BUILD NUKES, WIN FREE PRIZES

U.S. must offer more, demand more (Michael O'Hanlon, Sept. 3, 2003, The Japan Times)

At first blush, it is hard to criticize President George W. Bush too severely. Preoccupied with other foreign-policy challenges from Iraq to Afghanistan to Israel, his time for Northeast Asia is limited. Rightly indignant at how North Korean leader Kim Jong Il treats his own
people, and aware of North Korea's extortionate tendencies, he refuses to give North Korea inducements to stop a nuclear program it should already have ended according to the 1994 accord that President Bill Clinton signed.

But upon closer scrutiny, Bush is making a big mistake. [...]

The U.S. needs to push North Korea to reform its economy and even its political system in the way both China and Vietnam have done in recent decades.

This plan can only work if North Korea cuts deeply into its oversized conventional forces, which presently gobble up at least 20 percent of
gross domestic product. It can only work if Pyongyang invites Chinese economists and technicians into its country to teach its people how to
carry out market reforms. It can only work if it also agrees to verifiable elimination of its chemical weapons and ballistic missiles,
an end to counterfeiting and drug trafficking, and the departure of all Japanese kidnapping victims and their family members from North Korea.
And of course, the nuclear program must be quickly and verifiably frozen and then fully dismantled over time; North Korea's energy demands should be addressed with conventional power plants rather than new nuclear reactors.

The plan can only work if the U.S. does its part, too. That means easing trade sanctions. It means contributing substantial aid resources,
along with South Korea and Japan and China, to help North Korea develop its infrastructure. These efforts should start in the so-called special economic zones and then be broadened to include the rest of the country as well as health and agricultural and education programs. The plan also requires a peace treaty and diplomatic relations among the region's key countries to reassure private investors from South Korea and elsewhere that they should risk their money in a reclusive land.

Our policy towards China and Vietnam should be regime change, but Mr. O'Hanlon instead wants us to reward N. Korea for building nukes, violating agreements, and murdering its own people while asking only that it become more like its less Stalinist communist neighbors? Yeah, that'll learn 'em. Posted by Orrin Judd at September 3, 2003 8:07 AM