Security Guarantee For North Korea?

[Sprayber]

Washington Times
August 8, 2003
Pg. 1

U.S. Ready To Offer N. Korea Guarantee

Security pledge not binding pact

By Nicholas Kralev, The Washington Times

The Bush administration yesterday said it is prepared to offer written security guarantees to North Korea in the form of a joint document with other regional powers in upcoming nuclear talks.

Although such a pledge would not be a formal treaty subject to congressional ratification, it nevertheless could be endorsed by Congress in a resolution, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell told reporters at the Washington Foreign Press Center.

"There should be ways to capture assurances to the North Koreans — from not only the United States, but we believe from other parties in the region — that there is no hostile intent among the parties that might be participating in such a discussion," Mr. Powell said.

"When one comes up with such a document, such a written assurance, there are ways that Congress can take note of it without it being a treaty or some kind of pact. A resolution is something like that — taking note of something."

In Tokyo, the Japanese newspaper Sankei Shimbun reported today that diplomats from the United States, Japan and South Korea will meet next Wednesday and Thursday in Washington to coordinate policy on North Korea ahead of six-nation talks on the communist state's nuclear weapons program.

The newspaper, quoting Japanese government sources, said senior diplomats from the three countries would hold "informal" talks on a joint proposal to North Korea.

The White House has said the North Korean nuclear threat can be dealt with diplomatically, but has not ruled out any options, including military action.

A security guarantee to North Korea in the context of a broad regional pledge with other countries would not change that stance because the guarantee would express intent but not be legally binding, administration officials said.

The issue is part of an intensive diplomatic effort to convene a meeting among the United States, North Korea, China, Japan, South Korea and Russia in the next few weeks.

Pyongyang repeatedly has demanded a nonaggression pact with Washington since President Bush assumed office in January 2001.

But the administration has rejected the idea, saying Mr. Bush's oral assurance that he has no intention of invading the North should be enough to satisfy the regime of North Korean leader Kim Jong-il.

Now, in an attempt to address North Korea's concerns before the planned multilateral talks, where Washington wants Pyongyang to agree to scrap its nuclear weapons program, the administration is pondering a compromise solution.

Several regional leaders, including South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun in an interview with The Washington Times in May, have called on the White House to consider offering a security assurance.

As it has done with the whole nuclear standoff, the Bush administration is trying to ensure that any security guarantees to the North involve all countries in the region.

That approach, the administration argues, would make Pyongyang less likely to cheat or break any new agreement it may sign, and would provide better accountability mechanisms if it did.

In explaining the logic, the administration cites the North's development of a secret uranium-enrichment program in violation of a 1994 nuclear deal with the Clinton administration, which Pyongyang admitted in October.

Since then, the North has reopened its plutonium plant in Yongbyon, closed after the 1994 agreement was signed, expelled U.N. inspectors and claims to have reprocessed 8,000 spent fuel rods that can be used in plutonium production — an assertion that has not been independently confirmed.

China, the most likely host of the multilateral talks and the most diplomatically active of the six participants in their preparation, yesterday sent a delegation to Pyongyang.

Chinese Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing is scheduled to visit Seoul next week. A U.S.-North Korea-China meeting was held in Beijing in April, but produced no results.

Russia, whose involvement in the nuclear diplomacy up to now has been limited, was the last country to be added to the list of participants in the talks, largely at Pyongyang's insistence.

Moscow yesterday said that it is not aware of any other conditions the North may have.

"The North Korean side has put forward no conditions and to my understanding Pyongyang is interested exactly in six-way talks," Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Yuri Fedotov told Japan's NHK television.

"The most difficult stage will come when these talks begin. And it is hard to expect any quick success. All parties will apparently need to be extremely patient, display constructive approaches and readiness to listen to the other side," Mr. Fedotov said.

Mr. Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, said yesterday that the administration is satisfied that its strategy of making the nuclear issue multilateral, rather than bilateral, is working well.

"It's a tough regime to deal with and heaven knows it's an opaque regime," Miss Rice said in Dallas. "But we're fairly sanguine that if you're going to get this done, it's going to have to be in coordination with other states."

Meanwhile, the North criticized upcoming annual joint war exercises between the United States and South Korea, saying they put in doubt Washington's intent of no hostility.

"The adventurous war game is aimed at steadily intensifying tensions on the Korean peninsula and, eventually, making a pre-emptive attack on [North Korea] and attaining the sinister strategic goal of the U.S. in Northeast Asia," said a statement by the North Korean Foreign Ministry carried by the official KCNA news agency.

I got this off the Army AKO site so I'll just cut and paste.

Do you guys think a security guarantee will actually pursaude N. Korea to scrap its nuclear program or not.

[Sava]

Washington Times?

[:) Smiley]

A security guarantee carries more weight than Bush's promise, as Bush's promise is basically only good for the length of his term in office.

The problem though, is what would happen if we made a guarantee and they broke it? We would essentially be forced to invade at risk of severe loss of prestige.

[MichaeltheGreat]

As the article says, it is an expression of intent only, and has no force of law.

[Arrian]

Whatever, I have no problem with assuring them we aren't going to go in for "regime change" in NK.

Will it result in them actually scrapping their nuke program?





You must be joking. They'll never really give that up.

-Arrian

[MichaeltheGreat]

But comrade, that's only because no matter what we say, we won't give up our warmongering, imperialistic design of unprovoked aggression against the peace loving North Korean people and their enlightened and beloved Dear Leader.

[Proteus_MST]

If I were HEad of State in a Nation,
called by President Bush a member of the Axis of Evil,
I wouldn´t scrap my Nuclear Weapons for less than a Nonagression Pact.

[DanS]

It really depends on what the security guarantee would entail. I wouldn't want to guarantee the regime, although I wouldn't see anything wrong with writing our intent, given a set of circumstances that is generally favorable to us.

But I think that NK primarily is after a pot of goodies. Because of this, I don't think the trade of a security guarantee will give us much in return.

[Q Classic]

see, this is what i really like about the bush administration's foreign idio--er, policy.

we should have decided on a definite policy a lot earlier.
we ought to have informed our allies before ditching them high and dry in a misguided but functioning framework, simply because it was a clinton initiative.
if we were so dead set against clinton's policy there, why the **** are we back to a policy which clinton would have gone along with anyway?

we could have saved maybe about two and a half years of heightened tensions in the region.

way to go.

[rmsharpe]

Yeah, let's keep a madman dictator which is ready to export nuclear arms in power.

Great strategy...

[Q Classic]

If I were HEad of State in a Nation,
called by President Bush a member of the Axis of Evil,
I wouldn´t scrap my Nuclear Weapons for less than a Nonagression Pact.

because nonagression pacts have worked so well in the past...

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by Proteus_MST
If I were HEad of State in a Nation,
called by President Bush a member of the Axis of Evil,
I wouldn´t scrap my Nuclear Weapons

. . . FOR ANYTHING!




edit: added FOR

[DinoDoc]

Originally posted by Proteus_MST
If I were HEad of State in a Nation,
called by President Bush a member of the Axis of Evil,
I wouldn´t scrap my Nuclear Weapons for less than a Nonagression Pact.

Why blame Bush when Clinton and Carter make much more logical punching bags for the current mess we find ourselves in?

[Q Classic]

why blame clinton and carter when you can blame teddy roosevelt, truman, franklin roosevelt, mao, hirohito, yi sungman, kim jong il, and dean acheson?

[DinoDoc]

Because this mess is a result of the idiotic deal that they worked out with the DPRK and I don't blame the other people you listed because I don't particularly care one way or the other if Korea is divided or not.

[GePap]

So you think we should have gone to war in 1994 with NK DD?

[DinoDoc]

Originally posted by GePap
So you think we should have gone to war in 1994 with NK DD?

I think the deal should have gotten the nuclear stockpile they put in cold storage out of the country and included a much tighter inspections regime. We basically relied on Kim to be honest with no way to insure that he was and got predictable results.

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by DinoDoc
Why blame Bush when Clinton and Carter make much more logical punching bags for the current mess we find ourselves in?

Maybe, but if the Phoney President hadn't started off his regime in the U.S. with a blast at North Korea and had instead pursued Powell's plan of negotiating with the DPRK (a continuation of the Clinton policy), maybe relations wouldn't have deteriorated to this point.

[GePap]

Originally posted by DinoDoc
I think the deal should have gotten the nuclear stockpile they put in cold storage out of the country and included a much tighter inspections regime. We basically relied on Kim to be honest with no way to insure that he was and got predictable results.

I fail to see how a tighetr inspection regme on existing facilities would have stopped the creation of new ones. Besides, we would have had to offer far more than we did, and given work on the two planned reactors barely ever got started, well.....

One gets what they are willing to pay for. Good leason learned by the North: increasde the stakes substantially and get a much bigger deal.

personally, if the BUsh admin. had engaged NK from 2001 on, perhaps a better deal could have been struck much earlier.

[Q Classic]

Because this mess is a result of the idiotic deal that they worked out with the DPRK and I don't blame the other people you listed because I don't particularly care one way or the other if Korea is divided or not.

root cause is not the idiotic deal in 1994. it's the idiot deal made long ago that allowed nkorea to exist in the first place.

this current mess is entirely the result of bush's idiotic 360 turnaround on his policy relating to the north.