[imText1]The greatest significance of the latest “breakthrough” in the six-party negotiations aimed at North Korea’s denuclearization is the reaffirmation that North Korea will never completely give up its nuclear weapons program. The February 13 Joint Agreement out of Beijing reaffirms that as long as North Korea dangles before its immeasurably richer and more powerful neighbors the possibility of one day dismantling its nuclear arsenal, North Korea is guaranteed to reap rewards. The much-heralded “agreement” among the United States, Japan, China, Russia, South Korea, and North Korea is a sobering reminder that the security threat that North Korea poses with its nuclear weapons is the one incontrovertible sufficient condition to North Korea’s continued regime preservation.
Energy, food, economic aid, and legitimacy are a necessary condition to the North Korean regime’s long-term survival, for the quintessential criminal regime of Kim Jong Il—despite its claims of juche (self-sufficiency)—is unable to function over the long-term without aid from abroad. At the same time, nuclear blackmail ensures the aid-dependent, economically moribund North Korean regime that it will continue to receive help and pose as a contender for pan-Korean legitimacy as long as it does not give up its nuclear weapons. For the Kim Jong Il regime, dismantling its nuclear arsenal would be tantamount to killing the irreplaceable goose that lays the golden egg and submitting itself before the perpetual good will of its neighbors—it would be exceedingly detrimental national policy.
Yet the United States and other concerned nations continue to chase illusions, with little regard for the lessons of history, devoutly wishing to believe that appeasement might actually one day work. As the Romantic poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, remarked, “If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us! But passion and party blind our eyes, and the light which experience gives us is a lantern on the stern which shines only on the waves behind us!” Indeed, since the first North Korean nuclear crisis flared up in the early 1990s, the U.S. has intermittently been a willing reveler riding the merry-go-round that is the denuclearization drama produced and directed by Pyongyang, driven more by a patronizing impulse to change the North Korean hereditary dictatorship and partisan politics at home rather than consideration of the peculiarities of the Korean peninsula. It is a sad tale in which “passion and party” have persistently trumped reality.
Even a cursory look over North Korea’s nuclear politics over the past fifteen years shows that North Korea has not faced, and, all the more in the present climate of appeasement, does not face, any compelling reason to come into compliance with its international obligations. Not only has the North not paid any real penalty for its numerous violations of international agreements and transgressions against the norms of international relations, but such violations and transgressions have virtually without fail expeditiously led to generous rewards! The international community has repeatedly shown North Korea that its preferred mode of operation, particularly in the face of the most blatant kind of non-compliance, is a new and stronger dose of appeasement.
As to the possibility of the Joint Agreement out of Beijing leading to the complete and irreversible dismantlement of North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, well, in theory, almost anything in life is possible. For instance, it is, in theory, possible that Kim Jong Il could play a round of golf one morning and score a hole-in-one on every par (as his propagandists would have you believe), then in the afternoon walk down to the neighborhood convenience store and buy a lottery ticket and actually pick the winning numbers (if only he happened to be in a country other than his own socialist utopia), and proceed to be struck by lightning as he exits the store (the North’s propaganda that “General Kim Jong Il rode down to earth from Heaven on lightning bolts” notwithstanding).
Likewise, it is theoretically possible that Kim Jong Il will wake up one day an apostle of peace, democracy, and denuclearization. However, if past behavior is any indication of future behavior, North Korea’s strategy of survival through nuclear blackmail and the international community’s infatuation with appeasing the Kim family regime rather strongly suggests that the ultimate goal of the six-party talks—the irreversible denuclearization of North Korea—is unattainable through the current policy of appeasement. It seems that out of the six parties in the denuclearization talks, North Korea stands alone in recognizing that there is no place for chimeraphilia in nuclear diplomacy.
North Korea’s strategy of national survival is firmly founded in creating security threats, while periodically pulling sideshow stunts such as making verbal threats to proliferate nuclear material, then after an interval returning to the negotiating table and pretending to perform a novelty act of actually honoring its prior agreements and thereby creating the illusion that it is making a major concession. All the while, North Korea has been steadily reaping rewards from the most dovish to the most hard-nosed of foreign governments, such is the powerful lure of resorting to appeasement absent a less unappealing short-term alternative.
The words in italics in the preceding paragraph are generally associated with a circus show, not with nuclear politics. Sadly, dealing with North Korea often evokes a circus scene with a red-nosed clown in the middle of the tent running the show. The latest outcome of the six-party talks once again shows that North Korea is the true master of the ring, for, like the cheerful clown in a circus, it is selling illusions to a willing and gullible audience. And, as we know, in a circus, it is the prancing portly clown who always gets the last laugh.
