Leon Sigal of 38 North worries that Bolton’s grasp of the history of North Korean negotiations is flawed. Here’s his take on North Korean aims:
Throughout the Cold War, Kim Il Sung had played China off against the Soviet Union to maintain his freedom of maneuver. In 1988, anticipating the Soviet Union’s collapse, he reached out to improve relations with the United States, South Korea and Japan fundamentally in order to avoid overdependence on China. That has been the Kims’ aim ever since.
From Pyongyang’s vantage point, that aim was the basis of the 1994 Agreed Framework, which committed Washington to “move toward full normalization of political and economic relations,” or, in plain English, to end enmity. That was also the essence of the September 2005 Six Party Joint Statement which bound Washington and Pyongyang to “respect each other’s sovereignty, exist peacefully together, and take steps to normalize their relations subject to their respective bilateral policies” as well as to “negotiate a permanent peace regime on the Korean Peninsula.”
For Washington, the point of these agreements was the suspension of Pyongyang’s nuclear and missile programs. For nearly a decade, the Agreed Framework shuttered the North’s production of fissile material and stopped the test-launches of medium and longer-range missiles and did so again from 2007 to 2009. Both agreements collapsed, however, when Washington did little to implement its commitment to improve relations and Pyongyang reneged on denuclearization.
So-called experts ignore that history at their peril.
In one respect, the aims of the Kim family is something Americans should deeply understand: a desire not to be dominated. Korean history with the Chinese and the Japanese has been unpleasant, sometimes in the extreme, and it’s easy to understand why the Kims have taken North Korea on a highly independent path.
I think we can assume the recently reported trip to China was a carefully planned bit of diplomacy, perhaps an attempt to manipulate the West as much as it was to communicate with the Chinese. Perhaps Kim wanted to assert some prestige, as North Korean is near enough to claiming to be a nuclear power.
Given the reported horrific behavior of the rulers towards the ruled in North Korea, it’s a bit of a question as to whether Americans will ever accept the Kims as the legitimate rulers of North Korea, and the Korean War is also quite a lump in the throat – although the Chinese also participated in that bitter conflict on North Korea’s side, and we seem to have gotten past that. I might add that China’s Mao Zedong’s Culture Revolution resulted in suffering and death for millions of Chinese, and the Communists are still in charge there today.
But Mao was eventually, if unofficially, repudiated; after his death, his wife was put on trial, convicted, and sentenced to death for crimes during the Cultural Revolution, although the sentence was never carried out.
It might help, during negotiations with Korea, to remember the desire of the Kims to be independent of the various powers of the world.
