Davenport, Iowa
The Bush administration has agreed to lift North Korea’s designation as a state sponsor of terror despite the fact that the North Koreans did not sign any formal agreement obligating the rogue state to verifiably abandon its nuclear program, according to two sources with knowledge of the negotiations.
“There is no formal written agreement,” says a former top Bush administration official. “The North Koreans haven’t signed anything. We are taking them off the terrorist list based on oral understandings and clarifications. This isn’t diplomacy, it’s lunacy.”
A senior adviser to Republican presidential nominee John McCain blasted the deal as a “delusion” and suggested that the administration is seeking agreements for their own sake, not because they make the country safer.
“Few regimes have proven themselves less trustworthy than North Korea. We keep easing sanctions and ignoring our allies’ concerns, but verifiable denuclearization doesn’t get any closer,” says a senior McCain adviser. “That is hardly successful diplomacy; it is delusion.”
Another top McCain campaign official confirmed that the candidate talked to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice Friday evening but would not characterize the discussion.
The deal comes after several days of debate inside the Bush administration, during which North Korea’s behavior has been increasingly provocative. Over the past week, North Korea has banned UN inspectors from its nuclear facilities and reportedly test-fired short-range missiles.
The United States offered this summer to remove North Korea from the terror list on the condition that it submit a declaration of its nuclear activities and allow the United States and others in the six-party talks verify its claims. But that declaration–just 60 pages in length–failed to account for nuclear activity well known to the international community. Among the most glaring omissions was any acknowledgement that North Korea had supplied nuclear technology to Syria, another state designated by the U.S. government as a state sponsor of terror.
The U.S. government had known about North Korea’s role in the reactor since the previous spring and intelligence officials gave congressional leaders a highly classified briefing at the time. But the Bush administration did not want to share the information with the rest of Congress and fought to keep it secret despite pleas from members of Congress to make it public. Several congressional leaders attributed the desire for secrecy to the fierce determination of Rice and her State Department colleagues to strike a deal–any deal–with North Korea. In September 2007, Israeli jets destroyed the reactor and the secret was out.
In an interview with THE WEEKLY STANDARD on May 9, 2008, Rice expressed concern about North Korean proliferation and said the reactor in Syria was one “manifestation” of those activities. She said that future U.S. concessions would require a “verification mechanism” in order “to prevent further circumstances like that or to learn whether there might be other circumstances.”
She added that any future deal with North Korea would come only after verification mechanisms had been put in place. “I have not lost my understanding of the North Korean regime, okay? Nobody believes that this is a regime that you can believe. 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.”
She continued: “And in order to answer that question, you have to go through negotiations with them. But you also have to have verification mechanisms because, frankly, I don’t expect to be able to rely on the North Koreans’ telling the truth.”
And that, critics say, is the problem. There is no verification mechanism in the new agreement, which is based almost entirely on the oral commitments the North Koreans have given to lead U.S. negotiator Christopher Hill. And any future inspections will require “mutual consent” before they are permitted, in effect giving Kim Jong Il’s regime an unconditional veto. By definition, that leaves the United States with little choice other than to rely on the North Koreans’ telling the truth.
Even State Department officials put out to sell the agreement sounded skeptical. “Verifying North Korea’s nuclear proliferation will be a serious challenge. This is the most secret and opaque regime in the entire world,” Patricia McNerney, assistant secretary for international security and nonproliferation, told the Associated Press.
Rice believes that such unilateral concessions were necessary in order to leave the next administration a framework for U.S.-North Korea negotiations. But by taking North Korea off of the terror list, she is taking away one of the few leverage points left for those conducting that diplomacy. And one of the possible successors has made it clear that he opposes taking North Korea off the list without first verifying its declaration.
The McCain campaign put out a statement from the candidate Friday night, before the deal had been announced, expressing skepticism of the agreement. “I have previously said that I would not support the easing of sanctions on North Korea unless the United States is able to fully verify the nuclear declaration Pyongyang submitted on June 26. It is not clear that the latest verification arrangement will enable us to do so,” McCain said in the statement, which was distributed by the campaign a second time this morning after the deal was announced. “Diplomacy is a critical tool in ending the North Korean nuclear weapons program and it must involve our closest partners in Northeast Asia. While we conduct this diplomacy we must keep our goal in sight–the verifiable denuclearization of North Korea–and avoid reaching for agreement for its own sake, particularly if it leaves critical verification issues unaddressed.”
It was a bold and important statement. For those few voters still paying attention to national security issues, it is a reminder that McCain’s judgment on such matters is far more reliable than his opponent’s.
But if the polls remain as they are today, Barack Obama will inherit a North Korea policy that looks a lot like the one he has proposed throughout his campaign.
Stephen F. Hayes, a senior writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD, is the author of Cheney: The Untold Story of America’s Most Powerful and Controversial Vice President (HarperCollins).
