A big sigh of relief. The UN Security Council (UNSC) has approved the deal on Iran’s nuclear endeavours that commits Iran not to pursue nuclear weapons capability. It also approved the lifting of sanctions on Iran. The Republicans in the US Congress are the one remaining bastion against the ratification of this deal, but facing a UNSC decision supported by not just the US but also the other permanent members — Russia, the UK, France and China — it would be a brave Congress that would block the deal. In fact, with President Barack Obama ready to wield his veto that would override any Congressional resolution, it could not. Neither could a putative Republican president do anything about this fait accompli, embedded deeply in international law.
Now, for the next deal that, if Obama continues to hurry at the pace he is now setting, he could wrap up before the end of his presidency. In swift succession he has resolved three major impasses with Burma, Cuba and Iran. So, now to North Korea, which already possesses nuclear weapons, something it need not have if Republicans in Congress had not sabotaged deals worked out by Presidents George H W Bush and Bill Clinton.
Recently, Admiral William Gortney announced that it is now the US’s official assessment that North Korea is capable of mounting a miniaturised nuclear warhead atop an intercontinental ballistic missile, able to reach the US. Since the country’s relatively new president, Kim Jong-Un, behaves more dangerously than his father and grandfather, allegedly murdering his uncle, his close advisor, it is right to be scared and even more right to fast forward a deal that would halt further missile and bomb production.
The US’s position is that to restart negotiations North Korea must take steps towards denuclearisation before talks can begin and that talks must be focused only on convincing North Korea to give up its nuclear programme completely rather than on limiting the programme. Negotiating is not the same as legitimising. Indeed, doing nothing is a policy of “acceptance”. The second wrong mindset is that the US has now little leverage to persuade North Korea to go into reverse. To make things significantly better than they are this may be true but the fact is the North Korean threat could get a lot worse, especially if it is true miniaturization that is on the cards (which despite Admiral Gortney’s announcement is not yet confirmed by US intelligence).
North Korea has yet to test either a long-range missile or a miniaturised warhead. The US always maintains that North Korea is untrustworthy; it breaks deals. But think how it looks from their side: a string of broken undertakings. For example, the US sunk the so-called Agreed Framework of 1994 that laid the basis for serious technical as well as political negotiations. The former US ambassador to the UN, John Bolton, who rigidly opposes all liberal foreign policy developments, said of the discovery of North Korea’s centrifuge programme, “It was the hammer I had been looking for to shatter the Agreed Framework.” As Liz Whitfield of the Carnegie Endowment has commented, “The centrifuge programme was alarming, technically in violation of the 1994 deal.” But she points out it was only after this “shattering” that North Korea withdrew from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and developed nuclear weapons.
According to Robert Galluci, who was the head US negotiator at the time, North Korea would currently have possessed many more nuclear weapons if the Agreed Framework had not delayed their progress for so many years. In previous years, when negotiations made progress, the Republicans consistently sabotaged promises made to win North Korea’s trust. A food supply programme was curtailed. So were funds to continue the building of a light water reactor that could produce electricity but not uranium or plutonium, necessary ingredients for a nuclear bomb. It sits half finished, a monument to a wasted opportunity and a reminder that a deal could have been made before one bomb was made.
Tragically, there is no likelihood that North Korea will put its nuclear weapons programme into reverse. The only hope is to freeze the present situation and kick the can down the road in the hope that internal forces within North Korea might lead to regime change. Meanwhile, China, North Korea’s one remaining friend, will fight to keep Kim from doing anything too stupid. Since it controls much of the North’s trade, it has a great deal of leverage and has made it clear to the US that in the final analysis it will use it. Until now it has been cautious, fearing a mass of refugees if North Korea is destabilised.
Obama, with Iran under his belt, has a lot of credibility. Working with the Chinese, a deal of some proportion could still be made.
The writer has been a foreign affairs columnist for the International Herald Tribune for 20 years and author of the much acclaimed new book, Conundrums of Humanity — the Big Foreign Policy Questions of Our Age. He may be contacted at [email protected]