Non-Proliferation

Remember back during one of the presidential debates last fall, when the two candidates spent a rather excrutiating amount of time quibbling over whose foreign policy platform Henry Kissinger would more agree with? The issue was mainly one of Republican pride, as it would seemingly amount to apostasy for a veteran GOP foreign policy stalwart like Kissinger to "side" with a relative neophyte like Barack Obama. But it was also seen as a test of the legitimacy of Obama's then contentious talk-to-foreign-leaders approach. With a grizzled realist's stamp of approval, Obama was on solid ground, or so the logic went.

Kissinger is in The Washington Post today, and he (basically) makes sense, arguing that "the issue of proliferation is intrinsically multilateral" and that "bilateral U.S.-Iranian talks are indispensable." But on North Korea, he seems to have taken a step back.

North Korea has recently voided all concessions it made in six years of talks. It cannot be permitted to sell the same concessions over and over again. The six-power talks should be resumed only if Pyongyang restores the circumstances to which it has already agreed, mothballing its plutonium reactor and returning international inspectors to the site.

Those sound awfully like preconditions, even if allowing inspectors to return should be a first-order move. I can't speak to the nuances of Kissinger's previous North Korea position, but he seems to be responding to Pyongyang's brazen fire-a-missile-then-kick-out-nuclear-inspectors tactic. But holding out from the six-party talks would be playing right into North Korea's hands here. If they're the ones threatening to leave the talks, there's no sense to reciprocate with further threat-mongering.

I, for one, am not willing to wait for "mothballs" to accrue in North Korea's nuclear facilities before engaging in the talks to close down those facilities.

(image of Yongbyon nuclear plant, from flickr user earthhopper under a Creative Commons license)

Particularly when you're the head of the world's nuclear watchdog group, and you're addressing the country with the greatest leverage over an off-and-on nuclear "rogue" state.  Speaking in Beijing, International Atomic Energy Agency chief Mohamed ElBaradei sounded the right message on Iran and North Korea:

"There is no other solution apart from dialogue," ElBaradei said at a conference on nuclear energy in Beijing. "The only way to resolve these issues is not through flexing muscles ... but to try to engage the root causes."

ElBaradei, whose spats with the Bush Administration are well documented, is clearly pleased with the shift toward engagement with Iran occuring in Washington.  Now, though, the onus is on Tehran; ElBaradei rightly emphasized that, if Iran too is serious about negotiations, it will have to "reciprocate" the U.S. opening.  Opponents will assume that ElBaradei is simply talking soft when it comes to Iran, but this misses the point; it was the Bush Administration's confrontational stance toward Iran that messed up the IAEA's nonproliferation efforts, not the other way around (though I suppose if the IAEA had been able to continue its work in say, Iraq, it would indeed have dampened enthusiasm for U.S. hawkishness).

When it comes to China and North Korea, though, "dialogue" has to mean something different.  Talk of the U.S.-Iran opening abounds in the media; the issue is, one can conclude without much cynicism, also a domestic political one for both sides.  China and North Korea, on the other hand, will have to engage much more quietly, and behind the scenes.  Neither wants to let on any rupture in their alliance, so it is all the more important that Beijing talk -- but talk tough -- to Pyongyang.  Let's hope ElBaradei pressed this on the Chinese once the cameras were off.

As for the alleged "freedom-hating" speech by Jackie Chan in China the other day, I'm going to have agree with Josh from FP that Chan was making a clever use of sarcastic doublespeak when addressing his Chinese hosts.  After all, this is a guy who, as UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador, channeled his martial arts prowess toward the goal of peace in East Timor.

Even with nuclear inspectors kicked out of the country, it seems to foolish to contend, as Weekly Standard contributor Joseph Loconte did recently, epitomizing a bizarre assumption of many hawks, that North Korea has "the upper hand" in its relations with the world. This is a country "Hermit Kingdom" that has completely shut itself in from outside contact; that, as Loconte rightly notes, is willing to literally "starve its own people in order to feed its nuclear ambitions;" and whose propaganda is so absurd that it claims that a missile that sunk to the bottom of the Pacific is currently beaming revolutionary hymns in from outer space. In this light, kicking out nuclear inspectors and sputtering threats of ending the six-party talks in response to an entirely de rigueur Security Council condemnation are signs not of strength, but of paranoid desperation.

Paranoid desperation should be what we expect out of North Korea, particularly given the confusion of who will take over the country once Kim Jung-Il becomes too ill or dead even to be tackily photo-shopped into pictures. To be sure, the expulsion of UN nuclear inspectors is a setback. But as senior administration officials recognize, this is a "long" game, not a short one. Continuing the six-party talks remains the paramount concern, whose importance all parties, even the Chinese and the North Koreans, recognize is greater than that of a pro forma Security Council statement following the resolution-violating launch. And with China growing increasingly exasperated with its long-time "communist" ally North Korea, Pyongyang doesn't have much that it can count on.

North Korea's Yongbyon nuclear plant -- which persistent diplomacy succeeded in shutting down in in Bush's second term -- could not even be fully re-started for at least six to twelve months. In the meantime, the United States and Japan have put forth the names of companies to be targeted by the Security Council committee responsible for administering sanctions on North Korea. While it's conventional to depict North Korea's nuclear breakout as a ticking time bomb scenario, it's really the country's own leaders who are running out of time and credible options here.

With the climate so soured against it, any North Korean gambit to resume nuclear production seems designed to offer up bait to American hawks and split the United States off from the other six-party participants. China, not the United States, is the most important actor in this regional drama, and constructive Sino-American diplomacy here will bring far greater benefits than getting caught up in a war of rhetorical (let alone military) escalation with a feeble and desperate regime.

(image from flickr user leef_smith under a Creative Commons license)

Because, as IAEA Director Mohamed ElBaradei might put it, that couldn't be more opposite from the previous U.S. approach to Iran's nuclear program:

"It was a ridiculous approach," he insisted. "They thought that if you threatened enough and pounded the table and sent Cheney off to act like Darth Vader the Iranians would just stop," Dr. ElBaradei said, shaking his head. "If the goal was to make sure that Iran would not have the knowledge and the capability to manufacture nuclear fuel, we had a policy that was a total failure."

(ElBaradei, it seems, is fond of the comparison.) Toward the end of its term, of course, the Bush Administration had replaced this Khruschev-Vader hybrid table-pounding strategy with the Obi Wan Kenobi-esque diplomacy cred that the State Department's number three official, Bill Burns, brought to meetings with the Iranians. But the important factor here is not who the Obama Administration sends, but how it conducts policy. And instead of the non-starter of insisting that Iran shut down all enrichment activities entirely -- the only thing that this tactic started was, conspicuously, Iranian enrichment activities -- the new approach, quite sensibly, recognizes that spinning centrifuges look much better when there's parallel movement toward a compromise, rather than just acceleration toward a nuclear weapon.

And I don't quite grasp the physics of it, but apparently there's a way to keep the centrifuges "spinning, but not producing new enriched uranium, akin to leaving a car running, but in park." Okay, a Death Star in park may still be a Death Star, but if it's simply a matter of satiating Iranian pride, any way of getting Tehran to the table, and achieving an acceptable compromise, will be a hell of a Jedi mind trick.

(image from flickr user parl under a Creative Commons license)