The New York Times > Opinion > Editorial: The North Korean Challenge

The New York Times > Opinion > Editorial: The North Korean Challenge

February 11, 2005
EDITORIAL
The North Korean Challenge

North Korea put all of its worst instincts on display yesterday, announcing that it had produced nuclear weapons, intends to go on producing them and has no further interest in talking. Experts already knew the North was probably producing nuclear bombs, and it has been painfully obvious for months that diplomacy was getting nowhere. But by waving its nukes around so contemptuously and then kicking over the negotiating table, North Korea has managed to make a terrible situation even worse.

The world cannot simply resign itself to the prospect of a nuclear-armed North Korea. It directly threatens South Korea, Japan and China. It raises the risk of nuclear blackmail against the United States, and only strengthens concerns that North Korea may be exporting nuclear ingredients and technology.

Stepping back from this nightmare will require a very different attitude on the part of North Korea. It will also require a drastic change of approach by the United States. The Bush administration did not create this problem, but, with a series of avoidable errors, it has made it much worse, much faster than might otherwise have been the case.

When President Bush took office four years ago, he immediately began distancing himself from the Clinton administration's approach, which had stopped the most imminent North Korean nuclear weapons program in its tracks. It's easy to distrust North Korea and to detest Kim Jong Il's monstrous police state. The Bush administration's response, however, was more visceral than rational, and only drove North Korea into deeper isolation and paranoia.

As Washington turned increasingly confrontational, North Korea unfroze its plutonium program, sent home the international inspectors and started building bombs. Still, the Bush administration put North Korea on a diplomatic back burner as it followed its obsession with Iraq.

The strategy of listing North Korea as one of three partners in an axis of evil and then proceeding to invade the partner that was furthest away from a nuclear weapons program was no way to persuade North Korea to give up its nuclear deterrent. Washington's nonproliferation diplomacy has also been handicapped by the Bush administration's double standards about the nuclear proliferation offenses of Pakistan and other allies.

As if to compensate for the costly unilateralism of its Iraq adventure, Washington insisted on talking to North Korea only in the presence of four other nations, even though any deal must be built around a set of core understandings between North Korea and the United States. Then, to punish North Korea for a secret uranium-processing program, Washington waited many months before putting a serious offer on the table. North Korea apparently used the delays to build more bombs.

What makes this litany of diplomatic errors particularly alarming is that diplomacy is still the only path. The United States does not have any realistic military options, and intermediate steps, like United Nations sanctions, would require more international unity than the Bush administration seems able to generate. North Korea caused the problem. More enlightened, flexible and sophisticated American diplomacy must provide a way back to the negotiating table.