The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2007

ing leverage. That is why the president was right to rebuke Bolton publicly for his criticism of the agreement. Pyongyang’s Point Pyongyang’s basic stance is that if Washington remains a foe, it will seek nuclear arms and missiles to counter that threat; but if Washington ends its enmity, then it will not pursue nuclear weapons. If it were up to the hardliners in the Bush administra- tion, however, Washington would never put Pyongyang to the test. These ideologues equate diplomatic give-and- take with rewarding bad behavior. They insist the DPRK is determined to arm, or else is engaged in blackmail to extort economic aid without giving up anything in return. In fact, it has been doing neither. It has followed a strat- egy of tit for tat — cooperating whenever Washington cooperates, and retaliating when Washington reneges or fails to honor its agreements — in an effort to end mutu- al antipathy. It is still doing so. Up to now, the only way for North Korea to make the fissile material it wanted for weapons has been via its plu- tonium program at Yongbyon. Yet the North halted reprocessing in the fall of 1991, some three years before signing the Agreed Framework, and did not resume reprocessing until 2003. It also shut down its fuel-fabri- cation plant before signing the accord, having made enough fuel rods for at most 15-to-17 bombs’ worth of plutonium-laden spent fuel, and only recently refur- bished that plant. The North exercised some restraint on missiles, as well. The only way for it to perfect ballistic missiles was to test-fire them until they worked. Yet it had conduct- ed only two medium- and longer-range missile tests of its own in the 20 years prior to the fireworks of last July 4. With that history in mind, it is instructive to review the sequence of events that led up to the Bush admin- istration’s October 2006 turnaround. The U.S. Reneges During the fourth round of the Six-Party Talks in August and September 2005, under pressure from South Korea and Japan to seek a negotiated solution to the nuclear dispute, Pres. Bush authorized U.S. negotiators to meet directly with the North Koreans for sustained dis- cussion of their concerns. Isolated at the talks, Washington grudgingly accepted a joint statement that incorporated the main goal it was seeking, a pledge by Pyongyang to abandon “all nuclear weapons and existing nuclear programs.” When an earlier draft of that accord was circulated by China before the second round of talks in February 2004, Vice President Dick Cheney had intervened to turn it down with the words, “We don’t negotiate with evil. We defeat it.” The ink was hardly dry on the Sept. 19, 2005, joint statement when the irreconcilables struck back, get- ting Washington to renege on the accord and hamstring- ing U.S. diplomats. The very day Washington agreed to respect Pyong- yang’s right to nuclear power and “to discuss at an appro- priate time the subject of the provision of light-water reactors” it had promised in 1994 but never delivered, it announced it was disbanding KEDO, the international consortium it had set up to provide the reactors. On Sept. 19 the United States also pledged “to take coordinated steps to implement” the accord “in a phased manner in line with the principle of ‘commitment for commitment’ and ‘action for action.’” Yet immediately thereafter, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice insisted North Korea had to disarm first and implied that the “appropriate time” for discussing the reactors was when hell freezes over: “When the North Koreans have dis- mantled their nuclear weapons and other nuclear pro- grams verifiably and are indeed nuclear-free ... I suppose we can discuss anything.” Pyongyang reacted sharply. “The basis of finding a solution to the nuclear issue between the DPRK and the U.S. is to wipe out the distrust historically created between the two countries. A physical groundwork for building bilateral confidence is none other than the U.S. provision of light-water reactors to the DPRK,” a Foreign Ministry spokesman said. “The U.S. should not even dream of the issue of the DPRK’s dismantlement of its nuclear deterrent before providing LWRs, a physical guarantee for confidence-building.” Even worse, having declared in the September 2005 agreement that they had “no intention to attack or invade the DPRK with nuclear or conventional weapons,” and having pledged to “respect [North Korea’s] sovereign- F O C U S J U LY- A U G U S T 2 0 0 7 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 31 Leon V. Sigal directs the Northeast Cooperative Security Project at the Social Science Research Council in New York. He is the author of Disarming Strangers: Nuclear Diplomacy with North Korea (Princeton University Press, 1998).