ARTICLE: "Deal to Shut Major North Korean Nuclear Facilities Appears Closer: In the long term, hopes of normal relations after a long standoff," by Jim Yardley and David E. Sanger, New York Times, 10 February 2007, p. A6.
The Bush Administration describes it as a deal in the making in the mode of the Libyan package: a sequential giving up of all nuclear gear and material in exchange for normalized relations and opening up the floodgates on access to outside economic contacts.
If pulled off, this would be a major coup for this administration, although you'd have to be amazed if the DPRK went through with it before the end of Bush's second term. If Kim does, then somebody squeezed him harder than we could by freezing a lousy $24 million of its assets and that somebody must have been China.
When I was there last fall I was told by all that this time the Chinese leadership were very mad and very serious about cracking down on Kim, and the intimation was that many unseen screws would be applied (because each time I asked, that was the sort of hint provided).
Now, in the past, Kim has bargained for the best he could, then took the breather, and then went back at it again. The trick for us this time, as the article notes, is that we'll have a devil of a time confirming just how much the DPRK really possesses.
The NK's diplomats are saying they're ready to denuclearize, but then they've said many such hopeful things in the past only to renege each time.
Still, anything that got Pyongyang to normalize ties with the U.S. and through that conduit the rest of the world would work nicely for the soft-kill option, which is clearly what the Chinese and we would prefer (the Chinese because they fear a refugee flow and us because we're busy elsewhere).
Chris Hill would go down as the administration's most successful diplomat if he can pull this off. He was, after all, the guy who worked the Milosevic deal, so his experience from the previous administration may be the one great carryover of Clinton's diplomatic style to this administration (Clinton, admittedly, was taken by Kim back then, but we just didn't have the same nuke fixation back then that we now have in a post-9/11 world).
It is amazing how the Balkans were such a learning experience for so many current leaders like Hill and Petraeus. We collectively feel a lot of guilt (well, some of us do) for having taken so long to go in there, and yet so much was learned positively from the process, so many careers forged. I think history will judge it very positively.
Having said all this, I don't expect Kim to open up the DPRK like Qaddafi did. Qaddafi needed outside investment for a faltering oil industry and he can come out smelling like a rose given how little of that country has even been effectively drilled for oil (and he's got the best stuff in the world). For Kim, serious FDI flow means the slo-mo buyout and his own increasing marginalization, and he shows little desire for that.
But who knows what the Chinese are saying now or promising. I don't think the West's sanctions are responsible for this shift. I think, however, they did set up the dynamic by which the ace-in-the-hole scenario--namely China--came up empty this time, so for that reason alone they were worth pursuing.
This is my fear, though: by proving he has a bomb (albeit crude), Kim goes through with this pitch as best he can, pretending to give up all but not really doing so. He collects what he needs, gets himself into a far safer position, and then whips out the nukes down the road in a redeclaration and we begin again. Clearly, Kim couldn't get the same deal he got last time with the freeze because you can only try such tricks once. But I expect he has the new trick already teed up.
Eventually, I would still expect that Kim has to go down with some violence. I'm just hoping that the more connectivity we can achieve with the regime, the smaller number of bullets required.
One would be ideal.
Plus, the biggest gain here is that America and China are successfully navigating a joint effort at making a bad guy get less bad (and hopefully go away some day under the right conditions). Think about all the other places in this world where that might prove a nice combination and you begin to see the possibilities that I find so intriguing.
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