Unlock critical, urgent aspects of NK nuclear program
This is the 12th in a “Letter to President Biden” series aimed at conveying policy recommendations through open letters from politicians, scholars and experts to the new U.S. president following his Jan. 20 inauguration. — ED.
As you consider how you want to approach the issues surrounding Korea, it would be useful to review where U.S. policy has been, and where it may go now. Of course, there are multiple challenges to U.S. interests, and those of your South Korean ally, in the current situation. But contrary to many published papers and analyses in the past three decades, there are also great opportunities.
The short story is that you have a rare opportunity to pick up where your friends Bill Clinton and Kim Dae-jung left off 20 years ago. Twenty years is a long time, particularly in Washington. For that reason, few of the people now in government remember how masterfully Clinton and Kim had addressed the simmering Korean Peninsula issues between 1998 and 2001, or how strongly they had to confront the forces of Cold War thinking, bad analysis, insincere political opponents, and just bad luck.
Clinton and Kim were pushing a large rock up a hill, one might say. But they had reasons to do so. Their shared goal was a more stable and prosperous Korean Peninsula, and an East Asia region where North Korean WMD and missiles did not drive a zerosum hardening face-off between democracies and non-democracies, and a doomed arms race. China and Russia were very interested in what happened in their backyard, so lining up their conditional but grounded support was a crucial part of the effort.
Of course, as head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, you were aware of these forces. In fact, you huddled with the South Korean president in Seoul in late August 2001, as the George W. Bush administration’s reckless and self-defeating approaches to foreign relations were unfolding.
You were both alarmed at the prospect that Bush would abandon the Antiballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty and set off a race to the bottom with missile defenses provoking missile buildups. It was both illuminating and a source of pride for those of us who knew Kim that he voiced opposition to that ABM decision, thus becoming a true enemy of the Bush crew.
But more important was the speech you were working on at the time. A few weeks after you talked with Kim, you spoke at the National Press Club (NPC) in Washington. It was Sept. 10, 2001. You laid out as no one yet had just what self-defeating “nonsense” the Bush group’s approach to the world was. That speech is probably one of your best, because you were not only very specific about how their approach would fail. You were frankly pissed off, and this is clear in your voice. (https://www.c-span.org/video/165936-1/us-foreign-policy) As fate would have it, the events of the next morning in New York and Washington and Pennsylvania overshadowed the prescient and forceful call-to-arms you had offered us in the U.S.
A lot has happened in Korea and the U.S. in the past 20 years. Koreans have worked hard to become one of the most open and democratic societies in the word. At the same time, they now stand as the sixth most effective military, with domestically-produced fighter jets, long-range radar and coast guard ships.
As the U.S. struggles against all odds to censure its corrupt former president, two of Korea’s corrupt former presidents sit behind bars. When over a million people from all walks of life peacefully demonstrated around the country during the winter of 2016-17, helping to impeach a president, they picked up their trash on the way home.
Due to its respect for science-based policy and generally good governance, Korea is a world leader in confronting and mitigating the COVID-19 pandemic.
During this same time, and accelerating just after your NPC speech, the U.S. squandered much of its hard and soft power, its ability to make and implement foreign policy, and its reputation for trustworthiness. Those were only partly recovered during the eight years you were vice president. And then came Trump.
It should strike you as telling — and even illuminating — that the same group, including John Bolton, that destroyed the ABM Treaty and the working Agreed Framework with North Korea in the early 2000s then went on to walk away from America’s promised commitments to the nuclear agreement with Iran in 2018. In both cases agreements that prevented nuclear weapons development were abandoned unilaterally, with dire regional consequences.
President Moon Jae-in has 17 months left in his term. Along with all Korean democrats, he is trying to honor the work of Kim Dae-jung, and of Korean leaders and presidents going back to the Korean War who were trying to end those hostilities and rebuild the peninsula so that economic development, infrastructure and security would show what cooperating Koreans can do. Neither Kim nor Clinton had parliamentary majorities for long.
But you and Moon Jae-in do. Together you have a rare opportunity to pick up where Kim and Clinton left off. You have been around a while, so you know how remarkable this time is, when you can capture, cap and roll back North Korea’s nuclear programs and ICBMs to zero. To do so you must do what you have promised, by engaging in honest diplomacy, accepting Seoul’s central role, and stitching together a deal and then a process that is fair, realistic and durable.
It’s time to put on the table those five U.N. sanctions from late 2016. They are probably illegal anyway, since they target the public, and not any specific activity. Listen to Dr. Hazel Smith, among others, on this point. To cite this article, you can refer to “Smith’s 2020: The ethics of United Nations sanctions on North Korea: effectiveness, necessity and proportionality, Critical Asian Studies.” (To link to this article, go to https://doi.org/10.1080/14672715.202 0.1757479.)
If you do this, you will unlock the most urgent and critical aspects of North Korea’s programs. These are the ones that must be stopped first. In the view of the best analysts in Korea and the U.S., the Kim Jungun
regime is ready to deal. If you are wise and modern about this you will help unleash mutually-reinforcing economic development, security cooperation, and tension reduction in Northeast Asia.
Contrary to what many people are telling you, this “Korea initiative” should be considered low-hanging fruit. You would be pushing at open doors with China and Russia, some of Japan’s security concerns would be addressed, and South Korea would gladly shoulder much of the weight and long-term management.
Who knows, if you pitch the longplanned Korea-Japan bridge/tunnel, you might even help get those two talking about productive things again. In a nutshell, you are the right person to do this at this critical time.
President Moon has surrounded himself with some of the best and most experienced people, who know what happened in the 1990s and do not want it to go to waste. You should do the same. Give them authority and guidance, and help all of us build back better on Korea.
Good luck to you, Stephen Costello