North Korea: The Deal

The US, Japan, South Korea, China and Russia have reached a deal with North Korea over its nuclear weapons program. It’s not the Libya-template deal that the US wanted, and it doesn’t actually resolve most of the thornier issues with regard to North Korea. It puts them off for later, promises aid to North Korea, and promises to resolve a financial standoff over a Macau bank that the DPRK uses for some of its illegal currency-generating activities. But it’s a deal and it’s multilateral and the administration is likely to hail it as a success, which it is, of a sort.

North Korea agreed on Tuesday to take steps toward nuclear disarmament in exchange for $300 million in aid under a deal President George W. Bush hailed as the best chance to get it to scrap its atomic weapons program.

The landmark agreement, reached four months after Pyongyang stunned the world with its first nuclear test, requires the secretive communist state to shut down the reactor at the heart of its nuclear ambitions and allow international inspections.

But the accord also calls for concessions by the United States toward economically impoverished North Korea, which Bush once lumped together with Iran and Iraq as an “axis of evil.”

Three short graphs in, and the Reuters scribes place the burden of past tension on three short words. Not decades of North Korean sponsorship of terrorism, lies, drug smuggling, weapons trafficking, kidnappings, and other assorted misbehaviors. Just three short words. This is the press we have today: Aggressively clueless about the past, and mindlessly biased about the present. Useless as chroniclers of history as it unfolds.

Not that the Bush administration is really worth defending on many fronts at this point:

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Iran, another country at loggerheads with the West over its nuclear program, should see North Korea as an example.

“Why should it not be seen as a message to Iran that the international community is able to bring together its resources?” she asked at a news conference.

“…bring together its resources…” To do what, bribe rogue states with nuclear ambitions? Let the remnants of the Condi ’08 talk die with that quote.

Back to the uselessness of MSM reporters.

The deal came after a U.S. administration known for a go-it-alone style in world affairs decided to take a more multilateral approach toward North Korea, largely by drawing in China to apply pressure as Pyongyang’s major trading partner.

The Bush administration, to its credit, has been keeping the Chinese engaged on North Korea for years, to the point that the Democrats have criticized it for being too multilateral. For years. Anyone who has paid any attention at all to the Korean nuclear standoff has to be aware of this, and one would presume that Reuters would assign reporters who have at least a passing familiarity with this not at all ancient history. At the same time, these same Democrats have criticized the administration for being too unilateral in Iraq. Reuters’ writers Jack Kim and Chris Buckley are setting up a false accusation–that the administration has only now sought Chinese input on North Korea–to set up the oblique reference to Iraq, in order to steal two points against the administration in what is supposed to be a news article. Well done, boys. The DNC’s check is undoubtedly in the mail.

The story goes on to pretend to get inside the president’s head, detail the happy talk between US envoy Christopher Hill and the North Korean representative, before singling out the one realist left in the room:

Japan, which has voiced doubt that any agreement could be made to stick, said it will not join in giving aid to North Korea because of past abductions of its nationals by Pyongyang’s agents.

Japan is right; everyone else is wrong. North Korea will find a way to cheat.

Former US envoy John Bolton, architect of the Proliferation Security Initiative meant to cage North Korea’s illegal weapons trade, doesn’t like this new deal.

“This is a very bad deal,” former U.N. ambassador John R. Bolton told CNN. “It contradicts fundamental premises of the president’s policy he’s been following for the past six years. And second, it makes the administration look very weak at a time in Iraq . . . when it needs to look strong.”

Bolton seems to have things about right. It’s really impossible to strike a good deal with North Korea as long as it has any ability at all to sneak around inspections, and as long as the hard questions are put off for another day. North Korea has bought itself time and aid; we seem to have bought the promises of a state with a history of cheating and lying however it can. North Korea says it’s closing its main site at Yongbyon; time will tell. It has said the same before only to pop the seals when the world’s eyes looked the other way.

With Libya, the invasion of Iraq terrified Ghadafi to the point that he literally gave up his nuclear program. He also started cooperating with efforts to halt clandestine international nuclear networks. Ending Libya’s nuclear program was a bank shot victory against a rogue state that we won by invading Iraq, that most of the world has conveniently forgotten entirely about. We’ve gotten no such outcome in North Korea. We have a deal, lots of people are happy, but the problems are likely to remain as long as the Kim family remains atop Pyongyang’s bloody throne.

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