Conservatives have rightly been grousing about the latest nuke deal with North Korea. As John Podhoretz put it in the New York Post, “the Bush administration has now gone down the same path as everybody else–paying Kim a bribe in exchange for promises of change.” True enough, the North Korean nuke deal isn’t all that different from the deal President Clinton worked out back in 1994. In this nifty little table put together by Eric Hundman over at FP Passport, one can see the similarities.
| 1994 |
2007
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United States was promised:
- A freeze on graphite-moderated reactors and related facilities (along with a promise to eventually dismantle them)
- North Korea would remain party to the NPT (and eventually come back into compliance with all its agreements with the IAEA)
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United States is promised:
- Shutdown of Yongbyon nuclear facility
- Reimplementation of all North Korea’s agreements with the IAEA
- Promise of a “discussion” (i.e., a disclosure) of all of North Korea’s nuclear programs
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North Korea was promised:
- A light-water reactor project supplied by a U.S.-led international consortium
- Shipments of heavy oil up to 500,000 tons annually
- A promised “move toward” full normalization of economic and political relations
- An assurance “against the threat or use of nuclear weapons by the U.S.”
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North Korea is promised:
- Possible removal from U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism
- Immediate shipment of “energy assistance” equivalent to 50,000 tons of heavy fuel oil
- Bilateral talks with the U.S. aimed at “moving towards” full diplomatic relations
- Promise to “advance the process” of removal from penalties under the Trading with the Enemy Act (pdf)
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Equally disconcerting–and Clintonian–is that the deal seems to hinge on the “disablement” of the North Korean nuclear program. According to the blog China Matters, the Chinese word for “disablement” has a rather murky etymology:
I don’t think it’s really a Chinese word. I didn’t find it in my dictionaries. Google the phrase and you get about 600 hits, virtually all of them embedded in news stories covering the February 13 announcement.
It crops up a few times in other contexts.
One use is on an academic media site, talking in a po-mo sort of way about how trendy products are “stripped of their functional attributes” when the majority of the their value to the consumer can be ascribed to the image of with-it ness they bring.
On another site, the meaning is actually the subject of a query by a Chinese poster. 去功能化What’s that mean? the poster asks. The blog writer responds, I guess…maybe it’s like when you enter a code on a DVD player so it can’t show adult movies.
So where did the word come from? What does it mean? It appears to have been used at the request of American negotiators in lieu of a more familiar terminology. Again, from China Matters:
But it [disablement] doesn’t seem to include what Americans would normally construe “disablement” to mean, i.e. something involving dismantling or destruction.
Maybe the term was created and inserted into the negotiations so the Bush administration could assert that it had achieved more than the dreaded Clintonian “freeze”, while the North Koreans can interpret it to mean that all they need to do is to use reversible measures to put the facilities in a non-operating state without damaging or destroying them in order to receive the energy assistance promised in the declaration.
Whatever the word means, it’s not a very good sign for those who would claim that this deal represents a breakthrough in resolving the standoff over North Korea’s nuclear program. Jeffrey Lewis points to this transcript in which Secretary Rice uses the term “disablement” no less than 21 times in her announcement of the North Korea nuke deal. Perhaps conservatives would have a little more faith in this latest deal if it didn’t appear to hinge on what the definition of the word “is” is. Bonus: Lewis also links to this hilarious website paying homage to those who mangle of the English language.
