I‘ve let much of the sturm and drang over the Obama Administration’s announcement of a bilateral meeting with the North Koreans pass while I tried to acquire a sense of what this really means, and whether it necessarily suggests that Obama’s surprisingly-not-bad North Korea policy is going to revert to something weaker, something ironically like the policy George W. Bush ultimately delegated to Christopher Hill, now our ambassador in a sleepy backwater called Baghdad, and which failed so completely to achieve American interests.
Objectively, there’s no denying that thus far, the Obama policy toward North Korea has defied all expectations and proven much tougher than Bush’s. Kim Jong Il forced Obama’s hand, of course, with his springtime provocations. The policy we have now may indeed be too good to last — as a habit, I never overestimate the U.S. Department of State — but this announcement doesn’t necessarily signal a change.
My sense of this latest announcement from the Administration — and that sense is based in part on what the State Department is saying in public (see below the fold here) and how the South Koreans are reacting — is that this may not mean much of a change at all. It may mean much less than what the Administration continues to do behind the scenes, which is to impose some fairly tough sanctions on North Korea’s arms trade, and more importantly, on the illicit income that finances Kim Jong Il’s palace economy. Once we recognize talks with North Korea for the non-issue they really are, then we can shift our focus to things that matter, like following the money. On that account, this Administration has adopted many of the tough measures I was certain he would not. Last summer alone, Treasury issued a global money laundering alert against North Korea, sanctioned a North Korean bank for dealing with Iran, and sanctioned Iranian entities for dealing with North Korea, moves that essentially cut those entities off from the international financial system, and which will drive bankers and investors to sever their connections with the North. More sanctions were announced just this month. The financial connections we are finally attacking in earnest finance North Korea’s military, inner party, and Kim Jong Il’s own opulence. Obama’s people appear to understand that Bush and Hill made a grave error when they relaxed similar sanctions and threw away this key leverage in 2007, and that’s a mistake they at least say they don’t intend to repeat.
The Obama Administration earns no such credit for its non-response to North Korea’s atrocities against its own subjects, including its horrific chain of concentration camps. Taken in the context of North Korea’s negligent homicide of the 2.5 million people it allowed to starve to death, these may well comprise the greatest ongoing crime against humanity anywhere on earth. Recent reports suggest that conditions for the North Korean people, if that is possible, only continue to deteriorate. At this post, for example, I located and published the first satellite images of a camp reported by defectors, where refugees repatriated by China are now being worked and starved to death in increased numbers. How the Administration responds to this, or fails to, will tell us much about whether it grasps the fundamental pathology that drives this regime to confront, to oppress, and to take the lives of those within its grasp. In the end, it is the absence of influence and information that make North Korea such a policy challenge. We’ve failed to address that challenge because our efforts to influence North Korea have focused on the regime itself and disregarded the direct pursuit of influence with the North Korean people.
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