Today, North Korea is still trying to figure out how to deal with America. And for a regime that is frozen in time–maybe the last Stalinist state left on earth–it is perhaps no surprise that its tactics haven’t changed much since the Pueblo. Last week, in a dangerous escalation of tensions that have been building since October–when Pyongyang admitted it had a secret uranium-enrichment program–North Korean jets buzzed another U.S. spy mission, this time a surveillance plane, in what may have been another attempt to seize hostages. In response, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said he was deploying long-range bombers to Guam and suggested that U.S. troops, in range of Kim’s missiles, might be pulled from South Korea. A few days later, Pyongyang indicated it was about to begin missile tests in the Sea of Japan.
All this increases the likelihood that North Korea will shortly follow through on its threat to begin reprocessing plutonium, and perhaps make nuclear bombs. And as diplomats in Asia scrambled to find a solution, some expressed frustration that the Bush administration has all but accepted the present stalemate. The North Koreans are insisting on direct talks with Washington, but as one U.S.-friendly foreign diplomat described it, the administration is internally divided: the argument is tilting to hawks who believe that any one-on-one negotiation smacks of buckling to nuclear blackmail, and that Kim’s regime will soon go the way of Stalin’s. As President Bush prepares to invade Iraq, his official position is that the North Koreans must dismantle their nukes before anything else happens. And he refuses to call the deadlock a crisis. Explains one official: “We say ‘concern.’ We say ‘serious concern.’ We occasionally say ‘provocation.’ We don’t say ‘crisis’.”
Yet every day that Kim Jong Il gets closer to producing plutonium, his price for standing down may increase. “Bush is really losing time, and increasing the risk of war by not negotiating,” says a former U.N. inspector. Angry Democrats on Capitol Hill, like Sen. Dianne Feinstein, say the problem is not just that a U.S. military solution could become impossible if the North obtains more nuclear weapons. Nuclear fissile material is the North Koreans’ “cash crop,” says Feinstein. If Kim gets no satisfaction from Bush–he mainly wants a nonaggression pact–he “could very well sell this stuff to Al Qaeda and we would never know it.”
The question is how serious Kim Jong Il is about his own saber rattling. Some Korea experts say his behavior has been ruthless but rational. Condemned as an Axis of Evil member by Bush a year ago, Kim has responded by stepping up his nuclear program. Kim appears to believe he’s next after Saddam Hussein; Bush officials insist they don’t plan to attack him, but they do suggest that he should draw a lesson from Saddam’s fate. As one Capitol Hill official privy to the ad-ministration’s thinking puts it, the preferred policy for North Korea is also regime change; it’s just that in Kim’s case the hope is that it will be “assisted suicide.” Hence, even as Bush insists he is not cutting off food aid, he is slowly squeezing the North, reducing shipments to 40,000 tons from more than 200,000 in 2001.
Critics say that is only more likely to make Kim resort to selling plutonium. And they say Bush is deluding himself if he thinks Kim’s long-enduring regime is close to collapse. But Kim is “not suicidal,” as Song Young Gil of South Korea’s ruling party puts it. In 1994, during the last serious confrontation over the North’s nuclear program, Pyongyang threatened to turn Seoul into a “sea of fire.” “But just before things got out of control, Pyongyang gave in and agreed to a summit,” says Song. “All it needed was an excuse to save face… It has always shown some degree of consistency in diplomacy.” All the way back to the Pueblo.
