USA-North Korea: Game Never Ends

The temperature readings on confrontation with North Korea seem to vary with the seasons. Just when the thermometer drops to an all-time low level, bitterness turns to reason and the process of reconciliation resumes. Or so some analysts would like to think after months of worsening North-South relations in which the North totally cut off dialogue with the South, severely curtailed access to the Gaeseong Industrial Complex, fired a long-range Taepodong 2 missile and then conducted its second underground nuclear test.

Then, in the space of six weeks, reason replaced rage. After Kim Jong-il released the two female American journalists to Bill Clinton and the Hyundai Asan engineer before receiving the Hyundai Asan chairwoman, Hyun Jeong-eun, he sent a delegation to the South to commiserate over the death of Kim Dae-jung and see President Lee Myung-bak, the target of more than a year of propaganda attacks. The impression was that North Korea might want to cut a new deal, one in which it would finally be possible to come to viable terms on its nuclear program.

North Korea's relationship with South Korea has followed this pattern for many years. There were the Red Cross talks of 1972, when delegations from the North and South Korean Red Cross organizations negotiated what many believed would be the start of a long process of reconciliation. Lee Hu-rak, then the director of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency, visited North Korea and saw Kim Il-sung, all with the complete blessing of Park Chung-hee, South Korea's hard-line president for 18 years until his assassination by another KCIA chief in 1979. Any notion of real goodwill and fellowship, however, dissipated in new confrontations even as Roh Tae-woo, the general who was elected president under the new democracy constitution in 1987, pursued a policy of "nordpolitik" with the Soviet Union and other Soviet bloc countries, who were at the time in the process of shedding Communist rule and breaking up into new entities.

The fragmentation of the Soviet Union and the fall of Communist dictators in Eastern Europe no doubt had a lot to do with the hardening line of North Korea. The lesson of that transformation was that the Communist leadership of North Korea might also succumb to the forces of capitalism and democracy, forcing the ouster of Kim Il-sung and son Kim Jong-il. With North Korean negotiators warning that Seoul would become "a sea of fire," North Korea's line hardened after Kim Il-sung died in July 1994 and Kim Jong-il took over complete power as chairman of the National Defense Commission. South Korea's president, Kim Young-sam, was targeted with some of the same verbiage that North Korean rhetoricians later hurled at Lee Myung-bak, calling him a "traitor" and "lackey" of the Americans. Yet, somehow, the United States and North Korea came to terms in the Geneva Framework Agreement of 1994 in which North Korea agreed to shut down its complex at Yongbyon in return for the promise of twin light-water nuclear reactors.

For the benefit of those who may have forgotten the history, it was the revelation nearly seven years ago that North Korea had a highly enriched uranium program entirely separate from its plutonium program at Yongbyon that set in motion the sequence that finally detonated the 1994 Geneva Framework Agreement. Under that agreement, North Korea had shut down its experimental five-megawatt reactor at Yongbyon while teams of inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency rotated in and out of the North to confirm the program was really suspended. But all the while, as U.S. intelligence had gathered from multiple sources, ranging from spy satellites to information from the network of A.Q. Khan, the "father" of Pakistan's atomic bomb, to information on exchanges between North Korea and Iran, the North was dabbling in a super-secret program of enriching uranium.

North Korea's vice foreign minister, Kang Sok-ju, acknowledged the program in October 2002 to a mission led by James Kelly, then the U.S. envoy to Pyongyang, after which the U.S. cut off the shipments of heavy oil that it had been sending to the North as a stopgap measure during construction of twin light water nuclear energy reactors, all as agreed on in the Geneva framework. Next, of course, North Korea kicked out the IAEA inspectors and in early 2003 revved up its reactor and began producing "weapons-grade plutonium" - enough, analysts said, for half a dozen to a dozen warheads, two of which it's already exploded in underground tests in October 2006 and again last May. The uranium program has had a long history of "now you see it, now you don't" - or rather of high-level American diplomats shutting their eyes to the reality of what was happening in the drive to bring North Korea back to terms on a new nuclear agreement. The State Department for several years called it the HEU program - HEU for "highly enriched uranium" - but then adopted the more diplomatically selective initials, UEP for "uranium enrichment program," deliberately downplaying the program's significance, even questioning its existence as anything other than a very tentative experimental quest conducted perhaps by overeager North Korean scientists.

North Korea for years issued aggrieved denials that Kang had said a thing about the program, accusing Kelly and his veteran State Department translator of fabricating the conversation, but dropped all such pretenses earlier this year while confronting South Korea and the United States with increasingly vituperative rhetoric. Yes, North Korea admitted it had a uranium program, and there was no way it was going to give it up. Nor was North Korea about to return to the six-party talks under which it had gone along with highly contrived agreements in February and October 2007 that gave the world the impression it was preparing to abandon its whole nuclear dream in return for untold riches of energy and other forms of aid.

Suddenly, in early September, North Korea's peace offensive exploded in a mushroom cloud of words from Pyongyang that the North's nuclear wizards were about to enter "the completion stage" of their program to develop nuclear warheads with highly enriched uranium. North Korea's announcement of serious progress toward developing a nuclear warhead with highly enriched uranium at its core appears as a tough response to the strong sanctions adopted by the United Nations Security Council in June. The impression is that of a spiraling confrontation in which North Korea dared the Security Council to act in the wake of its nuclear test on May 25. The tone of the North Korean statement, as carried by Pyongyang's Korean Central News Agency, revealed if nothing else the effectiveness of the sanctions that are crimping if not stopping the North's export trade in conventional arms as well as intercontinental ballistic missiles. The sanctions also cut off the import of a wide range of products having to do with military programs along with luxury items for the North's elite - and, moreover, block the North from virtually all international financial dealings, including many with its main ally and benefactor, China.

North Korea, said the letter conveyed to the UN Security Council by the North's mission here in New York, will have "no choice but to take yet stronger self-defensive countermeasures as it had already warned if the sanctions remain in effect." A spokesman for the North's UN mission was quoted by South Korea's Yonhap News agency that it was "true we sent the letter" and "all of what the KCNA reported is true." North Korea issued the statement at an extraordinary juncture. It came on the heels of a month-long charm offensive that began with Bill Clinton's trip to Pyongyang in early August. Returning to California with the two women from Al Gore's Current TV network, he appeared like a knight in shining armor - in his case a statesman in a shiny jet plane provided by a wealthy benefactor. The women, Laura Ling and Euna Lee had been held for 140 days after having been captured by North Korean soldiers - "violently," they said later, on the Chinese side of the iced-over Tumen River border with China - while they were filming a piece on the plight of North Korean women sold into marriage and prostitution in China.

Clinton met with North Korea's ailing leader for three hours and 17 minutes and then reported on his "unofficial" mission to U.S. President Barack Obama a week after having delivered the two women to their families in a blaze of global publicity. Next thing, Kim Jong-il was posing for photos again, this time with Hyundai Asan chairwoman Hyun Jeong-eun, whose Hyundai satellite company is responsible for developing the economic zone at Gaeseong and the tourist zone at Mount Geumgang. North Korea released a Hyundai Asan technician who had been held for 117 days after attempting to lure a North Korean waitress to South Korea with promises of a great life in comparison to existence under Kim's dictatorship. Then came the death on Aug. 18 of Kim Dae-jung, the man who had initiated the South's Sunshine policy with North Korea and met with Kim Jong-il in the first inter-Korean summit in Pyongyang in June 2000.

Finally, North Korea reopened the Gaeseong Industrial Complex to normal commercial traffic, agreed to resume tours for South Koreans to the adjacent ancient capital of Gaeseong and met with a South Korean delegation to discuss holding reunions of a few more families divided by the Korean War. So what was going on? One explanation may be that U.S. nuclear envoy, Stephen Bosworth, was then touring the region, flying from Beijing to Seoul, and Kim Jong-il may have decided the time was ripe to bait the hook for the two-party talks that he seems to want desperately with the U.S. in place of the discarded six-party process. At the same time, North Korea sent a delegation to Beijing, chatting with the Chinese who may have been telling Kim Jong-il to lighten up and make nice.

The U.S., though, was sticking to its demand for six-party talks. Analysts like to say Washington was pursuing a "two track" strategy - Bosworth engaging in diplomatic palaver while sticking to the demand for a revival of the six-party process and the promise of tête-à-têtes "on the sidelines" between the Americans, meaning himself, and the North Koreans. The other track is firmness in sticking to the odious sanctions that have so infuriated - and alarmed - the North Koreans. The U.S. in September strengthened its own sanctions on North Korea, banning American firms from any dealings with the North in view of North Korea's declaration of its significant progress in its uranium enrichment program. The U.S. announcement was sure to deepen North Korean fears of losing arms shipments, as happened in late July when the United Arab Emirates confiscated a boatload of rocket-propelled grenades and other hardware bound for Iran, and also of missing out on the goodies that Kim Jong-il showers on family members and favored friends and aides.

North Korea, however, has its own two-track strategy - signs of making nice but no sign at all of giving up its nuclear program which, no one should forget, has been the cause of most of the problems for years. In the cycle of toughness and reconciliation, the betting remained that talks would present the only way out of the impasse. But no one should bet that North Korea would ever willingly abandon its nuclear program. The North Korean argument that it needs nuclear weapons for defensive purposes is beside the point. Whoever heard of a country firing a missile tipped with a nuclear weapon or dropping a nuclear bomb as a defensive measure? The bottom line is that North Korea's nukes are a point of tremendous pride for Kim Jong-il. He may be ailing, the victim of a stroke suffered more than a year ago and possibly other serious diseases, but he wants to be able to flaunt the North's nuclear prowess while gearing up for the huge celebration in 2012 of the 100^th birthday of his father, who reigns symbolically as North Korea's "eternal president." And if Kim Jong-il is no longer alive by then, he would dearly hope that one of his three sons, probably the youngest, will be able to carry on in his place - fortified by pride in North Korea's place as one of the world's nine nuclear-armed nations.