The Political Interest a Tough, Smart Deal

By Michael Kramer

Is the U.S. rewarding North Korea's bad behavior? Yes. Does buying off Pyongyang's nuclear-weapons program set a bad precedent? Yes. So Bill Clinton sold out, right? Wrong. The deal is smart and tough, a triumph of patient and creative diplomacy.

North Korea is the 1990s equivalent of the Cuban missile crisis. By comparison, the other foreign problems plaguing the President are mere irritations.

Left unchecked, Pyongyang would surely expand its bomb-grade plutonium stocks and its arsenal of nukes, which may already include one or two atomic devices. That could spawn a regional arms race and, worse still, a proliferation nightmare. "The real threat, if the North is allowed to get more nuclear-weapons material, would be their selling it, not using it," says Representative Gary Ackerman, who chairs the House Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific. "Their economy is virtually nonexistent. They'll do anything for money, which is why they're the largest exporter of Scud missiles. If they had a serious nuclear capability, they'd sell that too."

The Administration's deal is smart because it directly addresses that possibility by focusing on the North's future capability first. It's important to know about Pyongyang's existing nuclear capacity, but seeking to resolve that question now would have been a deal breaker. The agreement is smarter still because if Clinton had managed to induce the North to abide only by the terms of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, Pyongyang could continue to reprocess plutonium so long as it promised not to use the fuel to build weapons. "But that assumes the International Atomic Energy Agency could guarantee that ((the North Koreans)) wouldn't use the stuff to make bombs, and the agency has proved poor at that in the past," says Robert Manning, a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute, a Washington think tank. "The U.S. agreement dismantles the reprocessing facilities altogether, and that's the best way to guard against weapons production."

The deal is tough because it incorporates Ronald Reagan's injunction to "trust but verify." The substitute technology the North covets -- the light-water reactors they want for energy generation -- won't be delivered until Pyongyang's compliance has been proved.

The deal wobbles most seriously because it may encourage other bad actors to develop similar blackmail abilities. "But North Korea is special," says Manning. "Its army is huge, its leaders are insulated, and it has proved its ! willingness to fight, which it might do again if it feels cornered." Besides, adds Ackerman, rejecting the "bad precedent" argument, "we've bought off other nuclear weapons, as in Ukraine, and we're constantly purchasing arms that have fallen into bad hands. It's better to do a buyback than to have the stuff fired at us. North Korea is just a larger version of what we're doing elsewhere."

Above all, Clinton's deal is shrewd because it is more about economics than nukes. By envisioning new financial and diplomatic exchanges, the agreement aims to moderate the North's behavior. The regime may still fall, but if it does, it may now do so without embroiling the entire peninsula in a devastating war.

Reaching an agreement hasn't been easy. Implementing it will be harder -- and Pyongyang fears that the new Congress, assuming it is more conservative, may move to upset the bargain. That would be tragic. The deal is a good one. And by holding out against those who urged a course that could have led to war, Clinton has proved his strength and made the world safer.