime’s leaders know to be a fiction, extreme security measures are apparently justified at home. And so the state is “justified” in redoubling its defenses against foreign enemies, or so it declares.

The North Korean regime’s paranoia prevents it from allowing a liberalization of its statist economy, because it fears any liberalization that would make people less dependent on the government would contribute to its demise. Left destitute by this choice, North Korea must rely on foreign aid to survive and feed its people. But its paranoia about empowering its people at all prohibits [it] from accepting any of the monitoring and reform requirements that occasionally come with foreign aid. So instead, the regime extorts the aid granted by others. This is a major reason why it has pursued a nuclear program, why it stations thousands of artillery systems in reach of Seoul, and why it occasionally acts out well-planned and public diplomatic and military tantrums.

These are often intended to frighten the international community into giving patronage. Dictatorial regimes almost always threaten other nations, when they perceive it as necessary to their survival. What this shows is that security issues and human rights issues are linked inextricably. They both derive from the nature of the regime, and any long-term effort by the international community to alleviate security concerns in northeast Asia will have to seek to modify the nature of the regime.

Any government that treats its people with so little regard will inevitably challenge regional security, even if it did not have a nuclear weapons program. This is demonstrated clearly by North Korea’s non-nuclear affronts, like proliferating conventional weapons, narco-trafficking, counterfeiting U.S. currency and human trafficking. And, of course, how can one ever know with a regime as erratic as Pyongyang’s that it will not actually use its nuclear weapons or sell them to a terrorist bidder? (my emphasis)

This is a very real-world view that Mr. Lefkowitz is espousing. It is not in any way radical or an attack on the Administration’s current policy in the six-party talks. To the contrary, Lefkowitz goes on to praise the strategic rationale behind the talks; namely, that regional players like China and South Korea would assist in reigning in the North by acting out of their own national interests. Lefkowitz does not criticize this approach, he merely points out that it hasn’t worked. North Korea has failed to dismantle its nuclear facility at Yongbyon and disclose all of its nuclear weapons programs. Instead, it has resumed issuing threats, no doubt in an attempt to win further concessions at the talks.

But Secretary Rice is too engaged in the process for the sake of hers and the Administration’s legacy to allow any critique of the talks, even reasoned ones, to go unchallenged. Rice went out of her way to discredit Lefkowitz by pointing out that he is not involved in the six-party talks and doesn’t speak with authority on U.S. policy in them.

“He's the human rights envoy. That's what he knows. That's what he does. He doesn't work on the six-party talks. He doesn't know what's going on in the six-party talks and he certainly has no say in the six-party talks.”

Lefkowitz never claimed to be a participant in the six-party talks. He states flat out in his remarks that human rights is not and never has been a part of the negotiations. He is advocating for a change in the structure of the talks based upon the results that have been achieved thus far, which is to say, nothing. Lefkowitz sees human rights as essential to any negotiation with North Korea. Rice clearly does not. Perhaps this is because the Bush Administration is hurrying to tie up loose ends in its final year in office. This isn’t altogether a bad thing, unless in the rush to solidify a legacy the Administration makes bad deals just for the sake of making any deal.

Only the most unrealistic observer of North Korea’s past behavior could possibly believe that Lefkowitz is off the mark when he says that it is increasingly likely that the North will still be nuclear armed at the end of the Bush Administration’s term. North Korea cannot be trusted in negotiations no matter what promises they make, who vouches for them, or what intermediate steps they may take. The United States will only know that the North is living up to its agreements when it can get in the country and independently verify the claims of progress. As an old Soviet Union expert, Rice understands this. But it appears in this case that the Secretary is more interested in protecting a fragile and thus far fruitless negotiation than she is in actually achieving long-term results.

In the world where holding a meeting is not considered an accomplishment, the six-party talks have been a worthwhile disappointment. The Bush Administration was right to engage in them in an attempt to solve the nuclear issue on the Korean peninsula. But, it would do well to remember why there is a nuclear issue to begin with. In 2002, it caught North Korea cheating on the 1994 Agreed Framework, the last agreement in which the North promised to forego development of nuclear weapons in exchange for certain concessions from the United States. Having paid no substantial penalty for violating that deal, the North is negotiating another one which it will certainly break whenever it feels the need. Secretary Rice should heed Lefkowitz’s observations, not dismiss them. And she should familiarize herself with the axiom: once bitten, twice shy.