As U.S. repeated ‘Libya,’ North Korea got angrier
If you’re serious about peace and denuclearization, maybe don’t mention Libya. That appeared to be the message North Korea had for the U.S. once again Thursday when Pyongyang lashed out at Vice President Mike Pence, calling him a “political dummy” and threatening a “nuclear-to-nuclear showdown,” hours before Trump canceled an upcoming denuclearization summit in Singapore set for June 12, citing “open hostility” by North Korea.
“As a person involved in the U.S. affairs, I cannot suppress my surprise at such ignorant and stupid remarks gushing out from the mouth of the U.S. vice president,” Choe Son Hui, a North Korean vice foreign minister, had said earlier.
The remarks came after Pence brought up Libya as an example of North Korea’s possible fate in a Fox News interview Monday, though similar comments by Trump’s national security adviser, John Bolton, and Trump himself previously drew ire in Pyongyang.
“As the president made clear, this will only end like the Libyan model ended if Kim Jong Un doesn’t make a deal,” Pence told Fox News. Using almost the exact same words, Trump stressed last week that the example of Libya showed “what will take place if we don’t make a deal.”
Both were referring to the capture and killing of Libya’s ex-leader Moammar Gadhafi by rebels in 2011, apparently as a warning to North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons.
But a closer look at history reveals that Libya may be the worst example Pence or Trump could have chosen — and could have contributed to the renewed escalation of tensions in recent days. The North African nation chose to voluntarily give up its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and to comply with Western conditions — but the U.S. and Europe later helped topple the Gadhafi regime anyway. It’s easy to see why Pyongyang is more agitated the more Washington brings up Libya.
The Bush administration has framed Libya’s denuclearization move as resulting directly from the 2003 U.S.-led Iraq invasion and intelligence operations that cut off delivery routes for Libya’s nuclear weapons program. In an interview with CNN, Gadhafi himself indicated the toppling of the Hussein regime in Iraq may have affected his decision to give up the program.
“In word and action, we have clarified the choices left to potential adversaries,” then-President George W. Bush said in announcing the program’s dismantlement, indirectly referring to the Iraq War.
But analysts voiced criticism of the Iraq-Libya link at the time and suggested Bush may have been trying to use success in Libya to defend his Iraq legacy. Gadhafi’s concessions, wrote Brookings foreign policy analyst Martin Indyk in early 2004, were linked mostly to Libya’s economic crisis after years of sanctions and mismanagement.
“The only way out was to seek rapprochement with Washington,” Indyk wrote.