North Korea: Believe it or not, Bush and Obama agree on John Bolton's PSI
Thursday, May 28, 2009 E-Mail this story Free Headline Alerts
By Donald Kirk
WASHINGTON Ñ The United States appears to have no real game plan for dealing with North Korea's increasingly bold threats, other than attempting to lead the rest of the world towards a meaningless "condemnation" of the North's underground nuclear test and launching of several short-range missiles.
The White House, like the Blue House, the center of presidential power in Seoul, has accused North Korea of "saber-rattling" while keeping a score card of countries scolding North Korea for its defiance. However, there is no certainty on what the U.S. will do if the North goes a significant step beyond its nuclear test on Monday and stages an actual incident against South Korean or American forces, the two most likely targets.
Behind the posturing at the White House and the State Department, the United States does not want to risk armed conflict in Northeast Asia while bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan.
U.S. and South Korean forces have gone on "high alert", as they did after the first nuclear test in 2006, but that sensational term means little unless North Korea initiates armed action.
Neither the U.S. nor South Korea are at this point going to challenge North Korea under the rubric of the Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI), the multilateral attempt to inhibit the proliferation of nuclear weapons and the missiles to deliver them to distant targets.
However, Obama and other world leaders may have to move quite soon beyond lip service and state what PSI is all about: the blockading of shipments of nuclear weapons. In view of the horrifying prospect of terrorist organizations more determined and less inhibited by the niceties of international diplomacy than North Korea getting hold of nuclear weapons, the available options are few.
The fact that the U.S. has emphasized PSI highlights the irony of the similarities in the policies of the George W Bush and Obama presidencies. PSI was the brainchild of the arch-conservative hawk John Bolton when he was undersecretary of state for arms control.
Now, Obama personally is embracing PSI and talking by telephone to South Korea's conservative president, Lee Myung-bak, whom he will meet personally when Lee gets to Washington in mid-June.
The White House and the State Department seem ecstatic that South Korea should join in the far-reaching de facto PSI "alliance", which includes 15 "core" members and scores of "observers". The problem is no one knows where to take it from there.
U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates hopes to find support among America's friends in Asia as he travels to Singapore and Manila for meetings into the weekend with foreign and defense ministers, but it's not likely they will offer much more than vague promises of U.S. access to their bases and ports in the event of a showdown with North Korea.
More significantly, the United States cannot count for much other than verbal condemnation of North Korea from China, North Korea's only real ally and source of food, fuel and fertilizer, and Russia, which has played probably the least visible role among major powers close to North Korea.
There is an element of wishful thinking in Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's praise for China's condemnation. It's questionable, however, whether China will want to go along with U.S. demands for strengthening sanctions already put in place by the UN Security Council after North Korea's first nuclear test on October 9, 2006. Clinton seemed almost plaintive as she warned "there are consequences to such actions" and "discussions are going on" in the United Nations "to add to the consequences that North Korea will face coming out of the latest behavior".
The question now is whether the United States can get China and Russia to observe the sanctions and stop dealing with North Korean trading companies that are on the UN blacklist.
U.S. officials are upset that the Treasury Department had to lift constraints imposed on dealing with North Korea after it was discovered to be using an obscure bank in Macau - Banco Delta Asia - as a conduit for counterfeit U.S.$100 bills printed in Pyongyang. The U.S. did so as part of the deal to bring North Korea back to talks that led to agreements in 2007 under which Pyongyang promised to disable and dismantle its nuclear program in return for a vast infusion of aid. That elaborately contrived effort fell apart when the North balked at U.S. demands for serious "verification" of what it was doing.
South Korea's decision on Tuesday to join PSI led North Korea to threaten to go to war after having declared the Korean War armistice signed in July 1953 no longer valid. But South Korean defense officials are more concerned about the danger of a North Korean attack in the West or Yellow Sea. It was there that North Korea staged bloody attacks in June 1999 and June 2002 after North Korean vessels ventured south of the Northern Limit Line, which was declared after the Korean War and never recognized by the North.
Analysts say it's up to the United States - and the strategy of the Barack Obama administration - to decide on how or whether to use PSI to inhibit the flow of weapons of mass destruction among rogue nations as well as terrorist organizations that could well become their clients.
"PSI really depends on what the U.S. puts behind it," said Dan Blumenthal, resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. "Its mission is to interdict ships on the high seas. It's a question of whether we're going to be very tough on the North Koreans or not."
Blumenthal cautioned against reading too much into PSI despite its almost grandiose intentions. "If you blow a lot into it, it means a lot," he said. "Right now, it probably does not mean a lot."
There is no doubt, however, that South Korea's membership in PSI may be viewed as acknowledgement of the end of efforts at reconciliation with the North after the failure of six-party talks to get North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons program.
One fear is that nuclear materiel and technology may be in danger of reaching al-Qaeda and Taliban terrorists in Afghanistan and Pakistan's Swat Valley, in view of Pakistan's emergence as a nuclear power under the direction of physicist A Q Khan, the "father" of Pakistan's atomic bomb. He sold expertise and components to other nations, notably North Korea.
Khan wound up under house arrest on his opulent estate, but there's no telling what some of his disciples may do with their accumulated knowledge, either for money or for ideological sustenance. It is not difficult to imagine Al Qaida or the Taliban coming up with weapons of mass destruction - nuclear, biological or chemical - on the basis of skills shared by their friends in Iran, North Korea and elsewhere.