What to do with N Korea? To isolate or engage?
Isolation sometimes works, as it did with South Africa. But only when a very strong international coalition enforces that isolation, as was done against the former apartheid regime of South Africa. Unilateral isolation fails miserably, as evidenced by the Cuba's resilient Castro regime.
Engagement sometimes works, but usually slowly, gradually and incompletely, as evidenced by decades of engagement with the People's Republic of China.
Now what about North Korea? Bush's policy towards North Korea scorned the Clinton approach of aggressive but positive engagement, and treated the Kim regime more like Cuba. The result was a growth in the nuclear threat posed by the North Koreans.
Make no mistake, the Kim government is a loathsome totalitarian state. As
Nicholas Kristoff writes in the NY Times:
North Korea is the eeriest and most totalitarian country I've ever visited, making even Saddam Hussein's Iraq seem normal by comparison. I realized how regimented the entire country was when I stopped two girls randomly on the street for an interview on a 1989 trip and the girls started praising their leaders - reciting identical lines in perfect unison.
In his new book, Mr. Martin tells the story of how one of the Dear Leader's assistants, while drunk, told his wife about his boss's womanizing. The wife, apparently a true believer in the North Korean system, was shocked and wrote a letter to the leadership to protest this immorality.
The Dear Leader had the woman brought to him, then denounced her before a crowd and ordered her shot. At that point, her husband begged to be allowed to kill her. Graciously acceding, Mr. Kim handed him a gun to kill his own wife.
But attempts to further isolate the Kim regime will only continue to fail. Kim is even less concerned than Castro about the economic impact of isolation; he is used to it and uses it to further strengthen his paranoid hold on North Korea.
Bush is correct to push multi-laternal talks to include its Asian allies who have a stake in the containment of a nuclear North Korea. But he needs also to heed the advice of those with the greatest stake, the South Koreans. From an editorial in the South Korean newspaper, the Hankyoreh:
If the talks are truly work to resolve the North Korean nuclear issue, North Korea and the United States will each have to make mutual concessions in good faith. If the North is going to give up its nuclear program, the US must guarantee the North's system and make appropriate compensation. There must not be a repeat of the same insincerity as in the past, where talks are opened only for there to be no substantial discussion.
The danger posed by Kim underscores the idiocy of the Bush administration is staking so much on containing the far lesser threat of Saddam Hussein, while North Korea and Iran, both with far greater military capability even before assessing their nuclear potential. Not only were these greater threats ignored, Bush's actions have both increased those risks while diminishing the U.S. capability to counter them, both diplomatically and militarily.
But enough wringing our hands over recent blunders; please please please let some sanity sink into the grey matters holding sway in the White House situation room. It's time to grant North Korea the security guarantees it wants in return for nuclear disarmament, while beginning the slow patient work of opening that beleagured land to the rest of the world.