Washington is ready to fall into Kim Jong Un's trap, again
How many times will the United States pay North Korea to shut down the same nuclear reactor? The answer so far is three, although the Biden White House seems increasingly ready to make it four.
North Korea once again restarted its Yongbyon reactor in July after it had been dormant for two and a half years. To earn the expected payoff, Kim Jong Un appears to be following the same playbook his father and grandfather used to fleece the U.S. during their respective tenures as lead despot.
The premise is simple: Initiate a crisis so that Washington persuades itself that the only possible choices in front of it are a deal or a war. In fact, it's already working. White House press secretary Jen Psaki stated late last month that the new activity at Yongbyon "underscores the urgent need for dialogue and diplomacy so we can achieve the complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula."
For good measure, the Kim regime also reportedly reprocessed plutonium from pre-2018 reactor operations to generate fissile material for use in additional nuclear weapons. One estimate indicates that Pyongyang already has between 20 and 60 nuclear weapons. If Joe Biden continues to follow Kim's script, his North Korea policy is destined to fail just like that of his four immediate predecessors. The reactor, and the larger Yongbyon complex, have played a pivotal role in U.S.-North Korea negotiations since 1994. The reactor may be the most valuable nuclear facility in the world, since American presidents keep rewarding the Kim family with money and sanctions relief to shut it down.
Bill Clinton nearly went to war with North Korea in 1993-1994 to stop Kim Il Sung and his son Kim Jong Il from gaining access to the fissile material produced in the reactor. The crisis was "solved" when former President Jimmy Carter negotiated the parameters of what would become the 1994 Agreed Framework that froze, but did not eliminate, the nuclear threat. In exchange for shutting down Yongbyon,
Washington committed to building two, less dangerous nuclear reactors for Pyongyang as part of a multibillion-dollar package. George W. Bush declared in 2002 that the Kim regime was part of the "Axis of Evil" but then negotiated a deal for the same reactor in September 2005. A little more than a year later, Pyongyang conducted its first-ever nuclear test. Bush still eventually paid North Korea $2.5 million to destroy the reactor's cooling tower, although that did not alter the reactor's operations.
Barack Obama reached the so-called Leap Day Deal on Feb. 29, 2012, to freeze and disable the Yongbyon reactor in exchange for humanitarian aid. The deal fell apart after only six weeks when North Korea launched a long-range missile. Obama then shifted his attention to securing a nuclear deal with Iran while rechristening his do-nothing North Korea policy as one of "strategic patience." This gave Kim Jong Un ample time to build up his nuclear and missile programs, culminating in three intercontinental ballistic missile tests in 2017.