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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
October 20, 2002
Armed & dangerous
This last week we learned that North Korea now boasts of having developed nuclear and "much better" weapons in defiance of the treaties it signed with the United States and its neighbours in 1994. We learned or more precisely the people who already knew were reminded that the value of a "promise to behave" from a totalitarian dictatorship continues to be nil. And that without unlimited and therefore armed access there is no practical way to make the promise stick. North Korea is a special case even among special cases. While there were reasons to suspect the country had a secret nuclear weapons programme and had been working on other hideous weapons systems long before the overt declaration was extracted by U.S. negotiators a fortnight ago there is no strong reason to suspect North Korea has many direct links to international terrorist organizations. Nor are there any convincing signs of strategic co-operation between Pyongyang and other capitals of rogue states. Even the revelation by the U.S. State Department that Pakistan provided North Korea with the key to its nuclear weapons programme in return for the key to Pakistan's missile development suggests barter to mutual advantage not alliance. There is thus some hope that the North Korean regime may be isolated that its trade in missiles nuclear weapons technology and various unknowables can be at least crimped by external action. Supposing Chinese and Russian co-operation some kind of effective embargo might be put around the state. Yet even such "containment" itself ambitious is a half-measure. The regime is mad -- not merely the smiling unfathomable dumpling who is ruler but the whole politburo according to officials of more than one country who have dealt with them. With a common cultural and linguistic heritage the South Koreans I interviewed while visiting Seoul two years ago seemed just as puzzled by their Northern counterparts' behaviour as any American or European. "They speak what sounds like the same language and there are syntactical similarities but every word has a different meaning said one learned official in the Blue House (South Korea's equivalent to the White House) who had just participated in talks. They show no emotion at all when humanity requires at least some small gesture; and then suddenly all of them will be shouting angrily or even weeping like members of a chorus or choir. But we have to guess what it is about." (I am paraphrasing from memory and illegible old notes.) This was a man committed to President Kim Dae-jung's "Sunshine Policy" of rapprochement between the Koreas. He was speaking personally and off the record and I was honoured by his candour. I had just peppered him with sceptical questions about the policy itself and he had answered each one like a Western diplomat hedged about with qualifications. When I asked the natural follow-up What makes you think you can make any agreement at all with such people? -- he replied with even greater candour It is not reasoning so much as hope. To me one of the mysteries of diplomacy and the politics behind it is how people can go on hoping for the best when not only their rational calculating minds but their hearts and instincts tell them they are being blindsided. Newer to the game than most Western peoples the (South) Koreans have an apprentice honesty and puzzlement about them; in the West you get professional cynicism and knowing winks. Yet the result is the same. A policy built on fiction falls apart. This is what has happened to South Korea's "Sunshine Policy" a product of "good intentions". I am persuaded that its author President Kim is a deeply sincere man and a religious Catholic who tells the truth to others -- selflessly concealing it from himself. He deserves signal respect for his role in bringing a fairly stable constitutional democracy to his country and he was stalwart in his principles through years in which he served both as dissident in public and dissident in gaol. And he is extremely intelligent: another point of comparison with another strange president Jimmy Carter of the United States. The "Sunshine Policy" itself did not do such terrible damage to South Korean interests it rather built upon the damage that was done early in the Clinton administration by the Carter-inspired and brokered opening to the North. What the West did with growing South Korean co-operation was feed and sustain the crazy regime that now plausibly threatens the lives of every Korean and Japanese with weapons it did not formerly have. A regime which was on its last legs a decade ago having lost its Soviet sponsor and being in the course of losing its Chinese sponsor too. "We" -- well Messrs. Carter and Clinton -- saved them with huge infusions of foreign aid and even improved nuclear technology in the incredible belief that a country whose people were being starved to support a huge army aggressively deployed was somehow in need of nuclear energy. (A mountainous country which incidentally has substantial unexploited hydro potential.) If you look back over the record to 1993 and '94 you find all the arguments were made then and quite forcefully against President Bill Clinton's proposed "leap of faith". And those arguments were vindicated in one encounter after another as the North Korean regime continued to behave defiantly and aggressively in response to every concession that was made. Indeed as we now know there was almost a war in the Korean peninsula in 1994 when the negotiations went wrong -- as the Clintonians even in the act of selling out their strategic position were greeted by wave upon wave of North Korean paranoia. They would not be put off however and in the end achieved that "resounding triumph of diplomacy" celebrated in liberal media at the time. A triumph which for all we can foresee darkly may yet prove to have been purchased at the cost of millions of innocent human lives. Has anything been learned? Here we get closer still to the heart of a great human mystery. Nothing has been learned. The same people who made this catastrophic mistake recommend the same policies towards each new threat as it arises; and the principle of appeasement is alive and well throughout the modern successor to the League of Nations. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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