U.S. Should Follow, Not Lead in North Korea Talks

U.S. Should Follow, Not Lead in North Korea Talks

Tom Plate

LOS ANGELES -- Mutual cooperation among nations can advance their interests more effectively than any other approach, especially with disease control, financial crisis and war prevention.

The obvious example is the current bird flu epidemic. If only authorities in Thailand, Indonesia and Vietnam, especially, had immediately come clean when their birds started dropping like flies, Asia would be in better shape today. Instead, at least 16 people have died, tourism has been hurt and financial markets are fluttering.

Similarly, the same formula -- come clean, work together, let's get the job done -- was a major lesson of the Asian financial crisis (1997-1999).

This economic epidemic also originated in Thailand, when its currency, the baht, began to fall in value against other currencies, as if diseased. An immediate and massive regional effort to contain the Thai currency "flu" might well have blocked its pernicious spread to other Asian currencies.

Instead, economies collapsed, millions lost jobs, and tragic suicides ensued until a finally-alarmed West intervened to dampen the currency contagion.

The resort to the military option is yet another dangerous pathology that needs regional cooperation to contain. A current obvious scenario would be the nuclearization of East Asia -- a looming possibility if North Korea proceeds apace with its nuclear weapons buildup.

Pakistani nuclear experts, we now know, infected a very willing Democratic People's Republic of Korea, the world's last Stalinist regime, with atomic secrets and technology. Even so, North Korea, economically weak and still relatively isolated, is not the main destablilizing threat to the region -- serial nuclear proliferation is.

Yes, it would take a lot for the Republic of Korea, the successful democratic, capitalistic country to the south, to go nuclear -- but a fully atomic North Korea might just tip Seoul's scales. And, yes, it would be like moving a political mountain the size of Mount Kilimanjaro for Japan (with its horrific Hiroshima and Nagasaki memories) to go nuclear -- but the specter of Pyongyang playing around with nuclear missiles might just be that mountain-mover.

This scenario is avoidable, however. As with the region's bird flu and currency crises, three remedies are required. One is containment; the other is money; the third is close-knit regional teamwork.

A terrific opportunity presents itself later this month (Feb. 25), in Beijing. There, North Korean negotiators are scheduled to sit down with high-level representatives from China, Japan, South Korea, Russia and the United States for round two of the so called "six-party talks."

These talks do not require rocket science; the issue is simple. North Korea is prepared to freeze its nuclear program in return for a guarantee of non-aggression from the United States, which it fears desires to Saddamize it. Next, the North would need to begin dismantling its atomic arsenal piece by piece as economic aid pours into its diseased economy.

Should all this occur, the net regional gain here would be staggering. But there is one participant in the Beijing talks, however, that is unenthused about re-negotiating a freeze and re-starting an economic aid program: the Bush administration. It points out that the United States in 1994 took precisely this approach, and it turned out to be a turkey of a deal: Pyongyang cheated on its promise not to re-arm.

Washington's cynicism is understandable -- but it is dysfunctional. The Bush administration needs to listen more carefully to Beijing, Tokyo and Seoul and let them take the lead on economic aid if it refuses to be seen as "rewarding" North Korea's perfidy. As for the nettlesome verification question -- Is the North really freezing? And then, is it really disarming? -- this is only a short-term problem if the overwhelming and presumably inevitable consequence of a six-party regional-security pact is to open up North Korea. Its future scenario could include substantial investment, rapid modernization, a dose of helpful Westernization and a boatload of Western tourists -- not to mention to cagey CIA agents dressed like used car salesmen from Fargo.

Moreover, China, which has as much to lose as anyone if the talks fail, and which has developed very businesslike relations with the Bush administration, should take the lead role in arranging a verification scheme acceptable to Washington.

But this almost misses the point: the end goal is not simply the denuclearization of North Korea, as desirable as this would be, but the political and economic integration of semi-isolated North Korea into the East Asian region.

Only regional mutual cooperation can contain the kinds of diseases that plague everyone, whether bird flu, currency contagion or the cancer of war. Japan's Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi framed the issue as well as anyone recently when he told Tokyo reporters: "I hope the talks will serve as a step for North Korea to become accepted in the international community."

Washington must avoid playing the role of the spoiler and let those who live closest to the problem take the lead in solving it. It’s simply a measure of mature disease control.

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Tom Plate is a professor of Policy and Communication Studies at UCLA. He is a regular columnist for the Los Angeles Times Syndicate International, the South China Morning Post, The Straits Times and the Honolulu Advertiser. He is a member of the World Economic Forum, and the Pacific Council on International policy. The author of five books, he has worked at TIME, the Los Angeles Times and the Daily Mail of London. He established the Asia Pacific Media Network in 1998 and was its director until 2003.

For publication and reprint rights, contact Tom Plate at tplate@ucla.edu or John Simpson (john.simpson@latsi.com) of the Los Angeles Times Syndicate International.

The views expressed above are those of the author and are not necessarily those of AsiaMedia or the UCLA Asia Institute.

Date Posted: 2/6/2004