David Re...You're right, that WOULD have been.
Agreed
That's why the agreement probably should never have happened.
How so? The agreement actually was beneficial to both sides. We delayed NK from building the extra nuclear bombs it could have already built by now, and NK got the badly needed oil which its people needed to survive. Sometimes a wounded animal can be the most dangerous. The pact was just a delaying tactic until NK was too weak to be bothered with.
atimes.com
The stage for the coming confrontation was set more than a decade ago, after the collapse of Soviet communism. Officials of the George Bush I and Bill Clinton administrations hoped to play a waiting game. They figured North Korea would collapse, perhaps to be absorbed into South Korea in the pattern of East and West Germany. Meanwhile they would rely on a balancing act: neither speeding things up through military intervention nor providing to the regime the means to prolong its existence.
You are trying to micro manage a global problem. Put the agreement in its context, and question if the agreement achieved its primary purpose. If you say the primary purpose was to deny NK every single way to develop nuclear weapons at the present and into the forseeable future; then one could conclude that the agreement failed that last facet. If you say as this article does, that the Bush I and Clinton's administrations purpose at that time was to play a waiting game; to delay the NK nuclear program until the US had a stronger hand; then the pact achieved its purpose; as the US was able to play the China card to its advantage.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Korea/DL20Dg03.html
Pyongyang: A blot on the map
By Francesco Sisci
Part 1: Alone again, naturally
BEIJING - In October when Chinese President Jiang Zemin went to Texas to see US President George W Bush, the two spoke of North Korea. Jiang said he favored a denuclearized Korean Peninsula and Bush was happy about this. A few days later, however, the North Koreans told the Americans they indeed had a nuclear-weapons program.
It was a slap in Jiang's face. Pyongyang's admission meant either that the Chinese were A) out of the loop, did not know what was happening in North Korea, and therefore the United States did not need to talk to them, or B) they were lying and the North Koreans were telling the truth. In either case the message was that the Chinese were not reliable when talking about North Korea and that Washington had better talk to Pyongyang directly. The North Koreans were trying to build bridges with the Americans at the expenses of the Chinese.
Read the text. China and NK were played like a stratovarious; and NK's nuclear gambit is likely to fold like a cheap suit. China has newfound global asperations, and can't afford a bad child like NK to spoils its bigger goals. NK can't live without China's protection and largesse. Who will lose in the end; the weakest of the three. Who will win, the US big time, who not only will have tamed NK, but have gotten China to not only acquiesce, but likely do most of the spanking of its wayward child. |
