It Makes a Difference to the Sheep

DIPLOMACY OF A HIGHLY UNDIPLOMATIC NATURE. Claudia Rosett offers some talking points for the American delegation to the upcoming six-party talks.

Well, here's how we can help. We could reframe the talks not on North Korea's terms, but on ours. That means asking not at what price we can pay off Kim & Co., but what we might with true integrity put on the table.

Let's start with the problem that North Korea craves aid because it is poor; so poor that in recent years an estimated two million North Koreans have starved to death. There's no mystery about the cause. In this age of global trade and high technology, abysmal poverty is the result of one thing, and one thing only: atrocious government. We know how to fix that, and it is not by sending more food and fuel to be stolen by the same regime causing the poverty in the first place.

So how about making a generous offer to instruct North Koreans in the ways of serious prosperity, meaning genuine capitalism? Let's start by plunking down a copy of Adam Smith's "The Wealth of Nations," followed by the works of F.A. Hayek and, for easier reading, Milton Friedman's "Capitalism and Freedom"--plus a Sears catalog and a copy of the U.S. Constitution. We could offer translation into Korean. We could recruit tutors from Eastern Europe, versed in the pitfalls of transition. That would be aid, at last, in a form Kim could not steal.

We could follow that up with a list of places where Kim Jong Il, his family and other top officials could reasonably expect asylum should they choose to depart North Korea. Hawaii worked pretty well for Ferdinand Marcos.

We could underscore the asylum offer, and provide a great big centerpiece for the six-way talks, with a list of prosecutions carried out since World War II for crimes against humanity. We could submit lists of questions about recent reports of chemical weapons experiments on North Korean political prisoners, about massive testimony of infanticide, torture, exposure and targeted starvation, as deliberate policy of Kim's state. We could ask for not only the names but also the addresses of the top 15 or so officials responsible for overseeing North Korea's death camps and state security apparatus--because our diplomats would like to send each of them a personalized dossier, in Korean of course, on the Nuremberg trials.

Finally, having put all this on the table, we could expand our own miserly $1.4 million annual budget for Radio Free Asia's North Korean service. Instead of broadcasting only four hours a day to North Koreans, who risk their lives to tune in, we could start broadcasting around the clock, including news of all these offers that belong on the table. (It's not that hard to modify even a North Korean radio to receive RFA. In a recent survey of 200 North Korean defectors, conducted by the Intermedia Survey Institute, almost half, before defecting, had tuned in to foreign broadcasts.)

Then--and it doesn't really matter if North Korea's envoy is still in the room, or has gone off to sulk near the national plutonium repository; he'll be listening, he's got plenty at stake--we could add to the stack on the table our complaints about Kim's nuclear program. If we must discuss this extortion racket, let's start from the premise that as the world's leading democracy and superpower, we are the makers of manners--and it's high time in our dealings with North Korea that we brought some Reagan etiquette to the negotiating table.

It isn't entirely clear to me what this approach would accomplish, especially in the short-term. I suppose it would make those who just can't understand why everyone else isn't as obsessed with just how gosh darn evil the North Korean regime is as they are feel better. Call a spade a spade and all that. I chuckled at the idea of giving reading assignments (with homework?). Who knew that reading Adam Smith and F.A. Hayek was all it took to lift a nation out of poverty?