Monday, October 28, 2002
Nobel Peace prize winning Jimmy Carter weighed in on the current North Korean nuclear problem in a New York Times editorial yesterday. Most of it is predictable defending of negotiations rather than confrontation. I say predictable because it was largely due to Carter's intervention in 1994 that the United States pursued negotiations rather than military confrontation.
An aside here, Carter overstates his case a bit when he claims that
Back to Carter's main point in yesterday's editorial: He argues that "It is clear that the world community cannot permit North Korea to develop a nuclear weapons capability." Yet, as I have argued before, this has never happened. I don't know of a single case in which the "world community" stopped a soveriegn nation-state from acquiring nuclear weapons once it seriously began pursuing them (the only quasi-exception being South Africa). As long as war with North Korea is off the table, we had better get used to the idea of a nuclear armed DPRK.
An aside here, Carter overstates his case a bit when he claims that
Responding to a standing invitation from North Korean President Kim Il Sung and with the approval of President Bill Clinton, I went to Pyongyang and helped to secure an agreement that North Korea would cease its nuclear program at Yongbyon and permit I.A.E.A. inspectors to return to the site to assure that the spent fuel was not reprocessed.Don Oberdorfer's highly readable The Two Koreas notes that the State Department had asked Carter not to go in 1991, 1992, and 1993 because "his trip would complicate the Korean problem rather than help resolve it." The Republic of Korea expressed similar reservations. When Carter called Clinton and insisted he was going in 1994, Clinton "interposed no objection to the trip as long as Carter clearly stated that he was acting as a private citizen rather than as an official U.S. envoy." Oberdorfer goes on to describe the frustration of Clinton, Gore et al watching Carter make policy announcements on CNN that the Clinton administration more or less had no choice but to endorse after the fact.
Back to Carter's main point in yesterday's editorial: He argues that "It is clear that the world community cannot permit North Korea to develop a nuclear weapons capability." Yet, as I have argued before, this has never happened. I don't know of a single case in which the "world community" stopped a soveriegn nation-state from acquiring nuclear weapons once it seriously began pursuing them (the only quasi-exception being South Africa). As long as war with North Korea is off the table, we had better get used to the idea of a nuclear armed DPRK.
