Kim has provided Obama a teachable moment

Tony Karon

The nasty surprise that the U.S. president Barack Obama received from North Korea’s latest round of pyrotechnics should serve as a warning: North Korea is not the only foreign policy time bomb left behind by the Bush administration, although this one may contain lessons that could help Obama avert disaster on other fronts.

Consider: the North Korea dossier as inherited by Obama would have reported that the “Six Party Talks”, involving Pyongyang and the US, Russia, China, South Korea and Japan were stalled, with North Korea boycotting the forum to demand more concessions in exchange for freezing its nuclear programme. But with the North Korean economy moribund, the assessment was that Pyongyang would have no choice but to back down and rejoin the talks on the terms set by Washington. Until then, the Obama administration appeared inclined to ignore North Korea while addressing more pressing crises such as Iran and Pakistan.

Bad idea. North Korea’s regime does not like to be ignored, left to stew in its own juices while the world’s last superpower dispatches envoys to the Middle East and South Asia and its president begins an elaborate courtship of Iran. Pyongyang has learnt that nothing quite grabs Washington’s attention like testing a nuclear weapon.

anything that could destabilise the regime and more importantly, creates a real opening that could tempt it back into some sort of co-operation. Like Bush before him, Obama will not be able to avoid a response that seems to vindicate Pyongyang’s behaviour.

But the failure, here, is not really Obama’s; it’s a product of the catastrophic mess that was left to him. The U.S. secretary of state Colin Powell had been on the job a matter of days in 2001 when he sensibly suggested that the new Bush administration follow the 1994 framework agreement with North Korea concluded by the Clinton Administration. That deal involved Pyongyang freezing its nuclear programme in exchange for food and energy aid, and the promise of light water nuclear reactors. Both sides had accused each other of dragging their feet but a diplomatic process was underway. One of Clinton’s last acts in office was to send his secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, on a path-breaking mission to Pyongyang.

No sooner had Powell spoken up than he found himself repudiated – by his own president. Bush made clear that he had nothing but loathing for a tyrant who starved his own people. Overestimating Washington’s own power – in a manner that became his signature across the Middle East and Central Asia – Bush abandoned the deal. Talking to North Korea, his aides said, would reward its bad behaviour. Regime-change was the preferred option, even if that was a fantasy.

Pyongyang, for its part, demanded direct talks with the U.S., seeking recognition and security guarantees for its regime and a peace treaty to formally conclude the Korean War of a half-century earlier. Refusing to talk to North Korea got Bush nowhere, and eventually pressure from South Korea and China forced him to agree to talks with the “Six Party” framework created as a figleaf to allow Washington to deny it was caving in.

The Six-Party process dragged on, with North Korea periodically upping the ante through nuclear and missile tests. If “rewarding bad behaviour” was a concern, the Bush administration usually ended up doing it anyway, returning to the table even after North Korea had conducted its first nuclear tests precisely because the U.S.had no leverage to back its hardline rhetoric. The same thing is likely to happen again.

One lesson for Obama is that time is not on his side in deadlocked situations – delay usually means deterioration. North Korea has grown substantially more dangerous over the past eight years, not because it now has more nuclear devices to drop on others, but because the primary danger is that the cash-strapped regime will sell nuclear parts and know-how to others. In the deadlocked cases of Iran’s nuclear programme and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, too, time is working against the outcomes desired by the U.S.. That’s because – and this is a second key lesson taught by North Korea – a hardline position becomes empty rhetoric if it’s not backed by the leverage to impose your will. Bush had every reason to “loathe” Kim Jong-il but the US never had the means to unseat him.

A workable U.S.foreign policy requires recognising the limits of American power and pursuing the imperfect outcomes that are nonetheless preferable to high-minded failure, argues the former Bush administration state department official and president of the Council on Foreign Relations, Richard Haass. “One can imagine an Afghanistan or an Iraq that becomes a Jeffersonian democracy and an Iran or a North Korea that gets out of the nuclear business,” Haass wrote recently, “but such outcomes are improbable at best and more likely fantasy. Moreover, far greater involvement and investment would still fail to bring them about.” Better to seek “outcomes that are good enough and commensurate with interests and costs,” he argued, because “the United States is stretched economically and militarily. Better partial success we can afford than expensive failures we cannot.”

That logic requires a downsizing of U.S.goals in Iraq and Afghanistan. And in the case of Iran, it requires recognising that the Bush approach – multilateral talks via the European Union, in which Iran is offered economic incentives for agreeing to relinquish the right to enrich uranium – is going nowhere. If that remains the policy framework, the U.S.will be forced to either back down entirely, or else adopt coercive measures that eventually result in war. Indeed, the most urgent lesson on North Korea may be that not only does Obama need to break the mould of Bush-era diplomacy by dealing directly with the Iranians, but also that he needs to set realistic goals.


* Published in the UAE's THE NATIONAL on May 30,