Blowback, Second Edition: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire

NORTH KOREA:

ENDGAME OF THE COLD WAR

North Korea long claimed a greater legitimacy in the struggle against Japanese colonialism than South Korea, a claim that many students in South Korean universities and historians of the Korean War accept. Moreover, until at least 1975, North Korea was considerably richer than South Korea in terms of per capita gross domestic product, a situation that slowly changed with South Korea’s extraordinary economic achievements.

The Seoul Olympics of 1988, which the North boycotted, brought worldwide attention to the prosperity of South Korea. Russia and China, both of them caught up in domestic-reform movements, took notice. The only Communist country that respected the North Korean boycott was Cuba. In 1990, Russia opened diplomatic relations with the Republic of Korea; in 1992, China followed suit. On December 18, 1992, Kim Young-sam was popularly elected president of the Republic of Korea, the first civilian head of state since 1961.

The North did not like any of this, but did not totally foreclose adjusting to the new southern realities. Ever since the end of the Cold War, North Korea had very tentatively signaled an increased openness to discussions with unofficial South Koreans about the future of the peninsula, while also trying to shield itself from the infinitely greater economic power of the South. In 1990, a North Korean commented to a Chinese official, “What we have hung out is not an iron curtain, but a mosquito net. It can let in breezes, and it can also defend against mosquitoes.”¹ The North’s dictator for life Kim Il-sung died on July 8, 1994, just before he was scheduled to attend a first-ever Korean summit meeting with Kim Young-sam.

The U.S. news media have dismissed North Korea as a “rogue state” and its leader Kim Jong-il, Kim Il-sung’s son and successor, as a “mad prince . . . whose troops (and nukes) make him the Saddam Hussein of North Asia.”² What we know about that land, however, suggests that it is less a rogue state than a proud and desperate nation at the end of its tether. Having been driven into a corner, it has offered the world a textbook example of how to parlay a weak hand into a considerable diplomatic and economic victory over a muscle-bound but poorly informed competitor.

The tearing down of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the USSR in 1991 precipitated an acute crisis in North Korea. Even if it was not prepared to abandon its ideology and reform its economic system of juche (self-reliance), the northern leadership still could not help noting that the endgame of the Cold War was particularly dangerous for players on the Communist side. The former leaders of Romania were put up against a wall and shot; the former leaders of East Germany were tried and given heavy sentences by the courts of a newly unified Germany. Meanwhile, in another sign of the North’s potential fate, the United States persisted in its boycott and embargo of Communist Cuba even though that island’s regime no longer posed any kind of threat to it. Asked why the United States was willing to engage North Korea while still maintaining a strict embargo against Cuba, a “senior administration official,” speaking on condition of anonymity, said with a smile, “To my knowledge [the Cubans] do not have a nuclear weapons program.”³ This difference, in a nutshell, is the secret of how North Korea caught the Americans’ attention.

As the 1990s began, it became clear to North Korea that it had to try something short of war to break out of the trap in which the end of the Cold War—which had stripped it of its main allies and their economic support—had left it. It began by trying to open relations with Japan, inviting a delegation led by a senior Japanese politician to visit Pyongyang. In September 1990, only a few weeks after President Roh Tae-woo of South Korea had met with President Mikhail Gorbachev of the USSR in San Francisco and obtained Soviet diplomatic recognition, the then vice president of the Liberal Democratic Party in Japan, Shin Kanemaru, led a joint Liberal Democratic Party–Socialist Party delegation to the North Korean capital. The idea of going to North Korea was entirely Kanemaru’s and was vigorously opposed by the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs. At the time, however, it was widely assumed in South Korea that Japan was deliberately trying to undermine its increasingly friendly relations with the USSR, just as the North Koreans naturally assumed that Kanemaru, as a representative of Japan’s longstanding, one-party government, was coming as an official spokesman.

As it turned out, Kanemaru’s visit was just the last hurrah of one of Japan’s most corrupt politicians trying to further line his pockets. As Tokyo political commentator Takao Toshikawa has put it, “It was very much a personal initiative: a last chance for diplomatic glory in old Shin’s declining years, and also a brazen attempt to generate huge kick-backs out of the flow of grants, yen credits, etc., that would flow to Pyongyang once the principle of paying reparations [for Japanese colonial and wartime acts of brutality] was established.” While in Pyongyang, Kanemaru, “drunk and slightly senile, is suspected of having promised the North Korean strongman [Kim II-sung] grants and low-interest loans totalling ¥100 billion.”⁴

Ever since this meeting the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs has denied that what took place in any way represented official policy. More important, from a North Korean point of view, Kanemaru was arrested in March 1993 on bribery and corruption charges and died shortly thereafter. His downfall seemed to convince Pyongyang that its Japanese initiative was not viable. Kim Il-sung then evidently decided to see if he could deal directly with the United States.

As a result of the end of the Cold War, North Korea had lost the patronage of the USSR. For the previous forty years, the Soviet Union had competed with the People’s Republic of China to curry favor in Pyongyang, and this was the chief international structural condition that allowed the North to prosper and become somewhat independent of both. In 1974, following the first OPEC oil crisis, North Korea’s Soviet ally sponsored its entry into the International Atomic Energy Agency so that the Soviets could help North Korea develop a nuclear-power-generating capability. In 1985, North Korea adhered to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, also at the Soviet Union’s behest. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, North Korea lost not only Soviet nuclear aid and any continuing reason to participate in Western-dominated atomic control regimes, but also its second most important source of fuel oil. China, previously its leading source, now compounded these difficulties by asking North Korea to pay largely in hard currency for Chinese oil imports (though they also accepted some barter payments).

Under these circumstances, in March 1993, North Korea gave notice of its intention to withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Whatever its reasons—including fear of Japan, energy demands, post—Cold War isolation, and thoughts of possible “posthumous retaliation” (Raymond Aron’s phrase) against Japan and a triumphant South Korea—North Korea developed the foundations for a small future nuclear-weapons capacity, or at least convinced the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that it had. It has never actually tested a nuclear device. (It is highly unlikely, in fact, that it yet has one to test.) The initial American reaction was belligerent. The Pentagon talked about “surgical strikes,” á la the 1981 Israeli attack on an Iraqi reactor being built at Osisraq. Patriot missile brigades were transferred to Seoul, and the United States seemed poised once again to use force on the Korean peninsula.

American policy on nuclear nonproliferation has long been filled with obvious contradictions, and the officials in charge of the Korean branch, through overreaction and an almost total ignorance of their adversary, played right into the North’s hands. Until the five Indian nuclear tests of May 1998, the United States had more or less refused to acknowledge that in addition to Britain, France, China, and the Soviet Union, proliferation had already occurred in Israel, India, Pakistan, and South Africa; that South Korea, Japan, Sweden, Brazil, Argentina, Algeria, and Taiwan had technologically proliferated without testing; and that Iraq—perhaps Iran, too—was almost surely pursuing a clandestine nuclear-weapons program. The U.S. doctrine of nonproliferation also ignores the fact that there is something odd about a principle that permits some nations to have nuclear weapons but not others and that the United States has been only minimally willing to reduce its own monstrously large nuclear strike forces.

North Korea has ample reason to build a nuclear-power-generating capacity, given its vulnerability to a cutoff of crude oil. From a national security standpoint, Japan’s nuclear power capacity, its fast-breeder reactor program, its plutonium stockpile, and its solid-fuel rockets with ICBM capabilities could all plausibly appear threatening to a country that it once colonized and exploited. Japan has some forty-one nuclear plants generating 30 percent of its electricity, with another ten under construction. It has set a goal of meeting 43 percent of its demand for electricity through nuclear power by the year 2010.

The North Koreans must also have come to the conclusion that, whatever the American threats, a military strike against it was wholly unlikely. For one thing, South Korea is deeply opposed, not least because of memories of the way its capital, Seoul, only thirty-five miles from North Korean troops at the DMZ, was totally destroyed during the Korean War. In March 1999, when the United States was once again stridently issuing warnings about possible North Korean weapons of mass destruction and insisting that Pyongyang was developing ballistic missiles to deliver them, the South Korean defense minister ruled out participation by his country in a U.S. plan to create a regional missile shield, the theater missile defense (TMD). He further stated in the clearest possible terms that Seoul was opposed to any preemptive attack on North Korea even if war tensions were to rise to unbearable heights on the peninsula.⁵

Equally important, a new Korean war would almost certainly end the Japanese-American alliance. Since the Americans would inevitably take some casualties and the Japanese would refuse to participate at all militarily, the American public would want to know why. The Japanese-American Security Treaty was badly strained by a similar pattern during the Gulf War; a repetition in Japan’s “backyard” might well snap it. The American military therefore tacitly gave up on a military option and turned to the idea of imposing sanctions against North Korea if it did not rejoin the control regime created by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and allow the IAEA to resume inspections of its nuclear facilities.

The threat of sanctions also proved meaningless, although it did reveal to the American government how little its strategic thinking fits the actual complexities of the region. The legal basis for imposing sanctions would have to be Articles 41 and 42 of the United Nations Charter, which authorize the Security Council to impose interruptions of economic and diplomatic relations and militarily enforced blockades to give effect to its decisions. China would have vetoed the use of either article. Nor was it clear that there had ever been any legal basis for sanctions, because North Korea had formally and in a legalistic sense quite properly declared its intent to withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Such sanctions would have involved some combination of acts that would include interrupting North Korean telecommunications, cutting off desperately needed remittances of money from Koreans in Japan, prohibiting people and vessels from going there via a blockade, and stopping all trade. North Korea promptly announced that it would regard any blockade as an act of war and would retaliate directly against Seoul. This caused the South Koreans to lose their enthusiasm for sanctions. The suggestion that Japan join in the use of sanctions against North Korea proved acutely embarrassing, revealing as it did both the extent to which Japan was already involved in propping up North Korea economically and the extent of the Japanese guilty conscience over its mistreatment of its own sizable resident Korean population, many of whom support North Korea.⁶

Once the Americans had started to talk about sanctions, the Japanese government ordered a full-scale analysis of what might be involved. The secret report that resulted was subsequently leaked to the press and published in the monthly magazine Bungei Shunju.⁷ It revealed Japan as North Korea’s second most important trading partner after China, and the organization of Koreans in Japan allied with North Korea, Chosen Soren, as a remitter of huge amounts of foreign currency to the North, as well as large shipments of prohibited cargo such as computers and integrated circuits. All the large Japanese banks, including Daiichi Kangyo, Fuji, Mitsubishi, Sumitomo, Sakura, Asahi, Sanwa, and the Bank of Tokyo, have correspondence agreements with North Korean banks. Individual Japanese contributions to North Korea amount to at least ¥60 billion to ¥70 billion per annum—an amount equal to the value of North Korea’s total trade with China—and Korean operators of pachinko (pinball) parlors, many of whom are allied with Japan’s Socialist Party, have in the past contributed as much as ¥100 million on Kim Il-sung’s birthday. Any Ministry of Finance attempt to freeze these assets in Japan, the government report stated, would be ineffective since most private remittances and shipments go through third countries and then through China before reaching North Korea. Thus, even if the Americans had gotten U.N. approval of sanctions and avoided a Chinese veto, Japan concluded, they could not have successfully been implemented.

As is often the case, American policy toward North Korea in 1994 was belligerent but ineffective. The threat of a military intervention to destroy possible North Korean nuclear facilities lacked credibility, was not supported by either the South Korean or Japanese people, and might have destroyed relations with China. In this context former president Jimmy Carter undertook a mission of personal diplomacy to resolve the situation. Carter had long been interested in Korea. As president he had advocated withdrawing American military forces from the peninsula as part of a post-Vietnam reassessment of the failures of American policy in East Asia. He had been forestalled by implacable opposition from cold warriors in Washington, the assassination of Park Chung-hee, the anti-U.S. revolution in Iran, and the USSR’s invasion of Afghanistan.

In 1994, the American ambassador to South Korea, James T. Laney, a former missionary in Korea and president of Emory University in Atlanta, was a close friend of Carter’s and was aware of the former president’s willingness to undertake personal diplomacy whenever it seemed he might be helpful. Laney also knew that Kim Il-sung regarded Carter as less hostile than most American officials because of his aborted attempts in the late 1970s to bring peace to Korea. Although without evident enthusiasm, the Clinton White House did finally approve a Carter visit to Pyongyang.

As it turned out, Carter almost surely kept the United States from making a tragic mistake in a region long dominated by the military. His mission was quite comparable to the Nixon-Kissinger opening to China twenty years earlier. Whether Kim Il-sung was personally satisfied with a former president rather than a sitting president, we do not know, but clearly it was a better opportunity than negotiating with the International Atomic Energy Agency, which had nothing to offer him in return for his compliance with its inspection requirements. The Americans, on the other hand, could deliver goods North Korea badly needed, and also wring concessions and economic assistance from the Japanese and the South Koreans. Carter’s visit, like Nixon’s to China, was also testimony to the legitimacy of an isolated regime, something the United States had long denied. Kim Il-sung therefore agreed to freeze his nuclear program and opened negotiations on what he would require in order to permanently stop his weapons project and shift to a Westernapproved form of nuclear power generation.

So ended the first phase of one of the potentially most serious confrontations of the post–Cold War era. Had the United States government followed the advice of its military, it might have produced its own version of the Russian catastrophe in Chechnya (as it may yet at some point in the future). Had the North Koreans pursued their nuclear program (as they may still decide to do), they would have achieved their own Iraq-like status as the true pariah of East Asia. The United States could have avoided this confrontation had it opened some constructive channel of communication with Pyongyang years ago; instead, our soldiers continue to glare at theirs across the table at Panmunjom, within the Demilitarized Zone between the two parts of Korea. The West’s master theorist of war, Karl von Clausewitz, once argued that even after hostilities have commenced it is desirable to keep some channels of communications open among belligerents; failure to establish diplomatic ties in peacetime was, he thought, inexcusable. American—North Korean relations have been an apt example of his point.

Talks to implement the Carter-Kim agreement opened on July 8, 1994, the day Kim Il-sung unexpectedly died, and as a result were immediately suspended. His death and the lack of credible information about his son and successor, Kim Jong-il, which might have set back the negotiations, actually seemed to have little effect on the discussions. But they did create serious problems in South Korea, where the government prohibited any public expressions of grief over Kim’s death and banned a church-sponsored human chain that was to extend to the Demilitarized Zone on the anniversary of Korea’s liberation from Japan. The South Korean government also released letters that Russian president Boris Yeltsin had given to President Kim Yong-sam on a visit to Moscow in June 1994 allegedly proving that Kim Il-sung had started the Korean War. The police even entered elite Seoul National University’s campus to arrest some 1,400 students who were calling for U.S. troops to get out of Korea and quit blocking unification.

On August 5, 1994, talks between North Korea and the United States resumed in Geneva, leading to an “Agreed Framework,” which the two sides signed that October 21. According to this agreement the United States was to arrange for the construction by the year 2003 of two 1,000-megawatt light-water reactors in North Korea to replace its current graphite-moderated reactors (a Soviet design from which plutonium can rather easily be extracted for possible use in nuclear weapons). The United States was also to provide fuel oil to replace energy lost by the closing of North Korea’s current reactors, and it was to guarantee that it would not use or threaten to use nuclear weapons on the Korean peninsula. Finally, the United States pledged to open trade and some form of diplomatic relations. For its part North Korea agreed to stop using and then dismantle its Russian reactors, ship its used nuclear fuel rods out of the country, remain a party to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and allow IAEA inspections of its nuclear sites.

The new reactors the United States was to provide were estimated to cost in the range of $4 billion to $4.5 billion. By March 1995, South Korea had agreed to pay about 70 percent of their cost and Japan 20 percent (with the remainder covered by various, mainly European countries). Although the United States negotiated the agreement, it agreed to pay nothing. All three nations—the United States, the Republic of Korea, and Japan—set up a new organization called the Korean Energy Development Organization (KEDO) to do the construction work.

The Japanese government supplied an initial $5.8 million so that KEDO could go into operation, but it has since regularly suspended funds whenever something has happened in North Korea that has not met its approval. In addition, elements in the U.S. government keep undercutting the agreement. U.S. Secretary of Defense William Cohen, for instance, said in Seoul in April 1997 that the United States intends to keep its forces stationed in Korea even if the two Koreas reunite. He gave no reason for this astonishing one-sided commitment, which implies an unending American imperial role in East Asia. He also predicted that North Korea was on the verge of collapse, which may explain why the United States has been so slow to implement the agreement. Instead of delivering fuel oil, as promised, or opening diplomatic and economic relations, as the North Koreans expected, the U.S. government has vacillated, often blaming Congress for its failure to fund the new relationship. Its impulse seemed to be to provide North Korea with just enough food to keep it from starving while hoping that its collapse would be “soft,” relatively nonviolent, and controllable. Unexpectedly, with the onset of the global economic crisis in 1997, South Korea itself came close to collapse and proved incapable of paying its share of the new North Korean reactors. The American government made no effort to find or raise replacement funds.

It is important to understand that the war scare of 1994, temporarily relieved by Jimmy Carter’s mediation and the subsequent Agreed Framework, sprang from two sets of related causes. The first was, of course, North Korea’s flirtation with nuclear brinkmanship in the context of the collapse of the Communist world that had sustained it since its creation. The second was a kind of military machismo on the part of the Pentagon and its assorted cronies and clients around the world. Without any regard at all for Korean and East Asian realities, the American military leadership and its political backers seemed intent on having another “splendid little war” in Korea, a rerun of the 1991 Gulf War, with all of its medals, promotions, and new post–Cold War assignments for the armed forces. Needless to say, the Pentagon strategists who abstractly think of Korea as a potential East Asian Iraq give no heed at all to Korea as a real place in time and space—it is not, for example, an uninhabited desert, and any use of force there will produce catastrophic casualties on all sides. Despite its being one of the most heavily armed places on earth, there is no plausible military “option” in Korea. The temporarily favorable resolution of the 1994 threat of nuclear proliferation in North Korea, once direct negotiations and diplomacy were given a chance to work, did not eliminate either of the contending forces that had caused it, and at the end of the 1990s they reerupted to produce a festering politicalmilitary sore.

Frustrated by the failure of the United States to deliver on what Pyongyang expected to get from the Agreed Framework, North Korea continued development of a medium-range and potentially an intercontinental-range missile force. The North had long worked on copying, improving, and manufacturing the Soviet-designed Scud short-range liquid-fueled battlefield missile, which it then exported to earn hard currency or barter wherever it could. Throughout the 1980s, it traded weaponry to Iran for oil, accounting for as much as 40 percent of all Iranian arms imports during the Iran-Iraq War.⁸

After the Scud, the North’s next big project was to build an intermediate-range missile that conceivably might deter the massive forces the United States arrayed against it at bases in Japan and on the ships of the Seventh Fleet. It is not clear whether this effort was technologically serious or whether it merely aimed at deterrence by raising anxieties. The first North Korean IRBM (intermediate-range ballistic missile), the Nodong 1, was a Scud with additional engines bolted to its waist, giving it enough thrust to reach parts of Japan. The North only tested the Nodong once, in June 1993, when it went three hundred miles into the Sea of Japan. The accuracy of the Nodong and how many it has are unknown. Equally unknown is whether North Korea has even one nuclear warhead that it might attach to one of its missiles. The presumption is that the Agreed Framework interrupted its movement toward a nuclear device and that its missiles, even if they conceivably might arrive over their targets, are not armed with nuclear weapons.

However, in August 1998, a truly explosive development transformed this relatively benign environment into a paroxysm of Japanese and American overreaction and worst-case scenarios. On August 31, 1998, the United States government announced that North Korea had testfired a two-stage (later revised to a three-stage) liquid-fueled missile over Japan. The United States knew about the North Korean missile launch as it occurred; indeed one of the Air Force’s two RC-135S Cobra Ball surveillance aircraft, both assigned to the 55th Wing at Offutt AFB, Nebraska, was on station above the Korean peninsula to observe it.⁹ The Japanese, at least metaphorically, went ballistic. They condemned North Korea for a dangerous military provocation and an implied threat to Japan’s security. They cut off all contacts with the North and announced that they would launch their own spy satellites specifically to keep track of what was going on in North Korea and to end their dependence on military intelligence from the United States. They even professed to be thinking about withdrawing from the Agreed Framework.

It turned out that the North Koreans had used a three-stage rocket to launch a rather modestly designed satellite in connection with the celebration of the country’s fiftieth anniversary. Like the famous 1970 Chinese satellite that broadcast the Maoist anthem “The East Is Red” into outer space, Pyongyang Radio announced that its satellite was transmitting the “Song of General Kim Il-sung” and “Song of General Kim Jong-il,” which it labeled “immortal revolutionary hymns.” The satellite seems to have malfunctioned, and no one ever recorded these melodies. The North Korean foreign ministry also pointedly added, “We have never criticized the United States and Japan for having launched artificial satellites. We are well aware that these satellites have been used for espionage on our country.”¹⁰ Japan has in fact launched at least twenty-four satellites since its National Space Development Agency was founded in 1969. The Japanese (and Americans) also failed to mention that this was only the fourth North Korean missile firing on record and only the second in the 1990s, five years after the test of the Nodong 1 in May 1993. It also did not mention Japan’s own highly developed rocket program, including a behemoth called the H-2, which has a payload of 5 tons, considerably greater than the 3.8 tons the United States’ MX Peacekeeper ICBM can lift. This is not to imply that the North’s missile was not threatening, only that it was most plausibly an attempt to deter much more formidable strategic forces deployed against it by the United States and Japan.

The United States has continued to harp on the threat posed by North Korea’s missile capability. It ostentatiously flew B-52 and B-2 strategic bombers to its Pacific bases in Guam. Among the reasons for this belligerence was a desire on the part of the Defense Department and the arms industry to continue working on an antimissile defense system, an idea now considerably scaled down from the Reagan administration’s lasers in outer space but still devoted to intercepting an incoming missile by firing a defensive missile at it. The technological requirements of hitting a bullet with another bullet are fierce, and there is always a possibility that nuclear fallout and debris from a successful interception will kill more people than if the warhead had been allowed to proceed to its target.

The American government has so far spent billions trying to make the theater missile defense (TMD) work but has repeatedly met with failure. One of the things it had most wanted was to get the Japanese to help fund the project (which even if it does not work will be very lucrative for the companies trying to build it) and provide technical input into it. The Japanese had consistently balked. The TMD seemed to them a probable violation of the Anti–Ballistic Missile Treaty and, in terms of deterrence theory, utterly destabilizing. If one country should ever achieve a successful missile defense (or believe that it had), it would have a strong incentive to launch a preemptive strike against its opponents before they too achieved such a defense. This is the main reason why China has consistently denounced America’s infatuation with the TMD, as well as because it does not want to be drawn into a ruinously expensive arms race to develop it.

North Korea’s launch of a missile with a range of several thousand miles transformed this debate. The Japanese finally agreed to buy into the TMD. On September 20,1998, to the jubilation of Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Secretary of Defense William Cohen, Japan reversed itself and joined the missile defense research program. Whether Japan and the United States together will ever overcome the stupendous technological problems, not to mention the strategic issues of decoys, reliability, lack of defense against cruise missiles (because they fly too low), the ability to deliver weapons of mass destruction through much less sophisticated ways than missiles (for example, via boats, helicopters, airliners), and the likelihood that civilian populations will never actually trust defensive missiles are all open questions, to say the least. The history of the Cold War demonstrated that stable, credible deterrence is the only rational answer to weapons against which there is no defense. Nonetheless, the North Korean missile launch, together with evidence that North Korea is working on even longer-range missiles, gave great renewed impetus to the TMD idea.

The unraveling of the Agreed Framework was not entirely caused by Pyongyang. The drumbeat demonizing North Korea has continued unabated in Washington. In February 1999, Republican congressman Benjamin Gilman, chairman of the House International Relations Committee, was convinced that “North Korea could nuke Seattle,” and the director of central intelligence, George Tenet, testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee, told the senators, “I can hardly overstate my concern about North Korea.”¹¹ It seemed evident in the spring of 1999 that North Korea was being groomed as Public Enemy Number One until events in Yugoslavia overtook this campaign.

Even though it remains a small, failed Communist regime whose people are starving and have no petroleum, North Korea is a useful whipping boy for any number of interests in Washington. If the military needs a post–Cold War opponent to justify its existence, North Korea is less risky than China. Politicians seek partisan advantage by claiming that others are “soft” on defending the country from “rogue regimes.” And the arms lobby had a direct interest in selling its products to each and every nation in East Asia, regardless of its political orientation.

There is considerable evidence that since the signing of the Agreed Framework in 1994, a series of mysterious incidents has been created deliberately to undermine diplomatic efforts to reduce tensions. In September 1997, for instance, the United States, South Korea, China, and North Korea were scheduled to hold negotiations on replacing the forty-five-year-old Korean armistice with a peace treaty. In the same month the United States also said it hoped to obtain North Korea’s adherence to an international agreement first negotiated in 1987 called the Missile Technology Control Regime. This agreement sought to bring under control the transfer of technologies that could be used to make intercontinental ballistic missiles. The United States had indicated in advance that it would lift some of its economic sanctions against North Korea if it would halt deployment and sales of its missiles.

On August 22, 1997, the eve of the talks, the North Korean ambassador to Egypt, a key player in North Korea’s missile sales to the Middle East, “defected” to the United States. R. Jeffrey Smith, a reporter for the Washington Post, quoted a CIA source as saying, “There will be people in the intelligence community who will be salivating to see this guy.”¹² In the New York Times Steven Lee Myers noted that the defection threatened the peace talks but quoted another U.S. official as saying, “The alternative of turning down a bona fide plea for asylum from a state like North Korea is pretty unthinkable.”¹³ Jamie Rubin, a State Department spokesman, insisted that the defection “will not affect the four-party peace talks.”¹⁴ Then Newsweek revealed that the former ambassador had in fact long been on the CIA’s payroll.¹⁵ Informed observers concluded that he had not so much defected as been called in from the cold at a time of the CIA’s choosing and with an eye toward scuttling the upcoming talks. North Korea in retaliation declined to attend either set of scheduled meetings.

A year later, amid reports that North Korea had grown frustrated with the failure of the United States to normalize relations, the New York Times published a front-page article by David E. Sanger—“North Korea Site an A-Bomb Plant, U.S. Agencies Say”—which revealed that “United States intelligence agencies have detected a huge secret underground complex in North Korea that they believe is the centerpiece of an effort to revive the country’s frozen nuclear weapons program, according to officials who have been briefed on the intelligence information.”¹⁶ Congressional sources later revealed that Sanger’s source was unanalyzed intelligence photographs probably leaked by Lt. Gen. Patrick Hughes, chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency. According to congressional aides, General Hughes regularly passed on information about the site, later identified as Kumchang-ri, to Republican congressmen.¹⁷ None of the Times’s reporting on this incident ever cited a single government official by name, relying instead on the “blind quote”: “high government officials say,” “sources close to the White House reveal,” “members of the intelligence community disclose,” and so forth.

Two days after the article appeared, the Pentagon announced that the underground A-bomb plant actually seemed to be a large hole in the ground—one of thousands of such holes, some of them containing whole factories that were sited underground after the devastating American bombing during the Korean War—and that the United States had no evidence the North Koreans had ceased to comply with the Agreed Framework. Analysts in Asia speculated that if North Korea did decide to pull out of the agreement, it need only restart its reactors at its nuclear research center at Yongbyon instead of building a brand-new, inherently risky and expensive underground reprocessing plant. In Europe, the IAEA’s spokesman said that the international monitoring agency first heard of the alleged new nuclear site from the New York Times.

Dr. C. Kenneth Quinones, who from 1992 to 1994 was the State Department’s desk officer for North Korea and subsequently the Asia Foundation’s representative in South Korea—as well as the American who probably has visited the North more often than any other—wrote, “This . . . story is centered in Washington, not in Pyongyang. It involves America’s intelligence community and not North Korea’s nuclear program. . . . The recent leak of unsubstantiated ‘intelligence’ certainly appears to have been an irresponsible effort by a ‘pessimist’ within the American intelligence community. . . . The U.S. government has officially denied the accuracy of the reports.”¹⁸ Nonetheless, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright called the “suspected nuclear facility” a “huge threat” and demanded the right of the United States to conduct inspections in North Korea when and where it chooses.¹⁹ North Korea agreed to let Americans look into Kumchang-ri in return for food aid. When the inspection was completed, American officials disclosed that it was a huge, empty tunnel and that there was no evidence of any preparations to construct a nuclear reactor or install machinery of any kind in it.²⁰

In addition to these and other North Korean alarums, 1999 saw a number of strident but ultimately overstated U.S. claims about Chinese missile deployments and nuclear espionage, and unfortunate “accidents” (the U.S. bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade during the Kosovo war). These raised serious questions about whether the armed and intelligence services were either out of control or being manipulated for political ends.

This is not to say that North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs are not serious problems. Since there is as yet no worldwide treaty banning them, nor an effective defense against them, all programs to develop nuclear weapons and long-range missiles, including those of the United States and Japan, are “destabilizing.” They constitute the most dangerous offensive weapons in existence at the present time. The issue is what to do about them. North Korea remains isolated in part because of policies the United States has pursued over the past forty-five years. To be sure, these policies were first formulated during the Cold War, but with the end of the old postwar order in East Asia, we finally have a chance to help promote a peaceful reunification of the Korean peninsula. Instead, the Pentagon is promoting a ballistic missile defense system. Surely no better illustration exists of our continued imperial ambitions and delusions.

It is also worth remembering that what we call the Korean War ended as a war between the United States and China fought on Korean soil. Had it been strictly a “Korean” war in which only the United States intervened, the side we supported would have been militarily victorious and Korea today would not be divided. If the Korean peninsula ever erupts again into open warfare, China, an active participant in the Korean War, would undoubtedly once again consider intervention. China today actually seems most interested in a perpetuation of the status quo on the Korean peninsula. Its policy is one of “no unification, no war.” Not unlike the eighth- and ninth-century Tang dynasty’s relations with the three Korean kingdoms of Koguryo, Silla, and Paekche, China presently enjoys diplomatic relations with both Koreas and may prefer a structurally divided peninsula. A Korea unable to play its obvious role as a buffer between China, Russia, and Japan would give China a determining influence there. China’s greatest worry has been that the Communist state in the North may collapse due to economic isolation and ideological irrelevance, thereby bringing about a unified, independent, and powerful new actor in northeast Asian politics, potentially the size of and as rich as the former West Germany and defended by a good army, possibly armed with nuclear weapons—not a development the Chinese would necessarily welcome.

For all of these reasons, the United States should cultivate North Korea and become an active supporter of Korean unification. In return for unification, the United States should withdraw its forward-deployed land forces from East Asia but retain its role as a balancer and provider of a “nuclear umbrella.” A unified, economically successful Korea would help ensure a genuine balance of power in East Asia rather than the hegemony of either China, Japan, or the United States. Such a policy would also be a more effective way of instilling prudence in the foreign policy of an emerging China than our current pretense that we have the will, money, or patience to “contain” China.