Beijing tries to read mixed U.S. signals in Korea diplomacy By John W. Lewis

For the past year China has led the quest for a negotiated solution to the Korean nuclear crisis. It facilitated and hosted three-way talks with the United States and North Korea a year ago this week and two sessions of the six-party talks (adding South Korea, Japan and Russia) in August and February. Its officials crisscrossed the globe to explore potential areas of common interest and compromise and this week hosted North Korean leader Kim Jong Il to explore options for the beleaguered Korean Peninsula. Yet, in each of the formal talks, the Chinese have been discouraged by the minimal results. They are now questioning U.S. intentions toward Korea and, in the longer term, toward China.

Beijing considers the unchecked expansion of North Korea's nuclear weapons to be a real possibility, and its reasoning starts with the record of U.S. policies toward nuclear proliferation. That record, the Chinese argue, is mixed and often contradictory. As a result, China worries that Washington might continue to tolerate the program so long as Pyongyang did not cross key red lines, such as the transfer of nuclear materials to terrorists.

Whatever Beijing's past position on nuclear matters, many senior Chinese now regard nuclear weapons on their border to be a direct threat to their national security and suspect Washington of downplaying that danger. For them, it is no great leap to the conclusion that the unfettered growth of the Korean program might embolden others in Asia, including Taiwan, to acquire nuclear weapons despite verbal opposition from Washington. Beijing's leaders can easily imagine how that nightmarish turn of events would undermine the nation's drive toward modernization and end strategic cooperation with the United States.

Despite the fact that all parties at the six-party meeting in February endorsed the dismantling of the North's nuclear weapons program, the Chinese fear that the talks may be dead in the water. Following that meeting, they began to debate other ways to resolve the crisis. They had already reorganized the leadership team responsible for North Korean affairs, and that team had begun acting to prevent the worst case, including offering further inducements to Kim Jong Il this week. Whereas last fall the talk of deepening U.S.-China cooperation on Korea pervaded the news, now, especially after Vice President Dick Cheney's uncompromising stand on Korea and Taiwan last week, the reverse is occurring.

What China can do in these circumstances is quite limited. Its influence on North Korea is largely determined by what the United States does or doesn't do. By refusing to negotiate on a staged process leading to the eventual dismantlement of Pyongyang's nuclear weapons, Washington has tacitly allowed the North's program to proceed. It has rejected proposals for a temporary freeze, technical talks and any interim steps short of the unconditional and complete ending of the program. The result is virtual paralysis.

Beijing has been able to work with North Korea only when it could find areas of potential compromise between Washington and Pyongyang. It cannot or will not act

alone to exert pressure because this would jeopardize its influence on the North. Contrary to a widely circulated story, Beijing did not cut off energy shipments to North Korea for three days in 2003. Beijing would not take such a counterproductive action when its main influence with the North lies in the kind of quiet diplomacy being practiced this week with Kim Jong Il.

Many in Beijing are beginning to question whether there might be a more promising approach with Pyongyang. Should the Chinese, South Koreans and Russians conclude that making progress toward the common goal of the North's complete nuclear disarmament is out of reach, for example, they reluctantly might translate their joint offer of aid in February into a quid pro quo for a partial agreement, such as a limited freeze, that would allow the situation to stabilize. China could worry that such an independent action could endanger the common front with Washington. At the same time, it could calculate that the United States would be sufficiently pleased with any solution that halted the North Korean nuclear program.

None of these developments may come to pass, of course, but who could have imagined a year ago that Washington would have permitted the situation to deteriorate to the present point?

There are "no good options" for the United States to confront or contain North Korea's nuclear weapons proliferation, according to political science Professor Scott Sagan.

Sagan, who is also a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for International Studies, was one of five foreign policy experts who joined a panel discussion Friday titled "It's a Mad, Mad World: Prospects for Security, Diplomacy and Peace on the Korean Peninsula." Presented by the Law School, the event took place in Dinkelspiel Auditorium as part of Reunion Homecoming Weekend.

Panelists Mi-Hyung Kim, Bernard S. Black, Gi-Wook Shin and Scott D. Sagan took turns weighing in on the difficulties of U.S. diplomatic relations with North Korea during a law school-sponsored discussion. Photo: L.A. Cicero

What makes the situation even more vexing is that the objectives of neither North Korea nor the United States are entirely clear, said law Associate Professor Allen Weiner, a former State Department lawyer and diplomat who moderated the panel.

"Is the United States intent on a regime change? Or putting the nuclear genie back in the bottle?" Weiner asked.

"North Korea feels threatened by the United States and believes nuclear weapons are the only way to protect its national sovereignty," said sociology Associate Professor Gi-Wook Shin, director of the Korean Studies Program in the Asia/Pacific Research Center.

The talk came one day after North Korea announced that it is prepared to "physically unveil" its nuclear program. By Sunday, President George W. Bush announced that he would provide written assurances not to attack North Korea if the country takes steps to halt its proliferation and if other Asian leaders signed, too. Bush, who counted North Korea as part of an "axis of evil," stopped short of offering a formal, Senate-approved nonaggression treaty.

Earlier this month, North Korea claimed to have finished reprocessing 8,000 spent fuel rods to produce enough weapons-grade plutonium to build a half-dozen nuclear bombs. Faced with a collapsed economy and the legacy of 1.5 million deaths from starvation in the late 1990s, the North Korean government, led by Kim Jong Il, has overtly threatened to use its small arsenal as deterrence against U.S. aggression. Although it has been difficult to verify North Korea's capabilities, international experts have asserted that its main nuclear facility in Yongbyon could produce one or two bombs a year.

Tension first heated up last October when North Korea admitted to having abandoned the 1994 Framework Agreement brokered by the Clinton administration to shut down its nuclear reprocessing facilities.

Confirming U.S. intelligence reports that North Korea possesses nuclear weapons capabilities, the former director of the CIA under the Clinton administration, Jim Woolsey, said from the audience that in 1994 the CIA was confident North Korea had enough plutonium to make one or two bombs. Estimating that its current capabilities hover somewhere around six bombs, Woolsey explained North Korea doesn't have good delivery technology. The greater concern, he said, is that it would produce enough plutonium to sell to al-Qaida.

The amount of plutonium it takes to build a bomb is the "size of a grapefruit" -- making it difficult to monitor and stop weapons material shipments, Sagan said.

Believing North Korea is posturing for economic aid and bilateral security guarantees, the United States has sidestepped direct talks and instead joined South Korea, China, Japan and Russia in a round of six-party talks with North Korea last August. Bush's announcement is seen as an effort to jump-start the next round of regional talks that were expected by the end of the year.

The crisis has taken its toll on the longstanding alliance between the United States and South Korea. Panelist Mi-Hyung Kim, a founding member of South Korea's Millennium Democratic Party and general counsel and executive vice president of the Kumho Business Group, the ninth largest Korean conglomerate, said the relationship between the United States and South Korea is the "rockiest" it has ever been because of "Bush's hard-line policy on North Korea" and the fact that wartime control of the South Korean military reverts to U.S. hands. Bilateral talks would further alienate South Korea, which fears that Seoul will become a "sea of fire," she said.

"South Korea thinks Bush is a bigger threat than nuclear weapons 35 miles to the north," Kim explained, pointing out that South Korea will bear the brunt of a military conflict. "South Korea wants to avoid war and economic burdens it can't afford," she said.

Part of the problem has been the failure of the United States to explain its policy to the South Korean people. "The United States is bad at selling its policies to publics abroad," Weiner noted. We're used to dealing bilaterally with government officials; public diplomacy is a skill we've had to learn over the past 15 years."

"A PR campaign by the United States is not going to solve this," Kim countered.

"If North Korea collapses, how will South Korea survive?" asked law Professor Bernard Black, a panelist who served as an economic policy adviser to the South Korean government. "South Korea would have to devote 30 percent of its GDP to bring North Korea up to its standard of living and that's not sustainable.

"South Korea has lived under North Korean guns for the last 50 years. North Korea can destroy Seoul at any time. South Koreans are saying, 'What's changed?' The last thing South Korea wants is to provoke North Korea to attack."

China, North Korea's closest ally, may have the most leverage through trade sanctions and has a vested interest in halting regional proliferation, Kim said. "China does not need another nuclear neighbor. ... It has enough problems with India and Pakistan." North Korea's proliferation could lead to a nuclear Japan, South Korea and "its worst fear, a nuclear Taiwan."

Predicting that nothing would come of the next round of talks until after the next U.S. presidential election, Kim said ironically, "North Korea is expecting a regime change in the United States to an administration that is more reasonable."

"North Korea is not a crazy rogue state but a dangerously desperate state," said Sagan. "When you play poker with someone who's cheated in the past, you can expect them to cheat again."