Graham Allison had an interesting review in yesterday’s New York Times of Going Critical: The First North Korean Nuclear Crisis. This book addresses the 1994 deal with North Korea known as the Agreed Framework and is written by three men involved in those negotiations: Joel S. Wit, Daniel B. Poneman and Robert L. Gallucci. From the review it sounds like the book offers a wealth of previously undisclosed information and interesting insights from people with a great deal of first-hand knowledge.
While the deal itself could certainly be criticized on a number of counts (neither party complied with all their promises, and neither party intended to; North Korea’s secret uranium-enrichment program might not have strictly violated the agreement; it can be said that we were paying extortion money to an evil regime, even if most of the economic costs from our side were paid by Japan and South Korea, not the United States) the fact remains that it did succeed in freezing North Korea’s program to reprocess plutonium for eight years. A situation in which the North Koreans could have quickly built several nuclear weapons was averted. To me, given the stakes, that’s a success.
Of course the Clinton administration’s feverish work to block the Kim government from developing a large nuclear arsenal stands in stark contrast to the Bush administration’s North Korea policy. While Vice President Cheney talks a good game, saying “we don’t negotiate with evil, we defeat it”, in reality their approach has been “we threaten the evil, huff and puff, then ignore evil while evil builds nuclear bombs”. There’s an excellent chance that one day millions of people will pay the price for this administration paying less attention to the leg of the Axis of Evil that actually has nuclear weapons and is building more, than the leg of the "Axis" that might someday have felt like pursuing weapons of mass destruction program-related activities.
Posted by armand at July 21, 2004 09:57 AM | TrackBack | Posted to Politics