2010: The Obama administration replenishes the education and training budget and adds $250,000 in Formal Military Funding to the Libyan air force and coast guard, and continuing the anti-terrorism funding at a reduced level.
The US oil companies (ConocoPhillips, Marathon, Hess, and Occidental) were back, and the United States was preparing to build a brand new $100 million embassy in Tripoli.
Individuals and institutions associated with the anti-Gaddafi Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) were sanctioned as Specially Designated Global Terrorists by the Treasury Department in 2004, 2006 and 2008.
Students of our current infatuation with the freedom fighters in Benghazi will be interested to note that the Congressional Research Service noted the announcement of a formal political alliance by a member of the LIFG and al al-Qaeda in 2007 and observed:
Reports suggest that eastern Libya may be a stronghold for LIFG members and other extremist groups that could pose a threat to Libya's security. [3]
This elaborate diplomatic, economic, and regional security edifice was overturned in a couple weeks by the contagious enthusiasm of [French philosopher] Bernard Henri-Levy for the freedom fighters in Benghazi, and [French President] Nicolas Sarkozy's dreams of personal glory and political advantage.
The Obama administration, driven by its own domestic political calculations and the need to show solidarity with France and the United Kingdom, thereupon proceeded, with a reluctance that almost everyone acknowledged but virtually no one appreciated, to join the NATO bombing campaign against Libya.
The R2P ("Responsibility to Protect") cat is out of the bag. US diplomatic undertakings are now officially conditional, to be discarded when the right combination of outrage, advantage, weakness and importuning and opportunistic allies mandates a humanitarian intervention.
Pyongyang is free to imagine a situation in which it strikes a deal with the US, Japan and South Korea, only to have unrest in North Korea - which unlike Libya, has no restraint-encouraging oilfields - provoke declarations from anti-North administrations in Seoul and Tokyo of a political/humanitarian crisis that demands a military response, thereby stampeding the US into joining some kind of military action to support its allies and demonstrate it still occupies the leadership role in North Asia.
If US security guarantees, peace treaties and regional strategies have been devalued enough by the new R2P doctrine, it would appear that the best assurance of North Korea's continued survival is the deterrence provided by its nuclear weapons program.
However, it is a good bet that the Obama administration's North Korea policy will not be significantly impacted by the Libyan precedent.
Because, for the past couple years - and well before the complications of the Libya factor - the central tenet of the Obama administration's North Korea policy has been the premise that North Korea would never, ever surrender its nuclear weapons and the leverage they provide.
In recent testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, General Walter Sharp, who runs the military show in South Korea, reaffirmed that he did not envision a scenario in which North Korea would give up its nuclear capability: "I think it is clear that Kim Jong-il believes he has to have it for regime survival." [4]
Therefore, Carter is probably not going to North Korea to attempt to accomplish the impossible - denuclearization. He is probably using the eternal issue of denuclearization as a pretext for going to Pyongyang to discuss something new: rapprochement.
What this seems to mean is that the Obama administration is - gingerly, and through third parties - inching away from its previous policy of "strategic patience", ie letting South Korean President Lee Myung-bak carry the North Korea ball and hoping he would spike it in the regime collapse endzone.
Unfortunately, Lee didn't even make it past midfield.
In a spirit of hopeless optimism or cynical calculation, it appears that Lee persuaded the Obama administration that China, mindful of its burgeoning economic ties with South Korea and craving the validation of the democracies as a "responsible superpower", would line up against North Korea together with the South and the United States.
The exact opposite occurred.
North Korea rolled the dice and challenged Seoul's intransigence (and tested Beijing's forbearance) by (allegedly) sinking the frigateCheonan.
Lee's 9/11 moment came and went. His effort to demonstrate South Korea's new global stature by slighting the six-party talks and taking the issue to the United Nations Security Council was thwarted in a public and embarrassing way by China and Russia.
Political and military bungling dissipated the sense of national outrage and unity, and China, instead of abandoning Pyongyang, threw its full weight behind the North's continued survival.
Today it is clear that China is determined to frustrate Lee's hope of North Korean regime collapse and maintain the North indefinitely as a buffer state.
Obama's frustration with the disappointing outcome led him to accuse Chinese President Hu Jintao of "willful blindness" over theCheonan dossier.
The US and South Korea followed up with some ostentatious muscle flexing during military exercises off the Korean Peninsula, sending US-Chinese relations to their recent nadir.
The North Koreans thereupon pounded Yeonpyeong Island with a virtually unanswered artillery barrage, revealing an embarrassingly paper-tigerish aspect to Lee's pretensions to serving as freedom's frontline bad ass in North Asia.
Lee's current position is that North Korea must apologize for theCheonan sinking and the Yeonpyeong shelling before serious talks can resume; since Pyongyang claims the Yeonpyeong assault was justified retaliation, and has not even acknowledged its responsibility for the Cheonan outrage, he will presumably have a long time to wait for his apology.
As an official position, the United States government backs the demand of South Korea, its crucial North Asian ally, thereby allowing Seoul to maintain an effective veto on resumption of the six-party talks and formal government-to-government contacts.
However, "strategic patience" is beginning to look a lot like "strategic paralysis".
The US, which has seen a North Korea policy that was a) going nowhere b) backed into a diplomatic cul-de-sac by President Lee and c) and complicating already fraught relations with China, has apparently been quietly rethinking its North Korea policy.
In his March 1 testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Stephen Bosworth, the special representative for North Korea Policy, made some conciliatory noises instead of harping on the Cheonan and Yeonpyeong:
"[W]e have repeatedly told them ... that regime change is not the objective of our policy ... I don't think they should be operating under the fear that we are determined to undermine the regime."
A possible solution to the government-to-government impasse: Track II contacts, low-key engagement with North Korea by private groups and individuals, thereby sparing South Korea embarrassment of official US repudiation of "strategic patience" and sparing North Korea policy from the ferociously hostile attentions of the Republicans in the US Congress.
As described by Dr Tong Kim of the Ilmin Institute of International Relations at Korea University in an April 3 op-ed in the Korea Times, there's a surprising amount of "Track II" activity already happening, and it's going both ways:
North Korea is sending scientists, trade specialists and agricultural officials to the US when they are invited by private institutions, including Georgia University, New York University at Syracuse, and University of California at San Diego. In addition, there will be more North Korean groups to visit America in the fields of sports and culture, as American private sponsorships become available.
...
Among the recent Track II activities, last week's discussion in Germany between a DPRK foreign ministry delegation and the Aspen Institute may be most significant in terms of policy substance. The participants included former undersecretary of state Tom Pickering and Pyongyang's foreign ministry director of American affairs, Li Gun. The discussion topics were the issues of denuclearization, a peace treaty and economic assistance from the South and the international community, which in fact are the very issues to be discussed in government-to-government negotiations, when they take place. [5]
There is an unmistakable American foreign-policy wonk element to "Track II" that leads one to believe it is conducted under the watchful eye, if not tacit endorsement, of the US State Department.
An alert and resourceful writer/journalist, Justin Rorhlich, was able to breach the wall of secrecy and reveal on April 12 that a North Korean delegation had recently visited the United States and been permitted to gaze upon America's techno-democratic holy of holies, Google headquarters:
A delegation of 12 North Korean economic envoys flew back to Pyongyang on Sunday after spending two weeks touring companies that "represent main strands of the US economy".
The group visited Google (GOOG), Home Depot (HD), Bloomberg, Citigroup (C), Qualcomm (QCOM), Sempra Energy (SRE), Union Bank and Universal Studios, as well as a mushroom farm, a seafood wholesaler and the Port of Los Angeles, where they leaned about trade infrastructure.
Journalists were not permitted access to the visitors (they entered the Googleplex through a back entrance under tight security), and no mention of the trip appeared in the American media. I stumbled on the story after striking up a conversation with a DPRK official at the North Korean Embassy in Berlin, Germany.
While Russian news outlet ITAR-TASS maintained that "[T]he initiator of these meetings is unknown", the North Koreans were in fact invited to the US by Susan Shirk, director of the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation at the University of California, "to see firsthand what improved relations with the United States might mean in terms of economic cooperation."
From 1997-2000, Shirk served as deputy assistant secretary of state in the Bureau of East Asia and Pacific Affairs from 1997-2000, and is the head of the Northeast Asia Cooperation Dialogue, an organization engaged in "track-two" diplomacy.
Sources say the North Koreans attended lectures at Stanford University and NYU, where they learned about "the market economy, consumer protection, what a CEO does, corporate strategies in the US, and an overview of the western legal system". [6]
The next and, by far the highest profile, Track II initiative is Carter's upcoming visit.
In keeping with the unofficial character of the trip, Carter is not visiting under the auspices of the US-based Carter Center, which often coordinates its electoral and human-rights monitoring activities with the State Department.
Instead, he is visiting as a member of a delegation of the group of "Elders", a sort of superhero justice league of retired statesmen conceived by Virgin's Richard Branson.
North Korea may be prepared to reciprocate.
In advance of Carter's visit, North Korea announced that it had been detaining a Korean-American - according to the BBC, possibly an evangelically-inclined businessman named Jun Young-su - since November, encouraging speculation that he would be released to go home with Carter as a demonstration of North Korean interest in improved ties. [7]
Another bargaining chip is the fresh-out-of-the-box uranium-enrichment facility the North Koreans thoughtfully unveiled to Siegfried Hecker during his November visit.
South Korea's Foreign Minister Kim Sung-hwan visited Beijing at the end of March, apparently in futile pursuit of Chinese support for taking the North Korea enriched-uranium issue to the UN Security Council.
Prior to his arrival, the Chinese government made it clear it had no patience for South Korea's attempts to drive the debate - or determine the forum - for discussion of North Korean nuclear issues:
Beijing's assistant foreign minister Hu Zhengyue ... was quoted as saying the US and China still "officially do not know of the program" and that all that is known of it is "what one expert saw from a distance". [8]
Bosworth seemed to be willing to take Dr Hecker - the emeritus director of Los Alamos National Laboratory - at his word that what he saw in North Korea was, indeed, a uranium-enrichment facility.
At the same time, Bosworth proposed some more modest, achievable and hopefully transitional goals that were also, paradoxically, more sweeping:
... there are important things that I think we can try to achieve, relating to the question of proliferation, relating to their production of fissile material, both for the plutonium program and from their uranium enrichment program.
Non-proliferation and a cap on fissile material production are the cornerstones of Obama's (Nobel Peace Prize-winning) strategy to revitalize and universalize the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) regime. By putting the uranium-enrichment facility on the table and linking it to the US NPT policy, the North Korean issue is, at least partially, removed from its local security matrix (and vulnerability to Seoul's veto) and becomes part of America's global non-proliferation concerns.
The US State Department has disavowed any endorsement of Carter's trip. By remarkable coincidence, however, there has been a flurry of diplomacy back and forth in recent weeks.
The Chinese negotiator, Wu Dawei, proposed a three-stage process: Inter-Korean talks, followed by bilateral talks between the US and North Korea, followed by resumption of the six-party talks.
By offering up inter-Korean talks as the hors d'œuvre, the Chinese proposal isolated South Korea and put considerable pressure on Seoul not to act as an impediment.
South Korea's top nuclear envoy, Wi Sung-lac, did his best to put a brave face on events and assert that Seoul was, all appearances to the contrary, actually in the driver's seat.
According to the Korea Times:
Before leaving Seoul for Washington, Wi Sung-lac, South Korea's chief nuclear negotiator, said at the airport that the South's voice was partly heard in the Chinese official's proposal.
But he warned of misinterpreting the role of South-North contacts in achieving a nuclear-free North Korea. The inter-Korean talks should not be misunderstood as an easy test that North Korea can pass without showing its sincerity for denuclearization, he noted.
Wi stressed that North Korea and China must understand that major progress for denuclearization should be made at the South-North Korea talks. Another foreign ministry official said that Seoul is not interested in talks for the sake of talking, adding there are several measures that Pyongyang need to take before resuming dialogue. [9]
Secretary Clinton will visit Seoul this weekend for further consultations.
It is unlikely that Obama administration is prepared to subject South Korea to the humiliation of backtracking on the apology demand in order to get the diplomatic ball rolling.
But clearly the will is there to do something, and a way may be found to finesse Seoul's anxieties.
Even if formal talks go nowhere, well ... there's always Track II.
Notes
1. More Concern than Expectation, Daily NK, Apr 8, 2011.
2. Libya's Lessons for North Korea, Arms Control Wonk, Mar 21, 2011.
3. Libya: Background and US Relations, Open CRS, Aug 3, 2009.
4. N.Korea won't give up nuke capability - US general, Alert Net, Apr 13, 2011.
5. Track II diplomacy on N. Korea, Korea Times, Apr 3, 2011.
6. North Korea Gets a Crash Course in Capitalism, Minyanville, Apr 12, 2011.
7. North Korea confirms US citizen is arrested, BBC, Apr 14, 2011.
8. Foreign Minister Kim to visit China next week, Korea Times, Mar 22, 2011.
9. Seoul's nuclear envoy to visit USfor N. Korea talks, Yonhap News, Apr 11, 2011.
Peter Lee writes on East and South Asian affairs and their intersection with US foreign policy.
(Copyright 2011 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)
No comments:
Post a Comment