Two American journalists working for Current TV demonstrated a rather poor sense of geography and got themselves captured on the south side of the Yalu River. For their trouble, they won a 140-day trip through the North Korean penal system, a journey that only ended when Bill Clinton went to Pyongyang and got them out. Best of a bad situation, right? Wrong, according to John Bolton and the FOX News team:
No finer example of the blinkered thinking that got us into so many problems.
The Clinton visit was fantastic. Not fantastic in the sense that we spared two Americans the gulag; that’s a personal victory for them. I can be as cold-blooded as Dick Morris; indeed, when it comes to making a point to hostage-takers, I am willing to endorse ruthless steps:
The fantastic part, the part that seems to elude John and Dick and the rest of the reflexive Republicans, is that this is the diplomatic equivalent of Tom Sawyer painting a fence. Bill Clinton was actually able to think a move ahead, to see the table from Kim Il-Jong’s perspective.
Kim is old and sick. At least since Roman times, dictators have had a frustrating habit of dying at the hands of court intrigue, and weak dictators are particularly vulnerable. There was a massive explosion as his train passed a rail yard in 2004; whether actually an assassination attempt or not, Kim surely must think it was. Furthermore, Kim is trying to engineer the dynastic succession of his son. Even Mao, strongman of all strongmen, had to essentially surrender the fate of the Gang of Four to secure his own dotage. It’s not an easy task.
Kim has limited resources. To his south stand 30,000 American soldiers, a million and change South Korean soldiers, and missiles that probably work. He needs to maintain a massive standing army for internal security purposes and so that the folks across the DMZ don’t get any funny ideas about freeing his people. He has to worry that some of the many people in his army will become disgruntled by the lack of material resources and launch a coup, and at the same time he cannot allow the sort of economic activity that would create an alternate center of power in his country. All of a sudden negotiating with Max Baucus seems relaxing.
Kim’s strategy – the strategy he inherited from his father, and one that has served both Kims exceedingly well – is to go rogue. In the finest tradition of Sarah Palin, they periodically pull crazy Ivans. Sometimes they want to befriend the south, sometimes they want to say they’re at war. Sometimes they test-fire missiles and nuclear weapons, other times they blow up cooling towers. He wants to keep the West off balance, and he needs to demonstrate his essential value to his generals: only I can jerk the West around with this level of subtlety, so don’t go turning out the lights next time I have to have major surgery.
Having a hostage is a helpful thing in a military conflict. When Laura Ling and Euna Lee blundered across the border, they played into Kim’s hands. But then he got himself a bit caught up in his own intrigue.
You see, it wasn’t that long ago that he got angry with the west and decided he wasn’t talking to us. He pulled out of the interminable six-party talks, set off missiles and bombs, made threats about shipping, and generally stomped his feet. When Hillary Clinton called them children at the ASEAN forum just two weeks ago, the North Koreans huddled for three days in Pyongyang before releasing this wonderful statement:
Sometimes she looks like a primary schoolgirl and sometimes a pensioner going shopping.
Probably sounds better if you imagine it being said by Bruno. For good measure, they also said:
The six-party talks are over.
Ah, yes, the silent treatment. We want to have talks, and they won’t cooperate. How’s that working out?
I will immediately acknowledge that I don’t know of any secret Iran-contra style deal that may have been struck. Perhaps Clinton’s plane was stocked with crates of Krugerrands or an original Elvis jumpsuit. It doesn’t really matter, because as Kim of all people would know, any deal with Bill Clinton is instantly deniable by the Obama Administration and hardly enforceable even if public. Suppose Obama promised to stop tailing North Korean freighters, and then started to do it again – what is Kim going to do about it? Both Kim and Clinton knew that any deal ended the minute his plane left North Korean airspace. So let’s think about what each side got.
Kim Jong-Il
- A visit from a famous world leader. He can now tell his generals “without me, you are just a bunch of anonymous thugs; with me, you have someone to negotiate with the Americans.” He can tell his people that the former American president came to pay homage to him, although since he already tells people that his first game of golf featured eleven holes-in-one, he could have said that whether or not Clinton came.
- The chance to speak with Bill Clinton. Kim would much prefer to talk to someone he perceives as important than some State Department lackey. He tells Bill something and feels confident it will get to Hillary and Barack.
- A cry for interior decorating help. There’s no point being an evil dictator if you have to sit in a room that looks like that. No wonder he seems so glum.
Bill Clinton
- Journalists are free. Nice for them, nice for Al Gore, and gets rid of unfinished business. If we seized a North Korean ship and they said they would execute one of the journalists, or executed one and said they’d execute the other, we’d be in a bind. Now they have to capture more journalists before they can do this.
- Spoke with Kim. We have a lot to tell the guy, and who knows if any of it gets reported accurately. We get a fantastic communicator in the room with Kim for a couple of hours to see where things are going and try to probe for a larger deal.
- Plausible deniability. Again, no pressure to make any deal; if Kim presses a point, Bill can always say “I’ll have to bring it up in DC.” Kim has no such luxury; if Bill presses him on a point, he cannot shift responsibility.
Our conflict with North Korea has a mutually acceptable outcome; it is quite different from, say, Israel and Hamas, where one side will need to make a fundamental concession to its stated purpose to achieve a stable resolution.
We would be happy for Kim, his son, and their military to abuse the North Korean people to their hearts’ content, provided they stop building weapons that might hurt us and stop selling their weapons or technology to our enemies.
Kim would be happy to stop building weapons that might hurt us and stop selling his weapons to our enemies if he knew for certain that he was free to mistreat his people without our interference.
The trouble is, Kim doesn’t trust us to leave him alone if he stops building weapons that can menace us, he cannot demobilize his army without losing social control, and he cannot stop selling weapons technology because that is his only source of hard currency to pay his army. So long as he has a huge standing army and a weapons program and a proliferation effort, we don’t dare leave him alone. So we’re stuck.
The Chinese could solve all of this, but they don’t want to, because it’s a fun and inexpensive way to keep us tied up on the Korean peninsula and there’s always a possibility that they can cut some future deal for themselves out of the situation.
That leaves direct communication, in whatever context. It’s in our interest, yet the dynamics of the journalist situation made it their request. That’s terrific negotiating.
Let’s contrast that appreciation for the other guy’s perspective with Dubya’s reported attempt to persuade Jacques Chirac to send troops to Iraq:
Now out of office, Chirac recounts that the American leader appealed to their “common faith” (Christianity) and told him: “Gog and Magog are at work in the Middle East…. The biblical prophecies are being fulfilled…. This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people’s enemies before a New Age begins.”
Setting aside the horrifying prospect that our president might have launched a war because of something he read in Ezekiel, how was this going to convince Chirac to commit French troops? Perhaps if Bush had accused Saddam of making counterfeit Gitanes, or polluting the rivers of Bordeaux, or having a voodoo doll of Jerry Lewis, things might have gone differently. It’s a subtle thing in diplomacy, the ability to think not of the reason you want to do something but the reason he might want to do it. Good to see that the White House has some folks with that ability, if only demonstrated to date on the foreign policy side. Hell, Dubya couldn’t even come up with the best Ezekiel reference:
