Crisis in Korea: View from Pyongyang

WASHINGTON, Dec. 30 (UPI) -- Why did North Korea abandon the pretense it was abiding by its 1994 nuclear development agreement with the United States and why now? Because, seasoned East Asian Pyongyang watchers say, they appear to have believed that after the United States "takes out" President Saddam Hussein of Iraq, they would be next on the list.

The roots of the current crisis go back to President George W. Bush's State of the Union speech last January. To great applause, the president then included North Korea long with Iraq and Iran in an "axis of evil."

The comments were celebrated as a triumph by the powerful clique of neo-conservatives who run the Office of the Secretary of Defense under Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. And administration sources have told United Press International that they were included in the speech over the strong objections of Secretary of State Colin Powell. Certainly, close associates of Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz in the week after the speech openly boasted that the inclusion of the phrase was a humiliating defeat for Powell.

In the months that followed, it became increasingly clear that Bush was in earnest about confronting Iraq and Saddam and, at the very least, rooting out his weapons of mass destruction and programs to build them. Ponderously, slowly but inexorably, the United States continued to proceed along a path aimed at toppling Saddam and crushing his army militarily and installing a new government in Baghdad dependent on and favorable to Washington.

But according to East Asian intelligence sources, North Korea's reclusive, but smart and ruthless leader Kim Jong Il and his colleagues appear to have drawn the conclusion from U.S. policy that once Iraq was dealt with, they would be next on the list. Therefore, these sources said, the North Koreans have taken a page out of Israel's deterrence playbook. And like Israel, they did so because they were scared.

The North Korean capital Pyongyang is probably the most inaccessible capital city on earth. But certain things are known for a certainty, and very clear inferences can indeed be drawn from them.

First, senior South Korean intelligence officials and close advisers to President Kim Dae-jung have repeatedly told UPI Analysis that former North Korean leader Kim Il Sung and his innermost circle are truly ignorant of the nature of democratic societies in the wider world. Even worse, these top South Korean officials say, North Korea's Kim and his advisers are also still in a very much of a state of paranoid fear about everyone outside their own tightly policed borders.

That is why South Korea's Kim made his "Sunshine" policy of very cautious détente with North Korea the centerpiece of his nation's national security policies. And it is also why the South Korea's Kim and his own top officials were so appalled at what they considered the reckless actions and rhetoric of Bush when he visited the Demilitarized Zone border between South and North Korea last year. They feared Bush's tough talk could wreck the fragile foundations of their own détente.

North Korea has about the same population, a smaller area and a far, far smaller resource base than Iraq. Also, where Iraq can hope for uprisings of popular support among the Middle East's remaining 260 million Arabs outside its borders, or in the wider Muslim world, which numbers around 1 billion, the North Koreans are out on their own.

Pyongyang's only supporter is neighboring China, is determined to keep North Korea intact as a protective buffer against the contagion of the free speech, democratic societies of South Korea and Japan. But while China has been making long-term, serious and massive military investment to prepare for a possible air-sea war against the United States in the Taiwan Straits, it is no position to actively militarily intervene, on North Korea's side against the far superior U.S. high-tech military forces.

Besides North Korea's revered, although catastrophic, founding ideology of chu-chi, or independent self-reliance, teaches that national security and even survival can be entrusted to no other nation's hands.

The clear strategic inference to be drawn from such premises is that a nuclear deterrent would be necessary to maintain the cherished independence of North Korea against an outside world presumed to be entirely hostile against it. Similar motivations based on all too real recent history motivated democratic Israel's founding father David Ben-Gurion to launch an ambitious nuclear development program in the 1950s.

The North Korean admission makes clear that they never adhered to the 1994 Yongbyon agreement and that they did not break it out of anger at Bush's policies. On the contrary, North Korean admissions so far make clear that they were systematically breaking the 1994 agreement all along.

And as Anthony Cordesman of Washington's Center for Strategic and International Studies points out in a new paper, "even if the Yongbyon agreement of 1994 had been fully adhered to, it would not have prevented North Korea from having nuclear weapons or biological weapons of equal or greater lethality."

Will the North Koreans use them? The simple but accurate answer is, nobody knows. Cordesman believes, as he writes in his study, "North Korea has no incentive to risk an avoidable war. ... By every traditional standard, North Korea should still be deterred, "

South Korean intelligence officials and national security analysts around both President Kim Dae-jung and his new successor, President-elect Roh Moo-hyun, agree with this assessment. But both they and Cordesman make important qualifications to it.

"In practice," Cordesman continued in his paper, "few wears are the result of rational calculations." And he adds, "North Korea's long history of brinkmanship and risk taking is not reassuring."

South Korean intelligence officials and senior diplomats feel exactly the same way. And that is precisely the reason why the South Korea's Kim pushed ahead with his "sunshine" policy of developing dialogue and cautious cooperation with North Korea. For Kim and his advisers believed the paranoia and unpredictability of Pyongyang's leaders was rooted in their extraordinary self-imposed isolation from the wider world that has earned their country the nickname, "The Hermit Kingdom."

Therefore, Kim and his advisers were appalled when Bush included North Korea in his "axis of evil." But their warnings to Washington to tread carefully with Pyongyang fell on deaf ears. Senior Bush administration officials made no secret of their contempt for Kim and his "Sunshine" policy, which won him the Nobel Peace Prize last year.

Now, the consequences that Kim and his colleagues most feared appear to be coming to pass. Even if war is successfully averted, Cordesman concludes, "The U.S. faces a future in which there is a nuclear North Korea and in which it can never be sure how many more (nuclear) weapons it will acquire, regardless of how many agreements it makes not to acquire them."

This grim situation obviously marks the failure of President Bill Clinton's much touted 1994 agreement with Pyongyang. But it also now underscores the failure of supposedly far tougher policies and rhetoric pursued by the current Bush administration over the past two years.

What can be concluded is that North Korea's leaders have now made the calculation that only the fear that they already possess nuclear weapons will deter Bush from taking major military action against them at some point soon.

Therefore, while Bush's policies and his "axis of evil" rhetoric and determination to take down Saddam did not motivate Pyongyang to push ahead with its nuclear program, it simply confirmed in the minds of Kim Jong Il and his colleagues the wisdom of sticking with it. They appear to have concluded that only the possession of a nuclear deterrent -- and the certain knowledge among their potential enemies that they already possess it -- would be sufficient to keep Bush off their backs.

Given the significant softening of U.S. policy on the dispute signaled by Secretary of State Powell Sunday, Kim Jong Il may well be reading the Bush administration better than Bush and his officials so far have read him.

(The first in a five-part series that looks at the dispute between the United States and North Korea over Pyongyang's nuclear program. Next: America's dilemma.)