Kim Jong Il is a "businessman" who treats the entire country as his personal corporation. And the last thing he desires is to lose control of that business. So I don't see him throwing all of that away by pushing a nuclear program.
I don't see him throwing it all away by selling a bomb. I think it entirely likely that he will pursue a nuclear program, simply because he believes that he needs a deterrent. We may know that we have no intention of attacking without massive provocation, but he doesn't necessarily understand that. Paranoia strikes deep.
The best available solution to the problem of N. Korean insistence on bilateral negotiations would be for Russia, China, S. Korea, or all three to formally announce that bilateral negotiations would be fundamentally unacceptable to them. That would do a good deal to get us off the hook. Unfortunately, the squandering of political capital that took place over Iraq has hurt our ability to arrange this sort of thing.
I'd like to see us publicly call for a multilateral conference on Korean peninsula security issues - not a formal negotiation, just an exploratory discussion - and invite all interested parties, including N. Korea, to attend. That would be a proactive step, far better than our current pout-and-wait approach; it would put the ball in their court, and make us look like the reasonable ones. We should simultaneously offer a time-limited and conditional non-aggression guarantee, to create a further impression of magnanimity.
One thing that we have lost is the option of insisting on a nuclear-free Korean peninsula. It's too late for that, and in reality there is probably very little that could have been done to prevent it. From now on, we will have to assume that they have a nuclear capacity.
I merely assert that the Saudis must define what is, and what isn't acceptable behavior for a religious cleric, and then enforce those standards.
Unfortunately, they don't have the capacity to do that. That's what makes it such a difficult situation. They can't do the things they must do, and no superior alternative is available.
I wish there were an easy answer, but I don't see one. It would help if Iraq were on line with a significant surplus production capacity, but there's a lot to be done before that happens, and it's not sure to happen at all.
Everyone here should read the Pollack analysis:
foreignaffairs.org |
