CANBERRA
After 15 years of sporadic negotiations and crises, an agreement reached in Beijing on February 13, 2007, holds the promise of a new security and political order in Northeast Asia.
North Korea is prepared to shut and seal its reactor, a first step toward its permanent "disablement"; allow the return of International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors; and submit, after 60 days, a detailed inventory of the nuclear weapons and facilities to be "abandoned." In return, the other parties will grant it a million tons of heavy oil, 50,000 tons immediately; the US and Japan will open talks aimed at normalizing diplomatic relations and the US will "begin the process" of removing the designation as a state sponsor of terrorism and "advance the process" of terminating its Trading with the Enemy Act application. The parties will "take positive steps to increase mutual trust" and to "negotiate a permanent peace regime on the Korean peninsula."
If this happens, peace and cooperation will radiate from the very peninsula that in the 20th century was one of the most violently contested and militarized spots on earth.
For South Korea in particular, the agreement holds dramatic possibilities: South-North ministerial talks are already resuming in Pyongyang; a summit is a strong possibility and there is talk in Seoul of a Marshall Plan program to revive the Northern economy and of the early resumption of the train link between the two nations after a 57-year closure. The long-term prospect is for a united, denuclearized and substantially demilitarized Korea, playing a prominent, perhaps the core role, in the construction of a future Northeast Asian Community.
The agreement, however, offers no timetable for North Korea to give up its weapons. Observers suggest it might take up to 10 years for that to happen. Former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage raised the possibility of the US having to "sit down with Japan and prepare for the possibility that North Korea will remain in possession of a certain number of nuclear weapons even as the [Korean] peninsula comes slowly together for some sort of unification." Only by gradually building the sort of regional community and new security regime in which North Korea would accept that it had no further need of nuclear weapons could there be any assurance of abolition.
Having survived for so long against all odds as a secretive, highly mobilized, authoritarian, crisis system, normalization will present North Korea peculiar problems. The Catch 22 for North Korean leader Kim Jong Il: Only by giving up his weapons can he gain security and escape from isolation. To do that requires a shift from military to civilian priorities, as well as a response to popular demands for improved living conditions and civil liberties. That shift could undermine the system on which his power and prestige rests.
Three issues must be resolved for the agreement to proceed:
Highly enriched uranium (HEU): US allegations of a North Korean HEU-based weapons program in 2002 led to the present crisis. In 1998 North Korea probably purchased 20 centrifuges from A.Q. Khan of Pakistan. However, enriching of uranium to weapons grade requires a level of precision almost certainly beyond North Korea's capacity. Immediately after the Beijing agreement, Pyongyang expressed readiness to address US suspicions on this front, which suggests that this issue might be negotiable. Two weeks after Beijing, a senior government analyst told US Congress that the intelligence community was now "uncertain" about the state of any North Korean HEU program, leaving open the possibility that an Iraqi-style political manipulation of intelligence had contributed to the 2002 crisis. Pyongyang expressed readiness to address US concerns, and the issue suddenly seemed negotiable.
Banco Delta Asia (BDA): The most recent North Korean standoff with the US arose primarily not from nuclear matters but from the US allegation of a counterfeit operation, partly orchestrated through the BDA in Macao. It stretches the imagination to think North Korea could apply such sophisticated technology to strike a blow at the US Treasury, in small quantities, especially when North Korea cannot print its own currency. The mystery remains, but when Christopher Hill, the chief US delegate, announced in Beijing that the matter would be resolved "within 30 days," that could only mean that it had already been settled.
Light water reactor (LWR): Kim's father and North Korea's former leader, Kim Il Sung, set his heart on power generation by means of light water reactors as the quintessential, ultra-modern technology, even though it lacks military application; the LWR is close to holy writ in Pyongyang as a result. For the Bush administration, on the other hand, it is the epitome of the "failed" policies of the Clinton administration. Paradoxically, because the crucial consideration with the LWR is not military, this may be the most difficult issue to resolve.
Japan, not commonly thought of as a core country in the Beijing negotiation process, may express the most shock over the agreement - comparable to the "Nixon shocks" over US engagement with China more than three decades ago. Prime Minister Abe owes his rise to political power in Japan in large part to his skill in manipulating anti-North Korea sentiment over the issue of abductions of Japanese citizens during the 1970s and 1980s. He cannot easily reverse himself now. Domestic political considerations trump international ones, and the abductions are framed as a North Korean crime against Japan rather than a universal human-rights offense. Since Bush's policy shift in Beijing requires Japan to negotiate normalization, Abe's "containment policy," as the Asahi Shimbun news report put it on February 15, "falls apart."
Unquestioning support to Washington has long been the fundamental tenet of the Japanese state. But for normalization with North Korea to proceed, Japan will have to rethink its position on both North Korea and the US. Nobody in Japan is ready for the sort of "sitting down" indicated by Armitage, so confusion and anger, and perhaps political instability, can be expected.
It remains to be seen whether North Korea, the US and Japan, can neutralize their hard-line domestic opposition and build trust in sufficient measure to outweigh decades of hostility. The Beijing agreement constitutes a pre-dawn light in the darkness, heralding a possible new multipolar and post-US hegemonic order in Northeast Asia, with the Six-Party conference format institutionalized in due course as a body for addressing common problems of security, environment, food and energy, the precursor of a future regional community. It is hard to imagine anything with greater capacity to transform the regional and global system than the peaceful settlement of the many problems addressed in Beijing in February 2007.
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Gavan McCormack is emeritus professor and visiting fellow with the Division of Pacific and Asian History, the Australian NationalUniversity. Rights: © 2007 Yale Center for the Study of Globalization. YaleglobalOnline
