In his 2002 State of the Union address, George W. Bush referred to Iraq, Iran, and North Korea as an "axis of evil." Four years later, North Korea tested a nuclear weapon. Now, the Bush administration has agreed to a multilateral package of assistance for North Korea worth hundreds of millions of dollars in exchange for the dismantling of its weapons program. Since North Korea was only able to gain this aid after demonstrating its nuclear bomb, what precedent has the Bush administration's policy set?
In his "axis of evil" speech, Bush asserted that Iraq, Iran, and North Korea constituted a special type of threat:
"By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger. They could provide these arms to terrorists, giving them the means to match their hatred. They could attack our allies or attempt to blackmail the United States. In any of these cases, the price of indifference would be catastrophic." [emphasis added]
In the same speech, Bush also suggested that the U.S. would act militarily to prevent a nuclear threat from emerging:
"And all nations should know: America will do what is necessary to ensure our nation's security.
We'll be deliberate, yet time is not on our side. I will not wait on events, while dangers gather. I will not stand by, as peril draws closer and closer. The United States of America will not permit the world's most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's most destructive weapons."
Today's report in The New York Times that the United States, South Korea, China, and Russia will "provide roughly $400 million worth of various kinds of aid" to North Korea in exchange for its denuclearization raises the question of whether the Bush administration is now willing to reward nuclear blackmail. John Bolton, Bush's former ambassador to the United Nations, leveled this criticism of the deal to CNN yesterday:
"It sends exactly the wrong signal to would-be proliferators around the world: If you hold out long enough and wear down the State Department negotiators, eventually you get rewarded."
While Bolton also alleged that the agreement "contradicts fundamental premises of the president's policy he's been following for the past six years," it actually demonstrates that the fundamental premises of the administration's policy were untenable. The Bush administration's emphasis on "regime change" and the invasion of Iraq encouraged North Korea and Iran to develop nuclear weapons. The rhetoric of the Bush administration provided hard-liners in both nations with evidence that the U.S. was intent on "regime change," and the means to argue that acquiring nuclear weapons would be the surest way to deter the U.S. from attacking. Once North Korea demonstrated a nuclear weapon, it became clear that the Bush administration could no longer operate toward North Korea based on the language of confrontation that it had previously articulated toward the "axis of evil."
Robert Gallucci, who negotiated an agreement with North Korea during the Clinton administration, told the Washington Post last year, North Korea produced "no more [nuclear] material" during the eight years that the agreement remained in effect. After the Bush administration asserted that North Korea was violating the agreement and ended its participation in 2002, the administration was slow to accept the need for a diplomatic solution. The same Washington Post article states that Colin Powell wrote in his book Soldier that Donald Rumsfeld believed the goal should be the collapse of the North Korean government, not the prevention of proliferation through diplomacy; other conservatives who opposed diplomacy in principle only accepted the idea of multilateral talks with North Korea because they believed the talks would be too cumbersome to succeed.
The failure of the Bush administration's policy toward North Korea highlights the limits of the conservative understanding of strength and its application to national security. As George Lakoff and the Rockridge Institute explain in Chapter Six of Thinking Points, the conservative conception of security is based upon the use of force, while the progressive conception of security is based on protection. The conservative view of security produced a doctrine of preventive war, which asserts a right to attack other nations based on their future capabilities, and regards diplomacy as weakness. The progressive view of security recognizes the destabilizing effects of the preventive war doctrine, which has the effect of encouraging nuclear proliferation. Progressives believe that diplomacy should be the first response to international disagreements, not a last resort.
Basing U.S. policy toward North Korea on dangerous premises for so long made it necessary in the end to provide a reward to a country that tested a nuclear weapon, setting an perilous precedent. If the Bush administration does not waver from these same premises in its policy toward Iran, it may soon lead us to a new catastrophe.
Written by Evan Frisch, an employee of the Rockridge Institute, who blogs as evan_at_rockridge at the Rockridge Nation blog, where this is cross-posted.