Dealing With North Korea

The Washington Post's editorial about how the world should deal with North Korea is both right and wrong. First up, the part that is correct:

[W]hile demanding a veto over any campaign to disarm Iraq, Russia and China propose to stand aside while Washington disarms North Korea on its own -- presumably by meeting Pyongyang's demands for political and economic bribes.

The consistency in these apparently paradoxical positions is not hard to find. Both represent the easy way out of confronting a dictator. In Iraq, multilateralism is embraced as a way of blocking the tough but probably necessary measure of military intervention; in North Korea, power is delegated to the United States because that will save other countries from having to take responsibility for facing Kim Jong Il. The United States has been willing enough to go along with this formula -- the Clinton administration consented to multilateral containment of Saddam Hussein while negotiating unilateral deals with Mr. Kim. The problem is that this path of least resistance didn't work in either case, and not because of the Bush administration's belligerence. North Korea pocketed Mr. Clinton's concessions and went right on working on nuclear weapons.

Everyone is perfectly happy to let the U.S. take the lead on North Korea because they don't want to deal with it. Why assume the risk of Kim Jong-il's ire when they can just pawn it off on Big Bad America? Plus Mr. Kim only wants to talk to the U.S., so why not let him? Why not make this guy happy and maybe he'll shut up for a while and let them focus on heckling the U.S. on Iraq.

Now for the wrong part:

The Bush administration would be wrong now to concede North Korea's stockpiling of nuclear warheads, as it sometimes appears inclined to do. If there is a chance to stop Pyongyang from reprocessing its spent nuclear fuel into bomb-grade plutonium, it should be tried, even if it fails. At the moment, the administration appears paralyzed, by Iraq or internal disagreements or perhaps both; it cannot afford to do nothing. But it makes little sense to embrace the same strategy that has failed, especially if that amounts to swallowing the terms of a tyrant. Talks between the United States and North Korea, and perhaps bilateral agreements of some kind, will need to be part of any solution to this problem, given Pyongyang's long-standing obsession with wresting recognition and security guarantees from Washington.

I think The Post's editorial board isn't giving Bush's team enough credit here. Bush isn't doing nothing because he can't decide what to do, or is too preoccupied with Iraq. Bush is doing nothing because that's exactly the opposite of what Kim Jong-il wants. Mr. Kim, as this editorial correctly states, is obsessed with the U.S. and will only talk to the U.S. He is throwing a tantrum of sorts because Bush has made it so clear that he's willing to let South Korea, China, Russia and Japan take the lead. He's pissed that Bush cares more about another tinpot dictator who doesn't even have confirmed nuclear weapons. How can you extort money and arms when no one is even willing to talk to you?

But such deals will never be effective or even possible unless the nations around North Korea -- including South Korea and Japan as well as Russia and China -- are willing to join in credibly demonstrating to the North that the pursuit of nuclear weapons will only bring about isolation and ruin. Unless those states are willing to take on the risks of standing up to Mr. Kim, they will almost certainly incur the risk of living with a renegade nuclear power.

Back to something I agree with. I think China might be able to accomplish the most with North Korea. Given the refugees that they are currently forced to devote tremendous police power to rounding up, I would imagine that the first card they could play might be, "We'll stop sending your emigrants back. We'll help them get to South Korea instead."