POLITICS-US/KOREA: Foreign Policy Establishment Presses Bush

By Jim Lobe Reprint | | Print |

Analysis Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Mar 27 2001 (IPS) - Alarmed by the surly pose struck by President George W. Bush toward North Korea, the traditional US foreign- policy establishment is urging the new administration to show greater openness toward a quick resumption of talks with Pyongyang on ending its missile programme.

In a letter released here Monday, a 30-member task-force of the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) called on Bush to give “full support” to South Korean President Kim Dae Jung’s efforts at reconciliation with the North and not try to change a key 1994 nuclear agreement with Pyongyang unilaterally.

The three-page letter, signed by a bipartisan group of top US Asia experts, also argued that Washington should not make reducing the North’s conventional military forces and improving its human rights situation preconditions for supporting Kim’s “sunshine” policy, which suffered a serious setback when Bush rebuffed his appeals for early talks between Washington and Pyongyang during his visit here earlier this month.

“Kim Dae Jung’s focus on co-operation and reconciliation is the right way to begin the process and is clearly in US interests,” said the letter, whose authors included several prominent Republican hard-liners, including former US Ambassador to South Korea, James Lilley; Douglass Paal, a top Asia adviser to both Bush and his father; and Bush Sr.’s senior Asia policy- maker, Winston Lord.

The letter comes amid increasing consternation both here and abroad over Bush’s rebuff of Kim, who won the 2000 Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to promote detente on the Korean Peninsula, as well as other moves by the new administration that appear designed to increase tensions between Washington and other capitals.

In just the past two weeks, for example, Bush and his top aides have explicitly rejected the Kyoto Protocol, an accord among the world’s industrialised countries to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases; ordered the expulsion of 50 Russian diplomats in retaliation for a spying operation; and warned that future policy toward China, Iraq, as well as North Korea will be much tougher than it was under Bill Clinton.

They have also made clear their determination to deploy a system for national missile defence (NMD), which the US intelligence community has warned could spur tensions and a spiralling arms race with China and Russia that could spread to South Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.

At the same time, Bush has shown a certain indifference toward other key areas, such as the growing conflict in Macedonia, which, according to many observers, threatens to plunge the Balkans back into war, and even toward the simmering violence between Palestinians and Israelis.

Such moves have alarmed a growing number of analysts and diplomats both here and abroad.

Indeed, the European Union (EU) caught Washington by surprise this past weekend when it announced that the EU’s current president, Swedish Prime Minister Goran Persson, will soon travel to North and South Korea to help mediate between Pyongyang and Washington in the absence of any forward movement by Bush. Most EU member-countries have extended diplomatic relations with North Korea during the past year in support of Kim’s “sunshine” policy.

“It’s becoming clear that the new US administration wants to take a more hard-line approach toward North Korea,” said Sweden’s foreign minister, Anna Lindh. “That means that Europe must step in to help reduce tension between the two Koreas, not least because the outside world is so worried about North Korean missiles.”

Some analysts insist that Bush’s moves on Korea and elsewhere thus far should be seen simply as part of the normal adjustment process when an opposition party takes power and before it has all its senior policy-makers in place.

“The Republicans always go too far to coddle their (ideological) base,” says Robert Manning, a signer of the letter and a CFR Asia specialist, who notes that second- and third-tier policy-makers have not yet been confirmed in their new posts. “Bush has done that, and I think he’ll have to move back to the centre.”

That advice appears to be the intended message of the letter sent to Bush, as well. “The reason we sent it is that there seems to be a kind of hiatus here,” according to Don Oberdorfer, another signatory who was the Washington Post’s top Asia specialist some 30 years.

“The noises (made by the administration on Korea) have not been very helpful,” says Oberdorfer, who now teaches at the Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies (SAIS) here. “I hope and really believe that the noises are overblown and that, when they really sit down and look at this, there are not very many alternatives to (the Clinton) policy (of negotiations).”

In addition to praising Kim’s policy as the “right way” to proceed, the letter describes North Korea’s proposals to the Clinton administration on eliminating its long-range missile programme as “unprecedented” in scope.

They should be the basis for negotiating an agreement that would satisfy Washington’s “bottom line” – effective verification, elimination of long-range missiles already deployed; and movement toward subsequent steps to reduce tensions and the North’s conventional military threat, according to the letter.

It stressed that the so-called Agreed Framework – a 1994 accord between Washington and Pyongyang under which the North would abandon its nuclear programme in exchange for the construction of two light-water nuclear reactors by South Korea and Japan – should be reviewed due to concerns about its practical implementation, but should not be altered without Pyongyang’s agreement.

During Kim’s visit, Bush had suggested that North Korea was not complying with the Framework, although senior officials later admitted they had no evidence that Pyongyang was cheating.

Bush said he was very sceptical of Pyongyang’s general willingness to comply with any accord and thus would insist on the strictest verification measures in any negotiation. The administration also hinted that it wanted to see the North reduce its front-line conventional forces along the demilitarised zone as a precondition for resuming talks. Some 37,000 US troops are stationed in the South.

Bush’s rebuff undermined Kim both domestically and with the North, whose rhetoric has become aggressive since the visit, according to Alan Romberg, a retired career diplomat and Northeast Asia specialist at the Henry L. Stimson Centre, an arms-control think-tank. It also weakened Secretary of State Colin Powell who had said he wanted to take up where Clinton had left off with the North the day before Kim met with Bush.

Some say Powell, possibly with the help of the EU and the CFR task force, will still prevail. “Bush’s scepticism is legitimate,” said Manning. “But it’s not a policy; it’s an attitude. It will take them time to get used to the world we have now.”