By Leon V. Sigal*
May 22, 2001
NEW YORK -- So much for bipartisan foreign policy. Just before the November election, North Korea agreed to freeze its medium- and longer-range missile program and end all exports of missiles and related technology. It invited President Bill Clinton to come to Pyongyang to close the deal, a giant step toward eliminating its missile threat and redrawing the political map of northeast Asia.
Such a deal was of obvious benefit to U.S. security. As Secretary of State Madeleine Albright put it last November 2 at the National Press Club: "We would be irresponsible if we didn't take advantage of a historic opportunity to move beyond 50 years of Cold War division and reduce the danger that the North Korean missiles pose to us and others around the globe."
But "Call Me Irresponsible" could be the theme song of the passionate partisans who dominate Washington today. While "realists" in the foreign- policy establishment looked on, clueless as usual about how to deal with North Korea, Clinton sought support from George W. Bush for the visit. Bush, reluctant to enrage right-wing Republicans in Congress by endorsing the trip but not about to attack it either, remained noncommittal. Clinton, lacking the courage of his convictions, never went.
To Pyongyang, a visit by the president would have represented the culmination of a 10-year campaign to end its lifelong enmity with the United States, as well as with South Korea and Japan.
Despite the grumbling in the Bush camp that Clinton was "grandstanding," Clinton would have been doing the president-elect a favor by locking in a missile freeze before he left office. It would have allowed Bush to improve on the deal in the coming months by getting the North to dismantle their No Dongs and Taepo Dongs missiles and to allow on-site monitoring.
Bush can drive a harder bargain than Clinton on missiles. By holding up the resumption of missile talks and threatening to move the goalposts, however, the new administration will impede North-South reconciliation.
That will only intensify political pressures in the South to compel the eventual withdrawal of American troops.
Far from insisting on their withdrawal, Pyongyang is hinting at a new rationale for their continued presence by suggesting that Washington can play a role as peacemaker and peacekeeper on the peninsula. It is also ready to engage in serious conventional force negotiations -- once it is convinced that the Bush administration is ready to cooperate in ending enmity by concluding a missile deal.
A missile deal with North Korea could thus secure the American position in northeast Asia for years to come. It would end the missile threat to the United States and Japan. It would ease hostility on the Korean peninsula, where 37,000 U.S. troops and their dependents remain in harm's way. It would also benefit Israel and other American allies in the Middle East and Europe who want a halt to further missile proliferation.
Finally, the missile deal would transform the geopolitics of northeast Asia, opening up opportunities for multilateral security cooperation in the region. If China chooses not to cooperate, others would be more inclined to join together against it.
The idea that cooperative threat reduction works will not win easy acceptance among the "realists" who dominate the Bush team and the American foreign policy establishment. But it is the best way to enhance American security in Asia.
Leon V. Sigal is director of the Northeast Asia Cooperative
Security Project at the Social Science Research Council in New
York and author of Disarming Strangers: Nuclear Diplomacy
with North Korea (1998). The preceding is an excerpt from his
article in the current edition of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.