Kevin of Big Hominid looks at Howard Dean’s platform on North Korea, doesn’t like what he sees.
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Kevin of Big Hominid looks at Howard Dean’s platform on North Korea, doesn’t like what he sees.
2 Comments
All the Korea bloggers seem to agree that the key issue in any agreement is verification. Most of them go on to say that meaningful verification is essentially impossible. So should we abandon all hopes for a deal?
I don’t think so. We must simply take into account the fact that North Korea is going to cheat. Nevertheless, a deal might still be worthwhile if we can make the Norks give up enough up front, and we don’t give up too much that can’t be rescinded later. Is it reasonable to think that we could make them dismantle known nuclear facilities? That would set back their programs by several years. In return we give food and fuel (which we can halt) and a nonaggression pact, a mere scrap of paper.
How would we know when they have cheated enough so that we need to cut off the aid? I say that we can do it at the time of our choosing. Accuse them of any violation that we even suspect may be occuring. If they don’t prove the accusation baseless, we cut off the aid and nullify the security assurances. They can’t so easily rebuild the facilities that have been dismantled. Of course, that only works if we have a President willing to take the necessary action. That won’t happen if he is distracted (say, with a crisis over Taiwan), or if he merely wishes to sweep foreign policy problems under the rug (Clinton), or if he is an outright idiotarian (Carter). But unless the North collapses or we are willing to launch a war, it seems like the only way to achieve anything on this issue.
Great Satan makes very good points (by the way, I keep a severed goat head on a candlelit altar, Evil Master). My own feeling is that we should be working actively toward the collapse of the NK regime with as few concessions as possible. I agree we could treat any nonaggression pact as a mere scrap of paper– since that’s how NK’s behaved (and as Kirk of It Makes a Difference to the Sheep points out, we’ve had our own history of behaving this way, anyway).
But that paper will be seized on by asshole countries who’ll cry foul the moment we say “fuck the pact.” This is important, not because we need to cower before world opinion, but because there are practical diplomatic issues that arise from this. Another reason not to have a written pact is the ideological ammunition it gives the NK government against its own people: “See? See? We ARE powerful! We forced the evil Americans’ hand and now they’ve signed a nonaggression treaty! T’ong-il man-sae!!” It’s a poisonous meme to pile onto the other poisonous memes floating around inside the heads of the NK citizenry. I see the NK situation as a problem on several fronts, not least of which is (as it is in the Middle East right now) a battle for the minds of the populace.
Just my opinion, for what it’s worth.
Kevin