With U.S. and North Korea resuming high-level diplomacy and North Korea’s nuclear arsenal again on the table, what went wrong with the 1994 Agreed Framework is again on the table. That diplomatic deal meant to end North Korea’s nuclear weapons program and prevent the reclusive communist state from abandoning the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, but didn’t fulfill its promise. Why?
Partisans have long argued the fault lies in Washington and, more specifically, with Republicans. Glenn Kessler, who had previously covered Korea as a Washington Post reporter took a nuanced approach when he sought to correct the assertion by Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., that the 1994 nuclear deal was faulty. The Atlantic Council’s Barbara Slavin, for example, tweeted that “GW Bush wrecked [the Agreed Framework] by stopping fuel oil deliveries and putting North Korea on an ‘axis of evil’?” Those who had a hand in negotiating the deal have long defended their work and also blamed the deal’s collapse not on North Korean cheating, but rather on subsequent management of the Korea portfolio by the George W. Bush administration. What actually happened?
When President George W. Bush took office, most of his senior advisors were skeptical of North Korean intentions. Secretary of State Colin Powell was a notable exception. “We do plan to engage with North Korea to pick up where President Clinton and his administration left off,” Powell told the press at the State Department. When corrected by Bush, Powell apologized, explaining that he had leaned “too forward in my skis.”
Bush wasn’t going to make a presidential visit to Pyongyang, but rather his team sought working-level meetings to discuss the Agreed Framework, North Korea’s missile programs, and proliferation. “I’ve got a message to Kim Jong Il [current leader Kim Jong Un’s father]: fulfill your end of the bargain,” Bush told Asian newspaper editors.
The North Korean leader complained to a visiting European delegation at being chastised about their compliance, saying that to negotiate under such circumstances would be to lose face. Such declarations of aggrievement reached a fever pitch after Bush’s “Axis of Evil” speech, never mind that Bush’s comments were mild compared to the rhetoric coming out of Pyongyang on a daily basis. Indeed, for people like Slavin to be intellectually consistent, they must explain why they can chastise Bush for a single utterance of “Axis of Evil” but exculpate or ignore promises of “death to America” that occur weekly in Tehran and Pyongyang.
Powell’s State Department offered to send Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly to Pyongyang for talks but, while awaiting North Korea’s response, a North Korean ship sank a South Korean patrol boat. Still, Powell nevertheless pushed forward with efforts to engage, even after information surfaced with regard to the extent of North Korean uranium enrichment. On July 31, 2002, he met his North Korean counterpart Paek Nam Sun on the sidelines of an ASEAN conference. Then, without White House clearance, Powell approved diplomat Charles Pritchard’s attendance at a ceremony celebrating Agreed Framework progress despite U.S. intelligence that the North was violating the accord by illegal uranium enrichment.
The Pentagon was angry about Pritchard’s trip, given the magnitude of North Korean cheating. The issue was not new. In its last two years, the Clinton administration had been unable to certify that North Korea had stopped seeking uranium-enrichment capability. The evidence was damning: Even as North Korea signed the Agreed Framework, rogue Pakistani nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan had shared centrifuge blueprints and prototypes with North Korea.
On October 3, 2002, during a meeting in Pyongyang, Kelly told North Korea’s vice minister of foreign affairs that Washington knew that North Korea had produced highly-enriched uranium in violation of the Agreed Framework. The next day, Kang Sok Ju acknowledged that North Korea had maintained a covert uranium enrichment program in violation of both the 1992 Denuclearization Declaration and Agreed Framework. As a result, the Korean Economic Development Organization, formed to support and supply North Korea’s energy programs in the wake of the Agreed Framework, cut off heavy oil shipments which had been tied to Agreed Framework compliance. By this point, the U.S. had already provided North Korea with more than $600 million in food, with another $400 million channeled through KEDO.
Pyongyang responded to the cut-off of fuel oil shipments by announcing withdraw from the Non-Proliferation Treaty, expulsion of International Atomic Energy Agency monitors, and restart of the Yongbyon reactor. “My predecessor, in a good-faith effort, entered into a framework agreement,” Bush explained. “The U.S. honored its side of the agreement. North Korea didn’t. While we felt the agreement was in force, North Korea was enriching uranium.”
The Agreed Framework has already become a political football, however, simply because the reputation of so many Clinton administration officials rested upon it. Former State Department official Joel S. Wit, for example, argued that “the fact that [North Korea] had confessed to a secret nuclear program is a sign that North Korea may be looking for a way out of a potential crisis.” That was the equivalent of saying that a serial killer’s confession to having killed three prostitutes while under police surveillance meant that he had actually become a new man.
Some analysts also wanted to bury evidence of or explain away evidence of North Korean cheating in order to protect the Non-Proliferation Treaty. After all, if the NPT was so flawed as to allow countries under its restrictions to develop nuclear weapons, then the whole NPT regimen might collapse. In the Naval War College Review, Joshua Pollack suggested that North Korea might not actually have violated the agreement but instead North Korean scientists could simply have found new ways to meet their goals outside the parameters of their agreements. This was also disingenuous as all evidence pointed firmly to subterfuge. An even more ridiculous example of wishful thinking offered in the same argument was the argument that North Korean bluster was simply a prelude to its offer of a grand bargain, one which Bush ignored.
The North Korean regime, for its part, justified its violations in delays in the construction of light water reactors promised by the Agreed Framework. The two sides disagreed over schedule, but that did not justify North Korea’s wholesale violation of its agreements.
Despite the caricature of Bush as anti-diplomacy, the Bush team did not simply want to walk away. Rather, it sought a carrot-and-stick approach. While it discussed sanctions, it also sought to lure Pyongyang back into compliance with greater food aid. Bush also floated the possibility of greater energy and agricultural development aid if North Korea verifiably dismantled its nuclear program and addressed U.S. proliferation concerns. Instead, North Korean authorities accelerated their nuclear program. On February 12, 2003, George Tenet reported that North Korea might already possess missiles capable of reaching the continental United States.
The 1994 Agreed Framework was born out of North Korean cheating. Pyongyang had negotiated, collected concessions from, and then walked away from the commitments it had made in the 1992 Denuclearization Declaration. Clinton gambled on a nonproliferation agreement to avoid war and also wanted to cement his legacy as a peacemaker.
It was not Clinton’s fault that North Korea cheated. Nor was it Bush’s fault that the Agreed Framework collapsed. The blame rests solely in Pyongyang.
Kim Jong Il’s regime cheated and sought to leverage that cheating into greater defiance. The Bush administration was unwilling to shift the goal posts in the same way that Clinton and, for that matter, George H.W. Bush had. No one forced the North Korean regime to cheat. Kim Jong-il had agency and made the decision on his own.
That some pundits are so consumed by their own political animosity they’re willing to amplify the propaganda of rogue regimes like North Korea (or Iran) for domestic political gain is unfortunate. Once upon a time, it was completely out-of-bounds in civil discourse. None of this, however, substitutes for the facts: The Agreed Framework failed because North Korea cheated.
That responsibility for that cheating is on North Korea and North Korea alone. The nature of rogue regimes is that they do not abide by the norms of diplomacy. They sack embassies, they cheat on agreements, and they seize hostages. It’s fair to criticize Clinton and Bush or, for that matter, Presidents Barack Obama and Trump for their policies. It’s both unfair and arrogant to assume that rogues act only in reaction to the White House rather than in pursuit of their own strategies and goals.
Michael Rubin (@Mrubin1971) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a former Pentagon official.
