The Editors of 38 North are unhappy with misrepresentations – in their view – of the history of interactions with North Korea:
Cases in point are two recent articles in the New York Times, which, on balance, has done great reporting on the unfolding crisis. The first, “How Trump’s Predecessors Dealt with the North Korean Threat” by Russell Goldman, has a clear theme that they have been snookering us all along. Well, that may have been true for part of the time, but it wasn’t true for all of the time. The article completely misrepresents what happened under the Clinton administration, asserting that North Korea accepted the carrots offered by the administration in the 1994 US-North Korea Agreed Framework—two multi-billion dollar reactors and heavy fuel oil shipments—then cheated when it was supposed to be denuclearizing and learned the lesson that it could profit by provoking the West.
Sounds pretty straightforward, but unfortunately, it is fake history. If the author had bothered to do more research, he would have learned that in 1993, US intelligence estimated that North Korea could have enough nuclear material to build about 75 bombs by the beginning of the next decade. The Agreed Framework ended that threat. In 2002 when the agreement collapsed, the North only had enough material to build less than 5 nuclear weapons. Moreover, Pyongyang had made the mistake of allowing key nuclear facilities to deteriorate into piles of junk. So it couldn’t restart them. In effect, a plutonium production program that had cost tens, maybe hundreds, of billions of dollars to build had been trashed because of the agreement. True, Pyongyang had started to cheat by exploring a uranium enrichment program that could also produce bomb-making material, but that program was nowhere near as advanced and wouldn’t reach fruition for years. Sounds like a good deal to us. But none of this is mentioned in the article.
And it’s important to have a clear-eyed view of how history has truly unfolded, because past events will influence how North Korea will view potential future negotiations and actions – as we should have learned from the Iranian mess. In that one, we supported a hated dictator in the Shah, and the result has been a revolution, a hostile adversary for nearly 40 years, and a group largely hostile to Western values.
