Hammering out a deal with the devious, deceitful and defiant North Koreans to give up their nuclear weapons will be no easy task. Just ask Robert Gallucci.
Gallucci was the chief U.S. negotiator of the 1994 “framework agreement” with Pyongyang that the Clinton administration initially claimed solved the North Korean nuclear crisis.
Now the chairman of the US-Korea Institute at Johns Hopkins, Gallucci argues the agreement succeeded in freezing North Korea’s nuclear program for eight years, and that but for that, North Korea would now have hundreds of nuclear weapons.
Still Gallucci, in an interview with the Washington Examiner, says his dealing with Kim Jong Un’s father, Kim Jong Il, offer some lessons for today’s negotiators.
The past is prologue. What led to the unraveling of the 1994 agreement by 2002 was mistrust on both sides, and blatant cheating by the North Koreans, who sought and received the help of notorious Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan in developing highly-enriched uranium technology to secretly restart their nuclear program. “We caught them at that. We didn’t tell them we caught them at that. We watched them. First the Clinton administration watched them. Then the early Bush administration watched them, and ultimately the Bush administration called them on it. Our narrative is they cheated on the deal and we caught them. Their narrative is that we failed to make good on the normalization of relations, and they hedged against that by making a deal with the Pakistanis.”
Mistrust and verify, verify, verify. “Ronald Reagan was wrong, it’s not ‘Trust but verify,’” Gallucci said, “it’s ‘Don’t trust and therefore verify.’” The agreement he negotiated more than two decades ago was just four pages long, and left the question of verification and no-notice inspections to be worked out later. The result was when North Korea became disillusioned with the deal, it felt it could cheat and not get caught until it was too late to be stopped, which is what ultimately happened.
Good deals can be had with bad actors. “You can make a good deal, one that advances your national security and that of your allies, even if the other side cheats,” said Gallucci, citing the flawed 1994 agreement. “We were way better off making that deal than if we hadn’t made that deal. The CIA estimated in 1994 that if that its program continued, by 2001 North Korea would have about 100 nuclear weapons. Instead when George [W.] Bush came into office North Korea had exactly zero.”
Beware of bait and switch. North Korea is famous for saying one thing and doing another. Gallucci cites the example during the Obama administration of North Korea promising to suspend ballistic missile tests, only to launch what it claimed was a satellite into space. When the U.S. objected, North Korea said space launch vehicles didn’t count as ballistic missiles. “I would say be very careful about what you invest in terms of the language of the North Koreans,” he said, adding that the best analogy is the classic “Peanuts” cartoon in which Lucy constantly pulls the football away as Charlie Brown tries to kick it. “For years the United States has been in the position of Charlie Brown, with North Korea playing Lucy,” Gallucci said. In the spring of 1994, when Kim Jong Il assumed power after the death of his father, he promised a wide range of negotiations, only to renege. “We were all set to go, and announced all kinds of wonderful things, and Lucy pulled the ball away,” Gallucci said.
Keep up the pressure. Vice President Mike Pence said Tuesday the U.S. campaign of “maximum pressure” will not change unless North Korea takes “credible, verifiable, and concrete steps toward denuclearization.” That’s exactly the right approach, Gallucci said. “The thing that this administration I think really doesn’t want to do is start taking the pressure off, taking its foot off the gas pedal on sanctions, on exercises, things we know the North wants us to do before we get some real performance.”
No reward for just showing up. There are some things the U.S. could easily do, such as scaling back spring military exercises as a show of good faith. But Gallucci argues Kim Jong Un should get no freebies. “If out of this appearing to want to negotiate, he gets sanctions reductions, if he gets our exercises watered down, or postponed or canceled, then we are paying him before we get anything, we are paying him for his smiling face.”
Anything we give up, Galluci insists, should come at a price. “I think the administration doesn’t want to reward the North Koreans with substantive changes. We should go to the table. I think we should have minimal preconditions, we should be clear about not staying at the table if they test a long-range ballistic missile, if they test a nuclear weapon, if they shell an island, if they sink a ship, if they have mischief in the [Demilitarized Zone]. In other words, no provocations.”
Don’t pop the champagne. “It is really too soon to invest in this,” Gallucci said. “What we have is a report from South Korean diplomats of what the North Koreans have just said, which is quite inconsistent with what they most recently said publicly about their nuclear weapons program, how they regard it and whether it could be on the table for negotiation. So no, I don’t think we should break out the champagne glasses. It’s way too early.”
