Red Lines

So it's confirmed, now, that North Korea detonated a small nuclear weapons made from the Plutonium Clinton kept out of their hands and Bush let them take back. It's still unclear to me why this event - as opposed to any other in the peninsular debacle that is Bush's Korean policy - is supposed to be the international crisis du jour. The North's demands, as we've seen, are breathtakingly simple - a non-agression pact with Washington, and normalized relations. Why on Earth we would deny this simple request out of anything but spite is beyond me. This crisis could be resolved quickly if the American leadership were mature.

(It is equally true, I concede, that the crisis would not even be upon us if the Kim regime were mature. But since when do madmen set the bar for Washington's behaviour? Oh, never mind.)

Let's review: In 1994, North Korea begins enriching Plutonium, to which the Clinton administration responds with a threat of war, coupled with a diplomatic overture (via Jimmy Carter) that averts the crisis. The North hands the Plutonium fuel rods to the IAEA, and Washington promises to provide non-weaponizable nuclear reactors in exchange. In the interim, Japan and South Korea subsidize Northern fuel oil supplies.

The following 8 years: Republicans in Congress veto all money devoted to actually providing the nuclear reactors the US government had promised. In 2002, the North publicly repudiates the Agreed Framework, takes back the Plutonium from the IAEA, and begins turning those plutonium rods in to bombs, like the one they exploded last week. (Though Kim probably hopes the rest of his bombs work better than that one.)

2003: North Korea offers to step back from the precipice, if the US honors the Agreed Framework after all. In response, Bush invades Iraq, thereby occupying the US Army nearly-indefinitely and removing any serious concern that North Korea faces a possible land invasion (the one thing paranoid dictators actually fear.)

2004: Bush agrees to honor the Agreed Framework after all. Kim Jong-Il, seeing an open road ahead of him, flips Bush off and starts walking towards Nuclearland.

I think it's clear, that if we were going to put sanctions on North Korea anyway, it would have been better to do it sooner - for example, after Pyongyang took back their Plutonium rods. But of course that didn't happen, because other members of the Security Council hoped America would avert this crisis by doing something as inflammatory as talking.

There's more than a little stupidity to go around for everyone involved. Japan, South Korea, Russia, and China all deserve criticism for not realizing that neither Washington nor Pyongyang are rational actors at the moment. The belligerent capitals themselves deserve most of the criticism for their respective roles in bringing this scenario upon us. And if I seem more critical of Washington than Pyongyang, well, maybe it's because a few weeks ago I read this at Kevin Drum's place:

Let's recap: The Bush/Cheney administration took a bad situation with Iraq and made it even worse. They've taken a bad situation with Iran and made it even worse... They've taken a bad situation with North Korea and made it even worse... At every step along the way, they've deliberately taken actions that cut off any possibility of solving our geopolitical problems with anything other than military force.

Once is a singular event. Twice might be a coincidence. But three times? That's a policy. Encouraging these "clarifying events" appears to be the main goal of the Bush administration. This is not the way to make America safer.

For these people, crisis and war aren't bugs in the international system - they're features.