If you asked any ordinarily informed citizen if the State Department considered North Korea a state sponsor of terrorism, the answer would likely be “Of course.” And yet for nine years, from the end of the George W. Bush administration until November 20, the world’s most sinister and repressive regime wasn’t on that list.
It was delisted in 2008 as part of a Bush administration effort, spearheaded by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, to coax the regime into negotiations over its nuclear weapons program. That effort was not well-publicized; much of it, as this magazine later reported, took place in secret. The Bush administration—whose principal had in 2001 named North Korea part of an “axis of evil” that aided terrorist states and organizations—had suddenly decided Kim Jong-il’s regime could be negotiated with fruitfully.
“Nobody believes that this is a regime that you can believe,” Rice told The Weekly Standard’s Stephen F. Hayes at the time. “The question is: Is this a regime that, under the right set of incentives and disincentives, is prepared to make some fundamental choices about its nuclear program that would ultimately put the United States and the rest of the world in a safer position vis-à-vis the Korean Peninsula and, most importantly, vis-à-vis proliferation? That’s the question.”
The answer was “No,” as Rice and her subordinates at the State Department should have foreseen, and as President Bush should have known to remind them.
North Korea had been placed on the list in 1988 as a result of killing 115 people aboard Korean Air flight 858 and assassinating several South Korean officials in Burma. The regime would do plenty in the years that followed to remind the world that the Kims’ power is based on a mix of domestic and international terrorism. In 2007, just a year before the State Department removed North Korea from its terrorism sponsor list, American officials learned that the country had assisted Syria in the construction of a nuclear reactor—which would be bombed by the Israelis.
There were plenty of opportunities to re-list the DPRK over the last nine years. The North Koreans have tried to aid Iran with surface-to-air missiles and artillery rockets—and may have succeeded as we only know about the shipments that were intercepted. The North has repeatedly abducted Japanese citizens and attempted to kill at least three human rights activists in China and South Korea—and succeeded in killing a fourth—using what looked like pens but were actually syringes loaded with a lethal toxin. It suppressed the release of an American movie, The Interview, by threatening terrorist attacks on theaters and then hacked the computer systems of Sony Pictures in retaliation.
In February, Kim Jong-un, who succeeded his father in 2011, sent an agent to Kuala Lumpur to assassinate his exiled brother with a banned nerve agent. In January 2016, North Korea arrested an American citizen, Otto Warmbier, for the “crime” of attempting to take a propaganda poster from his hotel in Pyongyang. Warmbier was returned to the United States in a state of unconsciousness having suffered an extensive loss of brain tissue while in prison in what was almost certainly some sinister experiment. He died on June 19.
Some of these bizarre and malicious acts may not meet the State Department’s technical definition of terrorism, but most do, and nobody outside the world’s diplomatic elite would conclude that North Korea doesn’t deserve to be on the list with Iran, Syria, and Sudan.
Donald Trump’s ordering the re-listing of North Korea as a state sponsor of terrorism is more than a symbolic gesture. It allows for further economic sanctions—North Korea is only the fourth-most-sanctioned regime in the world, behind Russia, Syria, and Iran—and on November 21, the Treasury Department announced new sanctions against one individual, 13 companies, and 20 shipping vessels. But it is a symbol, too. It is a forceful reminder that sophisticated Western diplomats, in their quest for peace and rapprochement, can be talked into making some very stupid decisions.
