North Korea

Has the world changed materially since North Korea announced that it has nuclear weapons? No. There were those who thought and operated on the assumption that North Korea has had them for some time. There are those who were not and are not convinced that the weapons exist now. North Korea has been working the same game successfully for a long time and has grounds to believe it will succeed again.

Has the world changed materially since North Korea announced that it has nuclear weapons? No. There were those who thought and operated on the assumption that North Korea has had them for some time. There are those who were not and are not convinced that the weapons exist now. North Korea has been working the same game successfully for a long time and has grounds to believe it will succeed again.

For more than a decade, the North claims to have something, or have done something the sane countries of the world do not want it to have or do. The dictator says it will stop in exchange for bribes of tremendous magnitude – food, oil, money and political prominence. He pockets the bribe and doesn’t stop, raising the ante each time. It worked throughout the 1990s and for a while longer. North Korea is entirely unproductive, so food, oil and money are important, but all are easily attainable without nuclear blackmail. Political stature appears to be the name of the game.

What would North Korea be without the threat of nuclear weapons? Poor, repressive, hungry, cold, driven by an apparent lunatic and ignored. What is North Korea with the threat of nuclear weapons? Poor, repressive, hungry, cold, driven by an apparent lunatic and the center of the world’s attention. What would North Korea be if the U.S. agreed to give it the bilateral talks it seeks? Poor, repressive, etc. and equal at the table to the world’s only superpower.

The Bush Administration is right to insist that the Six-Party [U.S., China, Russia, Japan, South Korea, North Korea] talks are the proper venue for any discussion. North Korea poses a problem for its own region whether or not it has nuclear capabilities, and its neighbors have an interest in resolving the problem whether they admit it or not. Political repression has created famine and refugees that threaten South Korea and China, and North Korean forces have made aggressive military noises around the South. Neither Russia nor China can want a nuclear loose cannon. Both have serious concerns about Islamic fundamentalism and uprisings of their Muslim populations – the connection being that if North Korea has nuclear capabilities that it can transfer to terrorists, Russia and China stand at least as much chance as the U.S. of facing the fallout. Literally.

The problem isn’t the United States or U.S. policies. The previous administration gave North Korea everything it asked for and was repaid by illegal exports from North Korea to Iran, Libya, Pakistan and who-knows-where-else. The attacks of 9-11 changed American thinking about the size of the world and the security posed by our ocean borders. It made it impossible for us to ignore the worldwide traffic in nuclear and missile technology and forced us to reconsider paying North Korean blackmail. The current administration is getting what you get when you stop paying – threats of increasingly hostile behavior.

So, what are our choices? To give in and know that even if it doesn’t have nuclear weapons North Korea will continue to export its capabilities to hostile regimes and/or terrorist groups. Or not to.