South Korean Report on Summit Discredits U.S. Elites' Assumption
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un waves at parade participants in Pyongyang,
North Korea, in 2016. ( Lee Jin-man / AP)
Media coverage of and political reactions to Donald Trump's announcement of
a summit meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un have been based on the
assumption that it cannot succeed, because Kim will reject the idea of
denuclearization. But the full report by South Korean President Moon
Jae-in's national security adviser on the meeting with Kim last week-covered
by South Korea's Yonhap news agency but not covered in U.S. news media-makes
it clear that Kim will present Trump with a plan for complete
denuclearization linked to the normalization of relations between the U.S.
and North Korea, or the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK).
The report by Chung Eui-yong on a dinner hosted by Kim Jong Un for the
10-member South Korean delegation on March 5 said the North Korea leader had
affirmed his "commitment to the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula"
and that he "would have no reason to possess nuclear weapons should the
safety of [his] regime be guaranteed and military threats against North
Korea removed." Chung reported that Kim expressed his willingness to discuss
"ways to realize the denuclearization of the peninsula and normalize
[U.S.-DPRK] bilateral ties."
But in what may be the most important finding in the report, Chung added,
"What we must especially pay attention to is the fact that [Kim Jong Un] has
clearly stated that the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula was an
instruction of his predecessor and that there has been no change to such an
instruction."
The South Korean national security adviser's report directly contradicts the
firmly held belief among U.S. national security and political elites that
Kim Jong Un would never give up the DPRK's nuclear weapons. As Colin Kahl,
former Pentagon official and adviser to Barack Obama, commented in response
to the summit announcement, "It Is simply inconceivable that he will accept
full denuclearization at this point."
But Kahl's dismissal of the possibility of any agreement at the summit
assumes, without saying so, a continuation of the steadfast refusal of the
Bush and Obama administrations for the United States to offer any incentive
to North Korean in the form of a new peace treaty with North Korea and full
normalization of diplomatic and economic relations.
That pattern of U.S. policy is one side of the still-unknown story of the
politics of the North Korean issue. The other side of the story is North
Korea's effort to use its nuclear and missile assets as bargaining chips get
the United States to strike a deal that would change the U.S. stance of
enmity toward North Korea.
The Cold War background of the issue is that DPRK had demanded that the
United States military command in South Korea stop its annual "Team Spirit"
exercises with South Korean forces, which began in 1976 and involved
nuclear-capable U.S. planes. The Americans knew those exercises scared the
North Koreans because, as Leon V. Sigal recalled in his authoritative
account of U.S.-North Korean nuclear negotiations, "Disarming Strangers,"
the United States had made explicit nuclear threats against the DPRK on
seven occasions.
But the end of the Cold War in 1991 presented an even more threatening
situation. When the Soviet Union collapsed, and Russia disengaged from
former Soviet bloc allies, North Korea suddenly suffered the equivalent of a
40 percent reduction in imports, and its industrial base imploded. The
rigidly state-controlled economy was thrown into chaos.
Meanwhile, the unfavorable economic and military balance with South Korea
had continued to grow in the final two decades of the Cold War. Whereas per
capita GDP for the two Koreas had been virtually identical up to the
mid-1970s, they had diverged dramatically by 1990, when per capita GDP in
the South, which had more than twice the population of the North, was
already four times greater than that of North Korea.
Furthermore, the North had been unable to invest in replacing its military
technology, so had to make do with antiquated tanks, air defense systems and
aircraft from the 1950s and 1960s, while South Korea had continued to
receive the latest technology from the United States. And after serious
economic crisis gripped the North, a large proportion of its ground forces
had to be diverted to economic production tasks, including harvesting,
construction and mining. Those realities made it increasingly clear to
military analysts that the Korean People's Army (KPA) no longer even had the
capability to carry out an operation in South Korea for longer than a few
weeks.
Finally, the Kim regime now found itself in the uncomfortable situation of
being far more dependent on China for economic assistance than ever before.
Faced with this powerful combination of threatening developments, DPRK
founder Kim Il-Sung embarked immediately after the Cold War on a radically
new security strategy: to use North Korea's incipient nuclear and missile
programs to draw the United States into a broader agreement that would
establish a normal diplomatic relationship. The first move in that long
strategic game came in January 1992, when the ruling Korean Workers' Party
Secretary Kim Young Sun revealed a startling new DPRK posture toward the
United States in meetings with Undersecretary of State Arnold Kanter in New
York. Sun told Kanter that Kim Il Sung wanted to establish cooperative
relations with Washington and was prepared to accept a long-term U.S.
military presence on the Korean Peninsula as a hedge against Chinese or
Russian influence.
In 1994, the DPRK negotiated the agreed framework with the Clinton
administration, committing to the dismantling of its plutonium reactor in
return for much more proliferation-proof light water reactors and a U.S
commitment to normalize political and economic relations with Pyongyang. But
neither of those commitments was to be achieved immediately, and the U.S.
news media and Congress were for the most part hostile to the central
trade-off in the agreement. When the North Korea's social and economic
situation deteriorated even more seriously in the second half of the 1990s
after being hit by serious floods and famine, the CIA issued reports
suggesting the imminent collapse of the regime. So Clinton administration
officials believed there was no need to move toward normalization of
relations.
After Kim Il Sung's death in mid-1994, however, his son Kim Jong Il pushed
his father's strategy even more energetically. He carried out the DPRK's
first long-range missile test in 1998 to jolt the Clinton administration
into diplomatic action on a follow-up agreement to the agreed framework. But
then he made a series of dramatic diplomatic moves, beginning with the
negotiation of a moratorium on long-range missile tests with the U.S. in
1998 and continuing with the dispatch of a personal envoy, Marshall Jo Myong
Rok, to Washington to meet Bill Clinton himself in October 2000.
Jo arrived with a commitment to give up the DPRK's ICBM program as well as
its nuclear weapons as part of a large deal with the United States. At the
White House meeting, Jo handed Clinton a letter from Kim inviting him to
visit Pyongyang. Then he told Clinton, "If you come to Pyongyang, Kim Jong
Il will guarantee that he will satisfy all your security concerns."
Clinton quickly dispatched a delegation led by Secretary of State Madeleine
Albright to Pyongyang, where Kim Jong Il provided detailed answers to U.S.
questions on a missile accord. He also informed Albright that the DPRK had
changed its view about the U.S. military presence in South Korea, and that
it now believed that the U.S. played a "stabilizing role" on the peninsula.
He suggested that some within the North Korean army had expressed opposition
to that view, and that would be resolved only if the U.S. and DPRK
normalized their relations.
Although Clinton was prepared to go to Pyongyang to sign an agreement, he
didn't go, and the Bush administration then reversed the initial moves
toward a diplomatic settlement with North Korea initiated by Clinton. Over
the next decade, North Korea began to amass a nuclear arsenal and made major
strides in developing its ICBM.
But when former President Clinton visited Pyongyang in 2009 to obtain the
release of two American journalists, Kim Jong Il underlined the point that
things could have been different. A memo on the meeting between Clinton and
Kim that was among the Clinton emails published by WikiLeaks in October
2016, quoted Kim Jong Il as saying, "[I]f the Democrats had won in 2000 the
situation in bilateral relations would not have reached such a point.
Rather, all agreements would have been implemented, the DPRK would have had
light water reactors, and the United States would have had a new friend in
Northeast Asia in a complex world."
U.S. political and security elites have long accepted the idea that
Washington has only two choices: either acceptance of a nuclear-armed North
Korea or "maximum pressure" at the risk of war. But as the South Koreans
have now been able to confirm, that view is dead wrong. Kim Jong Un is still
committed to the original vision of a deal with the Americans for
denuclearization that his father had tried to realize before this death in
2011. The real question is whether the Trump administration and the broader
U.S. political system are capable of taking advantage of that opportunity.
Gareth Porter
Gareth Porter is an independent investigative journalist, historian and
author who has covered U.S. wars and interventions in Iraq, Pakistan,
Afghanistan, Iran, Yemen and Syria since 2004 and was the 2012.
#america #barack obama #bill clinton #cold war #colin kahl #denuclearization
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