Re-labeling North Korea a terrorist state a long time coming

Donald Trump’s decision to re-designate North Korea a terrorist state corrects a mistake that remained in place far too long. But righting this wrong will not change the dynamics of its nuclear-arming.

The president acknowledged the error when he said: “It should have happened years ago.” In truth, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea should never have been removed from the list of states sponsoring terrorism. Its crimes against hundreds of victims of terrorism, mainly South Koreans, stretches back decades.

{mosads}Its authoritarian terrorism against its own citizens is as legendary as its Stalinist prison camps are notorious for starvation, beatings and summary executions of prisoners, some by artillery shelling.

The mistake was that of the President George W. Bush administration. President Bush acted on the recommendation of a few of his aides, who advocated a “de-listing” of the DPRK in order to secure a verbal pledge from the rogue nation to abandon its nuclear-weapons project.

After two years of convoluted, arduous and complex negotiations involving the United States and the DPRK, as well as South Korea, Japan, Russia and, most importantly, China in the Six Party Talks, the Kim Jong Il regime struck a series of bargains but then calculatingly strung out Washington without full implementation of the deals to curtail plutonium reprocessing and nuclear bomb-making.

Fearing a collapse of the proposals in late 2008 before leaving office, the Bush White House accepted a verbal commitment from current leader Kim Jong Un’s father. The elder Kim agreed to close out one facility and open another nuclear site to international inspection.

As lawyers quip, a verbal agreement is not worth the paper it is printed on. Neither father nor son Kim was really committed to upholding any of the compromises worked out among the parties to stop Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons development.

As such, the Kim regime’s pledges were simply one of a string of broken promises made to gain relief from sanctions internationally imposed by the United Nations. Habitually, North Korea seeks to escape from the international “sticks,” and to pocket the material “carrots” in foreign aid. Then, it just walked away from its obligations to restart the cycle again.  

President Barack Obama fared just as badly as his predecessor in handling the North Korean threat, if judged by nuclear test explosions within North Korea. He didn’t dirty his hands by entering into protracted and intricate deal-making with either of the Kims.

When Kim Jong Un came into power after his father’s death, he accelerated the nuclear program. Four of the six DPRK’s nuclear tests took place on Obama’s watch. The most recent nuclear detonation happened after Trump assumed the presidency.

Trump’s presidential tenure has also been marked by North Korea’s 22 missile firings, two of which have been classified as ICBMs for their range of over 3,400 miles and designed to carry nuclear warheads.

Obama treated the newly installed Kim with a certain disdain, as one might an unruly child. Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton compared the tyrannical regime to “small children and unruly teenagers and people who are demanding attention” in an interview on ABC’s Good Morning America in July 2009. She went on to add: “Don’t give (attention) to them, they don’t deserve it, they are acting out.”

Barack Obama was measured in replying to North Korean missile and nuclear provocations. He put in place a policy of “strategic patience” to address North Korea’s pursuit of nucleardom. Strategic patience meant the Obama White House refused to offer new incentives to induce the North Koreans to turn back to nuclear disarmament parleys in the wake of the Bush administration’s debacle.  

But there were no positive results from this hands-off approach, just further nuclear and missile developments in the DPRK. As it turned out, Obama’s policy should have been labeled “strategic appeasement.”

Nothing substantive was undertaken to halt the forward march of North Korean missile and nuclear armaments, not even repeal of his predecessor’s woolly-headed de-listing of the DPRK from the Department of State’s terrorist state sponsorship since 1988.

Washington originally placed North Korea on the list, where it currently shares membership with Iran, Syria and Sudan. It was a deserved designation, coming after the downing of a South Korean passenger jet. DPRK agents placed a bomb aboard the plane, which exploded killing all 115 people on the flight in 1987.

More recently, one of Pyongyang’s submarines torpedoed a South Korean navy ship, Cheonan, drowning 46 seamen in 2010. Next, it fired on a small South Korean island off the coast, killing four inhabitants the same year.

Obama’s disengagement from the nuclear menace unfolding in North Korea during his second term resulted not in a more amenable response from the Kim dynasty. Quite the reverse occurred once Kim Jong Un ascended the communist and military hierarchy in late 2011.

It would seem that Washington’s policy of neglect and restraint motivated him to speed up the country’s missile launches and nuclear tests.

So, the inside-Beltway criticism that Trump’s re-listing the Pyongyang dictatorship will render U.S.-North Korean negotiations more difficult to convene fails to take in account that Obama’s go-soft approach resulted in more bad behavior, not less.

All of which goes to show that using carrots or sticks toward the Kim regime elicits a similar response — continued nuclear and missile provocations. On reflection, re-declaring North Korea will not, on its own, impede the renegade nation from nuclearizing its armory.

But symbols count in life and diplomacy. Thus, the symbolism, along with the Trump administration’s newest sanctions on North Korea, as well as China, demonstrated the White House’s determination to exact a price for Pyongyang’s outlawry.

There may not be points for just trying in international affairs, but there are certainly demerits for not making any effort to head off North Korea’s nuclear ambitions.

Thomas Henriksen is a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. His most recent book is, “Cycles in U.S. Foreign Policy since the Cold War” (Palgrave, 2017).