The news that North Korea is suspending some of the most critical elements of its nuclear weapons program and the United States is shipping food to the regime in return is a very positive development in the roughly twenty year campaign to prevent North Korea from joining the nuclear weapons club.
At the same time it raises some serious and tantalizing questions for both policy makers in Washington, Seoul, Beijing, and Tokyo, and for folks like you and me, all of us trying to make sense out of events.
By the way, the difference between the world as someone in the President’s or Secretary of State’s position sees it and interested observers like us is not as great as one might imagine. There’s the popular, quasi fantasy scenario: the decision maker reviewing true facts uncovered by daring spies, high tech surveillance and skilled analysts and making the hard choices, often in situations that ordinary folks don’t even know exist. Not only is this version of reality depicted in countless books, movies, TV shows, web series and video games, but by policy makers themselves. After all, if I can get you to believe that “I have examined all the classified information, reflected on the American National Interest and made the only possible choice” then I’m home free. An historical example ... when Lyndon Johnson was presiding over the Vietnam war he would invite favored journalists into the Oval Office to talk about how the war was going. He’d often start the conversation with papers marked TOP SECRET spread out on his desk. The papers would be optimistic assessments of progress in Vietnam. Suddenly, the President would realize that these highly classified documents were there and sweep them into a drawer, knowing that any half competent journalist would have read the documents, even upside down, and was now privy to inside secrets that showed the administration’s policy was right.
The reality is less glamorous. The information available to a decision maker is refined and filtered through multiple layers of the national security bureaucracy. The trite notion of “connecting the dots” is misleading as a metaphor for intelligence analysis. Before you can ask how the dots are connected, you have to decide that this factoid is a dot and not a smudge, that this dot is related to some of those other dots but not others, and that you have enough dots to connect. The intelligence briefings Presidents receive every day, as well as the longer term national security assessments are consensual documents, negotiated across departments and agencies. Depending on the President they contain more or fewer references to points on which the various analysts and agencies disagree.
Not only does the President get filtered and selected information about the world, but at every step of the way the raw data is interpreted in light of someone’s theory about how the world works and how the system works in other countries. The President’s own theories and beliefs are deeply involved in the process, from start to finish, as are the beliefs and preferences of other top officials.
You and I, on the other hand, rely on journalists using primarily open sources of information, along with the occasional strategic leak, for our raw data about what is going on. One of the side effects of the Wikileaks episode was being able to see the close correspondence between the information and analysis being reported in secret diplomatic cables to the information and analysis being reported by journalists. And then you and I, like all human beings, interpret and assess information in light of how we think about the world and what we already believe.
I don’t mean to suggest that we are all like the blind men in the fable who are trying to figure out the elephant (including the seventh and eighth blind men who can’t even find the elephant). But it does mean that access to secret information and the inside dope is far less important than the quality of our concepts and theories and the opportunities we have had to reflect upon the times in the past when we have been right and when we have been wrong.
This admittedly overly simplified version of both how the intelligence system works and how decisions are made is meant to suggest that what I think are the questions that the North Korean agreement raises are perhaps not so different from the puzzles keeping analysts in a number of governments busy.
■ What did Pyongyang and Washington really agree to?
■ What does this tell us about the regime in North Korea?
■ Why was the deal struck now and not earlier or later?
■ What does this have to do with the price of tea in China?
The agreement. Mark Manyin from the Congressional Research Service has an excellent synopsis of the terms agreed to by both sides at http://www.cfr.org/north-korea/wary-steps-forward-north-korea/p27526?cid=rss-analysisbriefbackgroundersexp-wary_steps_forward_with_north_-030112
In a nutshell, North Korea agreed to suspend operations at its major production facility for nuclear materials, to open its nuclear program facilities to inspectors from the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency), and to forgo further testing of long range missiles. The United States agreed to resume shipping food aid to North Korea.
It seems to me the biggest question is whether North Korea really agreed to do what it seems to have promised in terms of inspections and changes in its program or whether, some six months or a year from now, it will be clear that North Korea’s agreement did not include the full range of details, from logistics to access to facilities, that would make inspections fully effective.
Almost as important is the difference Manyin points out in the public statements by the two governments that were released simultaneously in Washington and P’yongyang. The Korean statement explicitly mentions resumption of the Six Party Talks; the Washington statement does not. This could be a comparatively minor difference perhaps based on nuances of language (hypothetical example: one side says “this could (meaning “it’s not beyond the realm of the possible”) lead to resumption...” the other side hears that as “this could (meaning “it makes it possible”) lead to resumption ...”) or it could represent a substantive divergence in understanding that could lead to some serious friction later on.
A much smaller question and one where in fact government insiders do know the answer is how this deal was reached. There are no formal diplomatic relations between Washington and Pyongyang so the normal channels are not there. It would be interesting to know to what extent diplomats from other countries, such as China, were used as intermediaries and to what extent -- if any -- this was the result of quasi-secret, informal talks between U.S. and North Korean official, perhaps at the UN.
What does this tell us about the regime in North Korea? I think it tells us very little, if anything.
There is ample evidence that there have been massive and pervasive food shortages in North Korea for at least the last three years. This is NOT likely to directly threaten the regime with demonstrations or a defiant opposition movement; starving people do not rebel. But the nightmare that haunts North Korea’s neighbors is that the routine functions of government, which in North Korea include production and distribution of everything people need to survive, will grind to a halt because the state cannot pay the salaries of the bureaucrats and workers who operate the system and they will have to spend their time scrounging for survival. If that happens, China will be flooded with millions of grindingly poor and starving people, the world will see scores, maybe hundreds or even thousands of desperate people dying in the mine fields that separate South Korea from the north and the international community will have to mount and sustain a humanitarian relief operation like nothing we’ve seen since the end of World War II.
There are three hypothesis I can think of to describe the current state of politics in Pyongyang.
I. The transition from Kim Jong Il to his young son has gone far more rapidly and smoothly than most people expected. Kim Jong Un is now picking up where his father left off (note that the deal announced in February was largely agreed before Kim Jong Il’s death.)
II. Kim Jong Un is a figurehead, a shadow puppet whose strings are being pulled by a coalition of his older relatives, senior military officers and heads of the state apparatus all of whom are ready agree to a momentarily halt in the nuclear program in exchange for vital food aid.
III. There is no transition as such but a pitched battle between various factions: the Kim family, state bureaucrats, party functionaries and the military. At the moment a faction willing to suspend the nuclear program for the time being or even contemplate ending it is riding high; next month or year all will change.
What we’ve seen so far fits any of those hypotheses. The deal tells us nothing.
Why was the deal struck now and not earlier or later? There is some pretty good evidence that there was a tentative deal reached with Korea before Kim Jong Il’s death and some attempts by the Koreans to get the U.S. to sweeten the deal. It may well be that it is only now, and not a few weeks ago, that it become clear that this deal was as good as it was going to get. I can think of two, not necessarily mutually exclusive, hypotheses that cold explain why not later.
I. Korean politics. The timing is explained by whatever is going on at the highest levels of the North Korean regime.
II. American politics. As we’re all well aware, the first chapter of the 2012 Presidential campaign is in full swing. The North Koreans might be motivated by the calculation that if they wait much longer an agreement could become an issue in the campaign and Obama might wish to bolster himself from an attack by Republicans by either not making an agreement at all or trying to wring more concessions out of them. They might also be concerned about the possibility that a Republican will sit in the White House next January. The fact that Mitt Romney’s chief foreign policy advisor is John Bolton – fiery super hawk from the Bush “Axis of Evil” years – and the other candidates have even more militant advisors may have convinced Pyongyang that it was now or never.
What does this have to do with the price of tea in China? Actually, quite a bit.
The Six Party talks are very important to Chinese foreign policy for both symbolic and practical reasons. From the broad symbolic perspective, the Six Party Talks show China as a leading player in regional politics, underlining the centrality of Beijing to peace and stability in Asia. It is China, not the United Sates who sets the agenda and the timing of negotiations, and China, not the United States, to whom everyone looks for leadership.
From a practical perspective, China cares deeply about both the specter of a horrific human disaster in north Korean and the apocalyptic vision of nuclear proliferation on the Korean Peninsula. A much smaller practical consequence would be the opportunity Six Party Talks represents for U.S. and Chinese leaders to cooperate on a major issue to counterbalance the prickly relations of the last few months (and the China bashing that will mark the Presidential campaign.)
Bottom line: you and Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and I, observers and analysts from the lowest echelons of the CIA to the highest echelons of the Chinese government, all have to stay tuned for further developments.
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