AFP,
Washington: The Bush administration has made an about face in its policy towards “axis of evil” member North Korea – from confrontational posture to constructive engagement – in an uphill bid to strip the reclusive nation of its only trump card – nuclear weapons.
The tentative agreement reached in Beijing this week with North Korea, which agreed to disband its nuclear weapons arsenal in return for wide-ranging benefits, mirrors an accord the Clinton administration struck with Pyongyang 11 years ago, analysts familiar with the pacts say.
President George W. Bush swiftly dumped the 1994 Agreed Framework two years after he came to power due to what many think were ideological reasons although Pyongyang allegedly reneged on the pact by running a secret uranium-enrichment program that can help develop a nuclear bomb.
Bush's foreign policy in his first term was dominated by neo conservatives, who rejected the entire notion of negotiating with what they called “evil” regimes, recalled Joseph Cirincione, Director for Non-Proliferation at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
“The argument then was: they are dictators and we don't deal with them. That approach led directly to the war in Iraq and the idea was that Iraq was just the first of regimes that would be removed,” said the leading American arms expert.
North Korea and Iran are the remaining members of Bush's “axis of evil” following the US-led conquest of Iraq in 2003.
“That policy has proved extremely costly and unproductive and as a result, you are seeing rethinking within the administration and a swing towards pragmatism,” Cirincione said.
The shift, he said, reflected a “significant victory” for Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, “who recognized that the US policy of the past four years was not working.
“She slowly changed that policy to allow real negotiations with North Korea, and skillfully denied that any change had taken place. She thus preserved the confidence of the president while morphing his policy from confrontational posture to constructive engagement,” Cirincione added.
The Bush administration's course reversal on North Korea is evidence that “hard-headed engagement offers a greater hope of reining in the North's dangerous nuclear ambitions than the policy paralysis of the past several years,” said Joe Biden, the top Democrat Senator on the Foreign Relations Committee.
Charles Pritchard, a key US government negotiator with the North Koreans under former president Bill Clinton, said the current US administration “absolutely have changed many number of things in terms of how they dealt with North Korea.”
He cited as an example the shift from initially refusing to hold direct talks with the North Koreans to now meeting with them bilaterally for a sustained dialogue under the China-hosted six-party nuclear talks.
The talks also include the two Koreas, Russia, Japan and the United States.
Both the Statement of Principles adopted at the end of the fourth round of talks in Beijing and the Agreed Framework discuss a light-water nuclear reactor for Pyongyang, a path toward normalized relations between the United States and North Korea, and reciprocal moves as Pyongyang dismantles its nuclear capability, analysts say.
The United States and North Korea do not have diplomatic relations.
“There are a number of things there (in the Statement of Principles) that suggest that the administration is trying to find success where they have had previously been plagued by failures,” Pritchard said.
Daniel Pinkston of the Monterey Institute of International Studies' center for non-proliferation studies said despite criticisms heaped by the Bush administration on its predecessor's North Korea's policy, “we have seen things coming full circle since January,” when Rice took over.
From Pyongyang's perspective, he said, the recent agreement “is superior” because the United States had given an undertaking not to attack North Korea with nuclear or conventional weapons.
Under the previous accord, US assurances were limited to nuclear attacks, he added.
As the Beijing agreement is just a first step towards denuclearization of the Korean peninsula, some analysts expect hardline opponents of the accord within the Bush administration to object to any concessions Washington may have to offer during future negotiations.
“There would be lot of guerilla warfare inside of the administration,” Cirincione said.
“Their (hardliners) whole philosophy is that the United States is a dominant hegemon in the planet and we should use our military force to transform international relations,” he said.
“But the fact that it is not working very well in Iraq doesn't dissuade them at all from wanting to try them out in other regions.”
