Ronald Brownstein:
Washington Outlook
For Wary U.S. and Asia, North Korea Is 'Land of Lousy Options'
.........Late last month, when a group of Democratic experts in Washington released a manifesto slamming Bush's foreign policy, the tone of uncertainty on North Korea contrasted dramatically with the assured jabs at the president on almost everything else. "Korea is the land of lousy options," acknowledged Kurt Campbell, a former Clinton administration official now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
That was the other major point of consensus at the gathering last week in Tokyo sponsored by the Japan Society and other Japanese foundations. Even those with strong beliefs about what ought to be done next described their ideas as "the least-worst choice in a range of bad choices," as one put it.
No one, not even the Chinese, expressed much confidence that they could predict how North Korea would react either to carrots (like a security guarantee) or sticks (like last week's cancellation of a nuclear power project the U.S. had been funding).
In this fog, several options dominated discussion. The choices roughly tracked the debate within the Bush administration itself, though in more exaggerated form. One camp at the conference hoped to convince Kim that the price of possessing nuclear weapons was too high by pressuring his regime.
The softer version of this approach called for tougher steps to cut off the money North Korea earns from sales of missiles and drugs and other smuggling.
The undiluted version came from conservative writer Max Boot of the Council on Foreign Relations, who argued in a paper that "the only way to make sure that North Korea is denuclearized (and its people liberated) is to overthrow the Kim regime."
Toward that end, he wanted South Korea and China to end all aid to North Korea and to open their borders to refugees. Most provocatively, he said that if China doesn't make strong efforts to discourage the North Korean nuclear program, Japan should threaten to "go nuclear itself."
That last idea seemed more a debating point than a practical notion. Yet Boot's conclusion that only regime change could genuinely stabilize the region — and end the suffering of the North Korean people — received a surprisingly enthusiastic reception from the diplomats and academics around the table.
Still, almost all hesitated to endorse such a campaign now. Chinese officials pointedly questioned whether the American Embassy would make visas available to the refugees Boot was encouraging to flood across China's border.
Many doubted any amount of peaceful pressure could dislodge Kim from power. And many feared that Kim would lash out militarily against even a nonviolent campaign to squeeze his regime. When cornered, former South Korean foreign minister Gong Ro-Myung said memorably, even a mouse will bite a cat.
Other options didn't look much better. Few were confident that a preemptive military strike could eliminate all of North Korea's nuclear program — much less do so without inspiring Kim to lash back horribly at South Korea and Japan.
REST AT latimes.com . |
