The Long Road to Pyongyang

Michael J. Mazarr

From Foreign Affairs, September/October 2007

Article preview: first 500 of 6,956 words total.

Summary:  The outcome of the North Korean nuclear saga has been held up as an example of the Bush administration defying its bellicose reputation and using multilateralism and diplomacy to defuse a crisis. But in fact, the story is one of extremely poor policymaking and a persistent failure to devise a coherent strategy -- with the result that North Korea has managed to dramatically expand its nuclear capability.

Michael J. Mazarr is Professor of National Security Strategy at the U.S. National War College. The views expressed here are his own.

At first glance, the outcome of the North Korean nuclear standoff might appear to be a positive one for the United States. Under the February 2007 nuclear deal negotiated by the Bush administration, North Korea will freeze its main nuclear reactor, at Yongbyon, and allow the return of International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors. The agreement also reawakens the slender hope that Pyongyang is on the road to nuclear disarmament.

More broadly, Bush officials have pointed to the outcome of the North Korean saga as evidence that the administration has defied -- or, as some would have it, never deserved -- its caricature as a bellicose, preemption-obsessed neoconservative clique. After the initial confrontation over North Korea's nuclear program, the diplomacy quickly assumed a multilateral dimension and never lost it. Japan has been a valued partner of the administration, its voice influential on North Korea policy; China was fully engaged. Outright military solutions were never seriously considered, and the process was built around negotiations designed to test North Korea's willingness to surrender its nuclear ambitions.

But a look back at the history of the Bush administration's approach to North Korea highlights a somewhat different aspect of the White House's foreign policy. The portrait that emerges is not one of a confrontational, militaristic administration; what instead becomes apparent is an image of a White House with extremely poor conceptual strategies and decision-making processes.

From the beginning, President George W. Bush, as the nation's chief strategist, has failed to articulate a coherent policy for dealing with North Korea. The administration as a whole entered office without a clear foreign policy doctrine. The president himself appears to have been attached to a number of basic principles: the importance of strength and credibility, the universal appeal of democracy, a Reaganite belief that dictatorships are morally reprehensible and cannot be trusted. But beyond those core attitudes, in the North Korean case the basic elements of strategy -- ends, means, and the balance between them -- were not lucidly expressed or rigorously debated at the most senior levels of the U.S. government. The result was a strategic muddle, a swirling debate not guided by any clearly calculated long-term vision. And after six years, the process has wound up almost exactly where it started -- except now North Korea appears to have tripled the amount of nuclear weapons material in its possession and has become a declared nuclear power.

REGIME CHANGE VERSUS REDEMPTION

During the transition between administrations in late 2000 and early 2001, a team of Clinton administration national security officials traveled to the home of the secretary of state designate, Colin Powell, to brief him and the national security adviser designate, Condoleezza Rice, on North Korea policy. Powell expressed a desire to pick up on the progress that had been made during the Clinton administration -- progress achieved through extensive bilateral negotiations culminating in a 1994 accord, the Agreed Framework, that froze the North's Yongbyon nuclear facility and its five-megawatt nuclear reactor. The ...

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