Asia Sentinel

The Obama administration tries something new

The Obama administration, after making what appeared to be overtures to North Korea, has run into predictable criticism from the right-wing establishment at home, which contends that United Nations-based sanctions against North Korea be placed at the center of the administration's North Korea policy.

Others abroad have echoed this view, particularly during the debate on the timing and speed of the decision to hold face-to-face talks with the Stalinist regime, although the US administration underscores that bilateral negotiations are to be in the context of the six-party talks. There has been a parallel debate over the Obama administration's intentions in South Korea despite the fact that it has scarcely found any opposing echoes on the liberal factions that are in favor of US engagement.

We have little time left to spend on North Korea's shrewd tactics of dragging out the talks while its centrifuges continue to spin. But to jump-start the process of the delayed six-party talks, the question is whether President Obama made the right decision in a realistic way. He seemed to convey to other member states--South Korea, China, Japan and Russia -- the conventional wisdom that “If a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken.” North Korea is, of course, one of the window-breakers in terms of nuclear non-proliferation principles.

The Obama administration has taken some surprisingly tough window-breaking measures, some of them aimed at the Dear Leader, Kim Jong-Il himself. It has issued a global money laundering alert against North Korea, going after the funds that  finance the North Korean despot's palace economy, as well as imposing sanctions against the North's arms trade. It sanctioned Iranian entities for dealing with North Korea and in effect cut those entities off from the international financial system.  

(The broken-window theory arose from a theory by US criminologists James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling and states that if windows in an abandoned building aren't repaired immediately, more windows will be broken and ultimately the building will deteriorate. “Untended” behavior, albeit small or trifling in the beginning, ultimately leads to the breakdown of community controls, because the unchecked panhandler is in general terms the first broken window.  The theory was applied most famously in New York by William J. Bratton, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's police chief, and is credited with cutting New York's crime rates.  Applying it to international relations is a new and untried wrinkle.)

North Korea's seriously bad behavior of obtaining nuclear weapons will inevitably flourish over time, as if weeds grow up. However, the problem facing the Obama administration is how to keep North Korea from developing nuclear weapons in a so-called CVID–complete, verifiable, and irrevocable disarmament–manner.

To this end, we need to return to the long-abandoned view that the Reagan administration had one goal in Cuba. That was aimed at separating Fidel Castro, the Cuban leader, from Moscow, not to overthrow Castro himself. We thus saw the Reagan administration's reluctance to directly confront Castro. In other words, the essence of the US role regarding the North Korean nuclear issues should focus on how to separate Pyongyang from Beijing.   China has remained the North Korea's guardian state since the two countries signed a mutual defense pact in 1961. A South Korean source reveals that in 2002 alone, 40 percent of Chinese exports to and 11 percent of its imports from North Korea passed through the port of Dandong on the Yalu River dividing the two countries. On top of this, a Chinese report shows that after the signing of a new trade agreement between the two governments in 1992 to lift the open account trade between them, trade at once increased to US$899 million in 1993, recording a new high. And along with the gradual recovery of the DPRK economy in the early part of the decade, trade between Beijing and Pyongyang picked up rapidly by recording new highs since 2003.

In terms of trade volume, according to the Chinese report, the two countries shared as much as US$1.58 billion in 2005, up from US$370 million in 1999, a 27.4 percent increase in six years. In 2006, January-October import-export volume was US$1.38 billion, a 3.8 percent increase over the previous year, in which Chinese exports to North Korea amounted to US$1.01 billion and Chinese imports from the North were US$370 million, growing by 11.1 percent and dropping by 11.8 percent respectively, compared with the same period of the year before.

China's “purposeful” investment in North Korea has increased markedly. From January to October 2006, the Chinese side endorsed 19 new investments in the North, with negotiated investment of US$66.67 million. Until October 2006, the Chinese side approved 49 investments in the moribund North Korean economy, with negotiated investment of US$ 135 million. Projects included food products, medicine, light industry, electronics, chemical industry and minerals.  While in normally-functioning, open and international economies those trade figures would be minuscule, for North Korea's disastrous economy they provide an essential lifeline.

Obviously, it is significant evidence to show that China played an influential role in getting its brother country back to the disarmament negotiating table very soon. The last talks were held in December last year after the North vowed to abandon the six-party talks permanently amid what appeared to be internal turmoil resulting from Kim's poor health.  However, Kim was reported to have told a visiting Chinese official, Dai Bingguo, Friday that his government intends to engage in both bilateral – presumably US-North Korea – as well as multilateral talks over its nuclear programs.

In all, the Obama administration's timely decision to play police officer on foot through direct contact instead of becoming a motorized-patrol officer of rolling down the window and staring at passers-by was right, given that the officer in a car cannot effectively approach the potential criminals. And President Obama's decision to scrap plans to deploy the much-debated anti-ballistic missile shield in Eastern Europe was also another good choice in engaging with Russia, an old archrival, and reawakening China, a new one, to the amicable Washington-Moscow relationship.

We will see if it bears fruit. Campbell, during his press conference, told reporters that the country “clearest and firmest” about pushing North Korea back to the six-party conference table is China, for which the Obama administration described itself as “very gratified.”

"We think over the course of the next several weeks, there's going to be a series of very high-level engagements between North Korea and China," Campbell told reporters. "During these meetings, we expect China to take a fairly clear line about their desire to see North Korea resume interactions as part of a Six-Party framework."

The US efforts to separate North Korea from China, of course, will take time and needs to be made in consideration of future strategic goals in Northeast Asia, including possible scenarios surrounding Kim Jong-il's eventual death, its subsequent contingencies in the North and over the long run, Korean unification. It's time that all the negotiators in the region should brace themselves again, not to lose the nuclear end-game.

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