It has now been more than 20 years since the Clinton administration signed its supposed breakthrough nuclear agreement with North Korea. The purpose of U.S. diplomacy was to prevent North Korea from attaining nuclear-weapons capability by means of a series of incentives and verifiable safeguards. Then as now, politicians seemed to embrace the notion that a bad deal was better than no deal at all, despite rhetoric to the contrary. Negotiators from the time readily admit they realized what they were getting was a bad deal, but convinced themselves that with Communist regimes falling all around, North Korea’s time was limited. What they never fully understood in North Korea as in Iran was (and is) the importance of the ideology to the regime, and the fact that there were enough true believers among the regime leadership and special military forces to render moot any doubts the public and any reformists might have had.
Twenty years on, North Korea is a nuclear power, more threatening than ever. Its cheating began almost the instant it signed the Agreed Framework and subsequent agreements. Wendy Sherman, who now leads negotiations with Iran, reacted at the time to Pentagon reports of North Korean cheating by condemning the Pentagon experts for making compliance so narrow.
Fast forward two decades: Obama seeks a breakthrough with Iran to change an otherwise sorry legacy, while past and present State Department officials like Wendy Sherman, Jake Sullivan, and Bill Burns recognize that one way to get ahead personally is to break through diplomatic barriers, whether or not breaking those barriers is wise for national security.
As the Obama administration rushes to seal a bad deal with Iran, the latest news regarding North Korea should be a wake-up call. From South Korea’s Yonhap News Agency:
North Korea has launched a new submarine capable of firing ballistic missiles, military and government sources in Seoul said Sunday, raising further concerns over the North’s evolving missile and nuclear threats. The communist country “is believed to have completed construction of the new submarine after importing a Soviet-era Golf-class diesel submarine and reverse-engineering it,” a government source said on condition of anonymity. The Soviet vessel was built in 1958 and decommissioned in 1990. “The new submarine is 67 meters long with a beam of 6.6 meters, and has a dived displacement in the 3,000-ton range,” the source said.
While North Korea has yet to master the technology of actually launching ballistic missiles from submarines, this is yet one more achievement on a trajectory that Pyongyang has pursued without interruption.
Back to Iran: While the Iranian regime says that it wants nuclear power for civilian reasons, on the surface such claims make no sense: Iran doesn’t have the indigenous uranium reserves to power a civilian program of the size it says it wants (eight reactors) for more than 15 years. That Iran could power its country with gas and oil for far longer and with far less investment should raise eyebrows. So too should the fact that Iran has been working on developing both submarines and ballistic missiles, the first of which has never been on the bilateral agenda and the latter of which the State Department appears willing to turn a blind eye to in its negotiations.
While the U.S. military conducts lessons-learned exercises constantly, the State Department has never conducted a lessons-learned exercise about why its diplomacy with rogue regimes has failed. It has simply never acknowledged its mistakes and so constantly repeats them.
I’m not sure there’s anyone outside of Pyongyang who would call U.S.-North Korea diplomacy a success. Rather, it has been a colossal, multibillion-dollar disaster. That should be a wake-up call, especially as Iranian negotiators have looked to North Korea for inspiration. But, if there is any silver lining, it is the lesson which the example should provide to American diplomats, should any choose to listen.
