Hillary vs the N. Koreans: If words were missiles, this would be World War III
Friday, July 24, 2009 E-Mail this story Free Headline Alerts
By Donald Kirk
WASHINGTON Ñ First, United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said in a television interview in New Delhi that the North Koreans were like "small children and unruly teenagers and people who are demanding attention".
Then the North Koreans returned the compliment during an Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Regional Forum at Phuket in southern Thailand, saying Clinton "looks like a primary-school girl" or "a pensioner going shopping".
Talk about a hissy fit.
The exchange illustrated the depths of tensions on the Korean peninsula but did added nothing to the debate over the North's nuclear program. The "hostile policy" of the United States was to blame for "the aggravated situation", the North Koreans said, and six-party talks on their nuclear program, which include the U.S., Japan, Russia, South Korea and China, were definitely over.
There was no disputing that assessment if Clinton's tough talk was any indication. The U.S.-North Korean confrontation has worsened dramatically since North Korea test-fired a long-range Taepodong-2 missile on April 5, conducted a second underground nuclear test on May 25, then fired a volley of mid-and-short-range missiles after the United Nations Security Council imposed new sanctions.
Clinton if anything seems considerably tougher, at least to judge by her public utterances, than the hardliners of the George W Bush administration, even during his first term when, in January 2002, he included North Korea in an "axis of evil" along with Iran and Iraq.
No way, she indicated, was the U.S. going to shower North Korea with aid just for "returning to the table" Ñ or for making good on promises they made "and then reneged on".
In other words, North Korea would have to do a lot more than shut down the five-megawatt nuclear reactor at at the Yongbyon complex and stop producing plutonium for more nuclear devices, as North Korea has said it is doing. North Korea would also have to do more than renew its commitment to the armistice that ended the Korean War in 1953 Ñ a truce the North has said is now void.
Remember CVID Ñ "complete, verifiable, irreversible disablement" Ñ of the North's entire nuclear program?
That was the acronym bandied about during the first term of the Bush administration, but it fell into disuse in Bush's second term after Christopher Hill, then the top U.S. nuclear envoy, persuaded North Korea to sign off on in September 2005 on a vaguely worded commitment to do away with its nukes in return for an enormous outlay of aid.
After the North conducted its first nuclear test, on October 9, 2006, Hill frantically got the U.S. Treasury Department to take off the U.S.'s blacklist an obscure bank in Macao, through which the North had been channeling counterfeit U.S.$100 "supernotes".
Then, in February and October 2007, North Korea appeared to come to terms on a program for disabling and then dismantling everything to do with producing nuclear devices.
Clinton, in Phuket, revived CVID, without quite calling it that. She warned that "complete and irreversible denuclearization is the only path for North Korea", but didn't quite get around to calling North Korea a member of the "axis of evil" Ñ although she might have been thinking just that, considering U.S. concerns about the nuclear program in Iran, to which North Korea has sold expertise and missiles.
Clinton, moreover, may have been tempted to add another country to the "axis", namely Myanmar, which is strongly suspected of harboring nuclear ambitions that it hopes to fulfill with North Korean aid. It is also seen as a transshipment point for North Korean missiles and other military items bound for sale elsewhere.
The commander of the U.S. Pacific command, Adm. Timothy Keating, said the U.S. would be concerned about Myanmar only if it is proved to be "receiving goods and assistance from North Korea".
Myanmar was assumed to be the destination of a North Korean freighter, the Kang Nam I, that finally turned back after the American destroyer the USS John McCain, equipped with Aegis-equipped ballistic missile defense systems, tailed it for a few days. It's widely believed that the Kang Nam I, regardless of what it had on board, did not want inspection at a refueling port on the way, probably Singapore. Its also possible Myanmar's authorities did not want to risk international condemnation by accepting its cargo.
Clinton, with that episode obviously in mind, sought to portray North Korea as isolated, alone in a hostile world in which even its closest friend, China, refuses to cooperate in proving critical supplies.
She seemed to believe, moreover, that she had everyone on her side, especially after the ASEAN confab came together in urging "all member countries of the United Nations" to carry out the terms of the UN resolution that bans dealing with North Korea on critical supplies.
Both China and Russia signed the recent UN Security Council resolution and appear so far to be cooperating. In a gesture laden with symbolic significance, Italy blocked the export to North Korea of a pair of luxury vessels reportedly made especially for the North's Dear Leader, Kim Jong-il.
Beneath such talk and gestures, though, there was no telling where the confrontation is leading. North Korea routinely denounced as "nonsense" all that Clinton said, but there was no overt sign the North was going to go beyond testing and risk a second Korean War Ñ or even minor clashes.
Nobody at Phuket talked openly about North Korea's concerns about the present health of Kim Jong-il and the struggle for leadership. The conventional view, however, is that those worries lie behind much of the recent muscle-flexing.
Nor is the United States, for very different reasons, interested in going beyond Clinton's strong words.
President Barack Obama is far more worried about the U.S. commitment to Afghanistan and Iraq, from which he still says the U.S. will be able to withdraw its troops by the end of 2011. Interestingly, a major figure in carrying out U.S. policy in Iraq is the same peace-minded diplomat who played such a pivotal role in the six-party talks Ñ Christopher Hill, now the U.S. ambassador to Iraq.
A clue to what might happen in a showdown is South Korea's purchase of record quantities of arms from the U.S. South Korean military imports from the U.S. last year totaled $790 million, almost as much as the $808 million imported by Saudi Arabia, the second-largest buyer of U.S. arms after front-ranked Israel, whose military imports from the U.S. last year cost $1.35 billion.
Those numbers, of course, are far lower than the amount of energy aid the U.S. is promising North Korea if it gives up its nukes. A North Korean official responded at Phuket calling the U.S. proposal "nonsense" and talking about "sovereignty, security, namely life".
The official employed a particularly colorful metaphor, saying the U.S. in effect "is telling us to take off all our clothes". That turn of phrase seemed to match his description of Clinton as "a funny lady" for her rhetorical displays.
It was always possible to interpret the verbal byplay as a sign of warming. At least North Korea did not call Clinton "human scum" Ñ a phrase reserved for John Bolton, former undersecretary of state for arms control and later ambassador to the UN, and the hardest of hardliners in the bygone Bush administration.