North Korea claims that on Tuesday night, it tested a hydrogen bomb. If true, it was a typically aggressive act by an evil regime. The White House said, however, that Pyongyang was doing something quite different, but also typical — engaging in empty boasting to exaggerate the Hermit Kingdom’s martial strength.
Whatever happened on Tuesday night, the reanimated North Korean nuclear threat holds a lesson about what happens when Washington makes agreements with regimes that are, to their core, untrustworthy. It often extends the lives of those regimes and facilitates the crisis it is intended to avert. That, of course, is why the rogue regime is interested in achieving a deal.
In 1985, North Korea signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty so it could openly share in the world’s advances in peaceful nuclear technology. Among the obligations it incurred in doing so was a requirement to disclose its nuclear progress (for example, the amount of weapons-grade plutonium it had produced) and submit to international inspections.
But in 1992, when the regime made its first declaration of what it had produced to date, the International Atomic Energy Agency found substantial evidence that the regime was cheating, hiding plutonium, probably to build nuclear weapons. North Korea reacted in spring 1993 by threatening to withdraw from the treaty altogether.
President Bill Clinton responded by negotiating a new deal with the rogue regime. Under what would be known as the Agreed Framework, Pyongyang was to stop producing plutonium in exchange for some economic aid and American help in building two light-water nuclear reactors (harder to use for plutonium production than the research reactors they had at the time).
This agreement was criticized by many commentators and by nuclear inspectors as far too lenient, giving the North Koreans too much time before they had to make honest disclosures. What’s more, the framework came at an awkward time. Immediately after it was announced, famine and economic crisis struck North Korea, such that western powers might have actually intervened at just the right moment to save the world’s worst regime.
In any event, the agreement bought nothing for the civilized world. In 2002, the North Koreans first admitted that they had been running a secret, parallel uranium-based nuclear enrichment program. Then they retracted their admission. Then they expelled IAEA inspectors and dismantled their monitoring equipment. They withdrew from the NPT in 2003 and persisted in their characteristic belligerent behavior until they finally conducted their first test of a nuclear bomb in 2006, their second in 2009, and their third in 2013.
So North Korea, a state sponsor of terrorism, has nuclear weapons 20 years after negotiating a deal (with former President Jimmy Carter) that was intended to prevent just that.
Which brings us to Iran.
Iran is another state that has violated its obligations under the non-proliferation treaty, is a sponsor of terrorism, is belligerent to its neighbors, and has just struck a deal on nukes with a Democratic president of the U.S.
President Obama inked a deal with the mullahs to delay their acquisition of The Bomb. The agreement was struck a few years after a peaceful, popular uprising appeared to threaten the tyrannical regime’s stability. The Iranians have already violated the deal with two recent ballistic missile tests, acts that evince bellicose intentions. The Obama administration is already trying to paper over the violations, and Iran is already threatening to back out of the agreement if Obama does otherwise.
The pattern is familiar and deeply discouraging. The situation in Iran’s neighborhood is far more tense than anything going on in East Asia. Amid hints of a looming sectarian war within the Islamic World between Sunni and Shia Muslims, Obama’s accommodation of Iran’s ambitions in the form of the relaxation of sanctions echoes the gross mistake made with North Korea two decades ago.
Obama is apparently obsessed with his legacy. It would be a tragedy if Americans found themselves looking back on his 2015 agreement as the crucial moment when a terrible regime secured its future and tipped the most unstable region of the world into a nuclear arms race.
