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In the coming days, there is an entirely real possibility that the White House will notify the U.S. Congress of its intention to remove North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism, opening a path toward eventual diplomatic normalization with a country that the U.S. has technically been at war with since 1950. This move would reflect a more pragmatically-oriented policy toward the reclusive nuclear state by President George W. Bush in his second term that balanced his strong disapproval of the Pyongyang regime¡¯s human rights abuses with practical diplomacy aimed at getting North Korean leader Kim Jong-il out of the nuclear weapons business. His able negotiator Ambassador Christopher Hill has succeeded in utilizing the multilateral six-party talks to leverage U.S. and Chinese diplomatic pressure on the North while also giving Pyongyang ample opportunities for bilateral talks with the U.S. which it so badly seeks. President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice have given Hill enough negotiating room to show that Washington is serious about finding a solution to this problem. The policy has garnered unanimous support in Asia and bipartisan support at home. However this policy has not come without cost. Bush¡¯s second term flexibility on North Korea has not sat well with the conservative core of the Republican Party and has elicited bold criticism from former senior officials like John Bolton.
The next phase of the negotiations appears to be moving along. North Korea is working methodically through 11 steps to disable the reactor at Yongbyon, and is required to provide a nuclear declaration by Dec. 31. In exchange for this, the U.S., China, Russia, and South Korea would provide energy assistance, and in an apparent side agreement, the U.S. has promised to delist North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism and remove economic sanctions that have been in place since the Korean War. Make no mistake, if the North disables and declares by the end of 2007, the Bush administration will have gone further in denuclearizing North Korea than any previous U.S. administration. Pyongyang would no longer be able to make plutonium for nuclear weapons; it will have fessed up on its secret uranium-based nuclear program which led to the breakdown of the Clinton-era agreement; and American and other inspectors would be on the ground in the closed communist state verifying all of this. This would be an unadulterated success.
So what¡¯s the problem? The prospect of delisting North Korea from the terrorism list has elicited some grumbling from Japan. Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda came to the White House last week to remind President Bush that North Korea needs to come clean on citizens it has abducted from Japan in order to get taken off the list. There is widespread agreement that progress on this issue is needed such that the U.S. does not abandon its most important ally in Asia.
But the real problem is Syria. The silence from all circles has been deafening following the Israeli attack on what is believed to be a Syrian nuclear facility built with cooperation from North Korea. One assumes the silence stems in part from the fact that no one wants to be on record characterizing intelligence, and there are probably debates taking place about the nature of the cooperation and whether it continued after the six-party denuclearization agreements in 2005 and 2007.
Some hardliners within the Bush administration have apparently tried to use the Syria revelations as a deal-breaker for North Korea and move to a containment-type policy. But this neither solves the North Korea nuclear weapons problem, nor the potential proliferation problem. The answer is to stick with the negotiations and to get to the year-end goal of disabling the North¡¯s bomb-making capabilities.
The second part of the deal -- the nuclear declaration -- becomes infinitely more crucial, however. If Pyongyang is serious about being removed from the terrorism list, then its declaration must include a full disclosure of any nuclear cooperation with Syria or others. This does not need to be public, for reasons of face, but if and when President Bush notifies Congress of his intention to delist North Korea from the terrorism list, then he needs to be able to assure Congress and the world that Pyongyang is out of any nuclear business with states currently on the list. If he cannot do this, then the U.S. should find a formula short of fully delisting North Korea. The North Koreans, South Koreans, and Chinese might respond that Washington needs to fulfill its end of the bargain and not impose new conditions in order to show political will and commitment. This is a false charge. No party has shown more political commitment to this negotiation than the U.S. to the extent that Bush and Rice may even be overexposed on the policy today. They certainly would be if the North's declaration offered no transparency on Syria.
Victor Cha is Director of Asian Studies and D.S. Song Professor at Georgetown University. From 2004 to 2007 he was Director of Asian Affairs at the White House and deputy head of the U.S. delegation to the six-party talks.
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