The agreement in which North Korea deactivates all of its nuclear facilities within two months may sound good on paper, but some believe it is too weak to work.
By Brooks Tigner in Brussels for ISN Security Watch
North Korea’s mid-February agreement to shut down and seal all its nuclear facilities within 60 days is too full of loopholes to be effective and is bound to hike bilateral tensions across the entire region, argue Asian, European and US security experts.
“The best we can say about the agreement is that it brings us back to square one, where things stood in 2005 when North Korea broke off talks with the international community about its nuclear program," said Han Sung-Joo, chairman of the International Policy Studies Institute of South Korea.
A year later, the country conducted its first nuclear test.
“We should not be lulled into thinking this problem has been solved. It has not. In fact, it is getting worse,” Han told ISN Security Watch and others during an expert debate here on North Korea organized by the European Policy Centre.
As part of its 13 February agreement within the so-called Six Party grouping of nations - China, Japan, North and South Korea, Russia and the US - Pyongyang is supposed to freeze all
However, there are problems with the agreement, which was accomplished largely due to a relaxation of Washington’s previously hard-line aversion to "rewarding" North Korea with any agreement or international recognition while the country was covertly pursuing its nuclear arms ambition.
Not America's finest hour of diplomacy
Antonio Tanca, coordinator for Asia policy at the EU Council of Ministers, which directly represents the 27 national capitals, said during the debate, “We are in a position that is not much better - and probably worse - than before the agreement. The situation has radically worsened compared to 2005, with China’s position [vis-à-vis North Korea] hardening. Pyongyang’s nuclear test was a slap in China’s face.”
Asia security experts point to problems with the accord itself and with the potentially negative impact it will have on North Korea’s relations with its neighbors and on the region’s wider security.
For example, the accord refers only to freezing North Korea’s weapons and enrichment facilities but not their dismantlement. Yet the deal’s success “depends on the dismantlement or at least the disabling of the country’s nuclear program,” observed Han. “The issue is not whether North Korea has an HEU [highly enriched uranium] program or not, but whether it has imported enrichment equipment and whether it’s going to use them."
As for complying the agreement, Han thinks the North Korean regime “will dole out ‘slices’ of concessions to the international community regarding [compliance] reporting, freezes, inspections, disabling of its facilities and so on. North Korea likely will follow the example of India and Pakistan to gain de facto recognition of its nuclear status.”
Patrick Cronin, director of studies at Washington, DC-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, agrees. “The proliferation issue is not over - not at all,” he told participants. “Signing the accord was the easy bit; its implementation will be the hard part.”
Mohamed ElBaradei, director of the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency, told news agencies on 12 March that inspecting and closing facilities behind North Korea's nuclear weapons program would be complex as the two sides sought to rebuild severed ties.
For Cronin, the central problem arising from the accord’s less-than-stringent provisions is the risk of proliferation. “Even if the international community manages to achieve dismantlement of North Korea’s facilities - and that’s a long shot - this will take 15 to 20 years to complete. That means the weapons will be around for a long time in a country that has shown a willingness to barter or trade whatever materials it has on hand for whatever things it needs,” he said.
Cronin also said the Bush administration’s support of the accord “was not America’s finest hour of diplomacy.” “Even US hardliners are not happy with it - at all - because it is a tacit acceptance of North Korea’s nuclear status.”
Leonid Petrov, chair of Korean studies at the Paris-based Institut d’Etudes Politiques, offered a slightly different angle, observing that North Korea’s dogged pursuance of its nuclear ambitions since the early 1990s “looks a lot like the Soviet Union’s policy during the Cold War years of building up its weapons - and hence its threat of force - as a pre-step to détente [and thus recognition of a country’s nuclear status].”
Major political challenges
Aside from the technical difficulties linked to the accord’s implementation, the deal presents two major political challenges: how Washington will define its relations with a country it deemed, until very recently, a rogue state, and what to do about regional security in East Asia where the accord has exacerbated bilateral tensions in many directions.
The accord has already created friction between the US and Japan, which has deep-seated issues with North Korea linked to organized crime and, most important, to a long-standing dispute over the abduction of Japanese citizens by North Korean secret service agents in the 1970s and 1980s.
“There’s been a falling out between Japan and the United States over how to deal with North Korea. The Japanese do not support the accord,” said Han.
Does this mean that the US is moving toward an equidistant treatment of North and South Korea? “It’s too early to tell, but that seems to be the case,” he said. “I don’t think Washington will treat both sides of the peninsula the same, but there are indications it is looking at a rebalanced relationship.”
Perhaps more important, one could ask if North Korea is moving toward a new political balancing act between the US and China, its long-standing client-ally in the region that has traditionally exercised a restraining effect on Pyongyang.
“Yes,” asserted Han. “North Korea is trying to reassure China that its [forthcoming] closer relations with the United States will not diminish its ties with Beijing. That said, however, I don’t think there’s a lot of love lost today between North Korea and China. Pyongyang will be eager to have the United States as a counterbalance to China.”
Counter-balancing tactics and equidistant political relations: these sound wearily similar to Europe’s historical but discarded obsession with balance-of-power politics – a game that led to the two most destructive wars the world has ever seen.
Yet the multilateral distrust and bilateral maneuvering in the Far East region suggests that some of that same political energy is bubbling beneath its surface. North and South Korea circle around one another with weapons barely concealed. Japan has tense political problems with North Korea and an acute image legacy problem from World War II with Seoul. China and Japan face each other as rivals for economic dominance in the region, while competition for energy resources is a source of growing tension for all the region’s economies.
Finally, Beijing’s distrust of North Korea’s nuclear intentions grows by the day, which may partly explain Washington’s sudden turnaround in its willingness to strike a deal with Pyongyang, according to Han.
“North Korea’s nuclear weapons are more of a threat to China than the United States or Europe. The US administration has drawn that conclusion and is now basing its [Far East Asia] policy on that. This also makes Japan and South Korea more dependent on the US nuclear umbrella, which plays to its favor, too,” he said.
Such interlocking dependencies and tensions call for a new security forum to promote multilateral dialogue and keep a lid on the region’s problems, says Petrov.
“We shouldn’t rely too much any more on China to resolve North Korea’s nuclear issue,” he said. “Policymakers engaged in the region must seek to identify common grounds for negotiations - with Pyongyang and for the region as a whole. The Six Party grouping should become institutionalized as the forum for discussing the region’s security problems.”
Based in Brussels, Brooks Tigner has reported on European and transatlantic security and defense issues since 1992, with particular emphasis on NATO and the EU's rapidly evolving military and homeland security policies. He is a regular contributor to the US weekly, Defense News, and editor of SECURITY EUROPE, a new monthly newsletter focused on European homeland security policy, technology and business.
