WASHINGTON
- The coalition of foreign-policy hawks that promoted
the 2003 invasion of Iraq is pressing US President
George W Bush to adopt a more coercive policy toward
North Korea, despite strong opposition from China and
South Korea.
By most accounts, North Korea
ranked high in bilateral talks between Bush and
Northeast Asian leaders, including Chinese President Hu
Jintao, at the summit of the Asia-Pacific Economic
Cooperation (APEC) forum in Santiago, Chile, this past
weekend, although the final communique did not address
the issue.
Bush reportedly tried to make clear
that his patience with Pyongyang and its alleged efforts
to stall the ongoing "six-party talks" was fast running
out and that Washington will soon push for stronger
measures against North Korea in the absence of progress
toward an agreement under which Pyongyang would
dismantle its alleged nuclear-arms program.
Bush
claimed on Sunday that his interlocutors, who include
the leaders of the four other parties to the talks -
Russia, China, Japan and South Korea - agreed with him,
but Hu and South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun have not
backed down publicly from their strong opposition to a
harder line toward Pyongyang.
Indeed, just
before the weekend summit, Roh told an audience in Los
Angeles that a hardline policy over North Korea's
nuclear weapons would have "grave repercussions",
adding, "There is no alternative left in dealing with
this issue except dialogue." The South Korean leader
also denounced the idea of an economic embargo against
Pyongyang.
That the hawks back in Washington are
indeed mobilizing became clear on Monday when William
Kristol, an influential neo-conservative who also chairs
the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), faxed a
statement titled "Toward Regime Change in North Korea"
to reporters and various "opinion leaders" in the
capital.
PNAC issues statements relatively
infrequently, so its formal statements are carefully
noted. PNAC boasts Vice President Dick Cheney, Pentagon
chief Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul
Wolfowitz and Cheney's powerful chief of staff, I Lewis
Libby, among a dozen other senior Bush national security
officials, as signers of its 1997 charter.
"It's
clear that they see the transition [between the Bush
administration's two terms] and before any new round of
the six-party talks, as the time to try to set policy
direction," one veteran analyst told Inter Press Service
on Monday.
Kristol's statement referred in
particular to two recent articles, including one
published last week by Nicholas Eberstadt, a Korea
specialist at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI),
that appeared in the neo-conservative The Weekly
Standard, which is edited by Kristol.
The
article, "Tear Down This Tyranny", called for the
implementation of a six-point strategy aimed at ousting
North Korean Chairman Kim Jong-il, in part by "working
around the pro-appeasement crowd in the South Korean
government", which apparently includes President Roh
himself.
The second article, published on Sunday
in The New York Times, detailed a number of recent
indications cited by right-wing officials and the press
in Japan - including high-level defections and the
reported circulation of anti-government pamphlets - that
Kim's hold on power may be slipping.
The article
noted in particular a recent statement by Shinzo Abe,
secretary general of Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic
Party (LDP), that "regime change" was a distinct
possibility and that "we need to start simulations of
what we should do at that time".
"Recent reports
suggest the presence of emerging cracks in the Stalinist
power structure of North Korea, and even the emergence
of serious dissident activity there," wrote Kristol.
"This should remind us that one of President Bush's top
priorities in his second term will have to be dealing
with this wretch[ed] regime," he went on, citing
Eberstadt's strategy as "useful guidance for an improved
North Korean policy".
Eberstadt's article, which
criticized Korea policy in Bush's first term for being
both "reactive" and "paralyzed by infighting", proceeds
from the explicit assumption that efforts to persuade
North Korea to give up its nuclear program - which US
intelligence believes may already include as many as
eight nuclear weapons - are almost certainly futile.
"We are exceedingly unlikely to talk - or to
bribe - the current North Korean government out of its
nuclear quest," wrote Eberstadt in an implicit rejection
of the basic goal of the six-party talks.
Moreover, he wrote, the nuclear crisis and the
North Korean government are essentially one and the
same: "Unless, and until, we have a better class of
dictator running North Korea, we will be faced with an
ongoing and indeed growing North Korean crisis."
To achieve the desired "regime change",
Eberstadt called first for a purge of US State
Department officials who had argued for engaging
Pyongyang during Bush's first term. Washington,
according to Eberstadt, should also increase "China's
'ownership' of the North Korean problem" by making clear
to Beijing that it "will bear high costs if the current
denuclearization diplomacy failed".
At the same
time, US officials must recognize that South Korea has,
under Kim and the"implacably anti-American and
reflexively pro-appeasement" core of his government,
become a "runaway ally" - "a country bordering a state
committed to its destruction, and yet governed
increasingly in accordance with graduate-school 'peace
studies' desiderata".
"Instead of appeasing
South Korea's appeasers (as our policy to date has
attempted to do, albeit clumsily)," wrote Eberstadt,
"America should be speaking over their heads directly to
the Korean people, building and nurturing the coalitions
in South Korean domestic politics that will ultimately
bring a prodigal ally back into the fold."
Washington should also ready "the non-diplomatic
instruments for North Korean threat reduction," he
wrote, arguing that preparing for the deliberate use of
such options - presumably an economic embargo or even
military strikes - "will actually increase the
probability of a diplomatic success".
Finally,
echoing Shinzo Abe, of Japan's LDP, Eberstadt called for
planning for a "post-Communist Korean Peninsula" with
other interested parties, "to maximize the opportunities
and minimize the risks in that delicate and potentially
dangerous process".
Eberstadt's strategy,
according to a number of analysts, largely echoes the
views of John Bolton, under secretary of state for arms
control and international security, a former American
Enterprise Institute vice president who is openly
campaigning to become deputy secretary of state under
Condoleezza Rice.
Bolton, perhaps the
administration's most extreme hardliner, has strong
support in Cheney's office and other right-wing
strongholds, including The Weekly Standard and on the
editorial page of The Wall Street Journal.
On
Saturday, Tokyo's right-wing Governor Shintaro Ishihara,
who claims to be on friendly terms with Bolton, told
Fuji Television that Bolton wants to impose economic
sanctions against North Korea, which in the US
official's view, would lead to Kim's ouster "within one
year".
