180410-윌리엄 페리, 서울 강연

DRAFT 5 4/8/18 5:39 PM

WILLIAM J. PERRY

 

NORTH KOREA DIPLOMACY: DON’T LET THE BETTER BE ENEMY OF THE GOOD

 

TALK IN SEOUL, 10 APRIL, 2018

 

President Trump is preparing to meet with Kim Jung Un in a month or two for negotiations on NK ‘s nuclear program.

This could lead to a major breakthrough with NK if it resulted in a program to denuclearize the Korean Peninsula.

Or it could lead to a dramatic failure, thereby discrediting diplomacy as a means of dealing with this dangerous problem.

Success is far from certain, and the consequences of failure could be devastating, so careful preparation for this summit meeting is critically important.

 

One aspect of the preparation should be a careful study of the results of the North-South meeting, scheduled to take place at the end of this month.

The North-South meeting should be a key indicator of the seriousness of the North to move toward normalization, and can serve as vital input to the US preparation for its meeting.

 

Another vital part of the US preparation should be a study of previous negotiations intended to achieve denuclearization.

Today I will discuss three previous negotiations and what lessons we can learn from them.

 

In 1994, Ambassador Gallucci negotiated the Agreed Framework, intended to bring about the denuclearization of NK.

In 1999, I met in Pyongyang to negotiate the denuclearization of NK.

And from 2003-2008 the six-party talks were held in Beijing for the same purpose.

 

When I became the American SecDef in 1994 the first crisis I faced was NK.

NK announced their intent to produce plutonium by reprocessing spent fuel from their reactor.

This would have given it enough plutonium to make six nuclear bombs.

 

President Bill Clinton determined that it would be too dangerous to allow NK to make plutonium, and told me to make a public statement saying that we would not permit them to do so.

I did so, and NK responded by calling me a “War Maniac”.

Then I prepared an option for destroying their nuclear facility with cruise missiles armed with conventional warheads, in the event that NK did not back down.

And the State Dept. prepared a set of very tough sanctions.

But NK threatened to engulf Seoul in a “Sea of flames” if the sanctions were imposed.

 

Their threat could be bombast, but I proposed that we reinforce our troops in SK before imposing the sanctions, so if they did follow through on that threat we could stop their troops before they could threaten Seoul.

In the meantime, Pres. Clinton had authorized former Pres. Jimmy Carter to go to Pyongyang to meet with Kim Il Sung.

 

During the national security meeting considering my proposal for reinforcing American troops in South Korea, President Clinton received a call from President Carter.

Carter reported that Kim Il Sung had agreed stop NK’s production of plutonium and negotiate a diplomatic solution.

I think it is fair to say that this was a successful example of what is usually called “coercive diplomacy”.

 

Amb. Gallucci was appointed to lead the American diplomatic team and in a few months he had negotiated the Agreed Framework.

I believed then as I do now, that this was an excellent agreement, but it was bitterly opposed by some members of the U.S. Congress, who led a continuing battle against it.

The U.S., Japan, and South Korea complied with the “hard agreements” that entailed building two LWRs for NK and supplying fuel oil until they were operational.

But as a result of the intense opposition in Congress, President Clinton decided that it would be politically difficult to comply with the “soft” agreements---the actions designed to move towards a normalization of relations with NK.

 

NK fully complied with shutting down the nuclear complex at Yongbyon, but they wanted a hedge;

so they started an R&D program in highly enriched uranium at a covert facility.

So neither side fully complied with the intent of the Agreed Framework.

The net of this was that the Agreed Framework did prevent NK from building the dozens of plutonium-based nuclear bombs they could have built at Yongbyon by the end of the decade, but it did not lead to normalization and it di not prevent NK from getting a head start on a uranium-based nuclear bomb.

 

In 1999 a new crisis arose with NK over their test firing of a long-range missile.

We saw the test firing as evidence that they must also be continuing work on the development of a nuclear bomb, since an ICBM does not make military sense unless it has a nuclear warhead.

We soon found out that this continuing nuclear work was an R&D program for enriching uranium.

So we had a new crisis, with many calls for withdrawing from the Agreed Framework.

 

To deal with this crisis, President Clinton appointed me to be his special envoy to NK.

Since the NK nuclear program was a major threat to South Korea and Japan, I requested that the president of South Korea and the Prime Minister of Japan appoint counterparts to work with me, making it a trilateral process.

South Korea appointed Minister Lim Dong Won, and Japan appointed Ambassador Ryoko Kato, both very able and both experienced in foreign policy and diplomacy.

The three of us worked together as a team and in a few months had prepared a report that described a way forward.

It called for coercive diplomacy; that is, a combination of carrots and sticks.

We proposed a rich package of incentives not previously offered to NK, including ending the Korean War and diplomatic recognition, both of which were key steps in normalization, which we believed was necessary to fully end the threat of war with North Korea.

In the latter half of 1999 our American team spent four days in Pyongyang negotiating an agreement with North Korea that would require it to give up its nuclear and long-range missile programs.

Our team left Pyongyang believing that the North was very positive about our proposal.

During the next twelve months there were hopeful signs:

A North-South summit meeting;

And the two Korea teams marching together in the 2000 Olympics

 

Then in October 2000 Kim Jong Il sent his senior military advisor to Washington to conclude that negotiation.

He stopped at Stanford to visit me on the way to Washington and we had very positive discussions.

I then went with him to Washington and again the discussions were very positive.

 

By the end of 2000 the deal was ready for signing by heads of state. ​​​​​​​But a month later, the Bush administration came to power and cut off all discussions with North Korea, thus walking away from this opportunity to stop North Korea’s nuclear program.

 

I believe the Bush administration cut off discussions because they thought that if they could put enough economic pressure on NK that the regime would collapse.

But I think this reflected a lack of understanding about how tight and ruthless was the control of the NK regime over their people.

In any event, that hoped-for collapse did not happen.

 

In 2003, the crisis began building up again and China stepped in to promote the 6-party talks.

The 6-party talks were hopeful, but those hopes were dashed when NK conducted its first nuclear test.

 

It was evident that while NK was talking, they were continuing unabated on their nuclear development.

While the talks were underway, North Korea developed and tested both nuclear weapons and long-range missiles.

Today they have a small arsenal of nuclear bombs, including thermonuclear bombs, a medium-sized arsenal of ballistic missiles, including an ICBM that has been successfully tested.

And they continue to build and test.

 

What can we learn from these previous negotiations with NK?

 

I believe that the first and the most fundamental lesson is that NK, at a very high cost, has pursued a nuclear program to ensure the survival of their regime.

That was quite obvious to me during the four days I spent in Pyongyang in 1999.

NK believed that the US had the intent and the capability to overthrow their regime, and that a NK nuclear arsenal was the only sure way to deter the US from carrying out that plan.

One can’t learn everything about a regime in four days, but that lesson was absolutely clear to me and to my team.

 

The second lesson was that NK leaders are not “crazy”.

They are despotic; they are ruthless; they are cruel to their own people; but they are not crazy.

They have a rationale for their actions---to stay in power---and they have followed that rationale with consistency and shrewdness.

I note that all other Stalinist regimes in the world have been overthrown since the end of the Cold War---NK is the last one standing.

So from their point of view, they are doing something right.

 

The third lesson is that the regime is not driven by ideology; indeed, they cannot afford an ideology that does not support their overarching goal of sustaining the regime.

As a result, they have been quite flexible in the means they used to achieve that goal.

A corollary of this is that they also have not been bound by ethical or moral standards.

So if they saw some advantage in breaking an agreement, they would, particularly if they could do so clandestinely.

 

The fourth lesson is that while they value economic incentives, and will bargain for them, they will never trade regime survivability for economic benefits, no matter how attractive.

Conversely, economic disincentives (sanctions) hurt NK, but by themselves will not cause them to give up their nuclear program.

During our negotiations with NK my guiding principle was:

“We must deal with NK as it is, not as we wish it to be”.

And these four lessons give us a clue as to how “it is”.

 

These experiences in negotiating with NK since 1994 do not argue against further negotiations with North Korea---rather that we should be very careful when we do.

In particular, any agreement made must be subject to a rigorous verification process that is included in the agreement.

And that will be very difficult in a country rightly called the “Hermit Kingdom”.

And any agreement must deal with their security concerns and related to that, their desire for normalization.

 

But these lessons do call into question whether the US can quickly achieve its stated goal of full denuclearization, now that NK has a nuclear arsenal.

That arsenal provides a deterrent to any military attack by the US, an attack that NK officials believe would be successful.

Believing that, why would they give up the nuclear arsenal that deters such an attack?

Or, put another way, what could we offer them that would persuade them to give up their nuclear arsenal and remain confident of staying in power?

 

Would American security assurances do that?

I offered them such assurances in 1999, and they were very interested.

But at that time, they did not have a nuclear arsenal, and could not be sure that they could succeed in building one.

Thus they were not considering giving up a nuclear arsenal, but rather giving up the right to try to build one.

 

So the US should enter these new negotiations with some healthy skepticism that NK will fully negotiate away the nuclear arsenal they now have, even though they have stated that as the purpose of the negotiations.

And if they do agree to give up their nuclear arsenal, the US should insist on rigorous verification agreements.

 

Verification is critical in any arms control agreement, but particularly so with NK, given its history of breaking agreements.

And I do not know of any way of unilaterally verifying an agreement whereby NK gives up its nuclear arsenal.

We do not know how many nuclear weapons NK has operational or under construction.

We do not know where all of their nuclear facilities are located.

 

And counting warheads is fundamentally difficult.

Our nuclear treaties with the Soviet Union and Russia, counted operational missiles, which we could verify, and inferred the number of warheads, which we could not directly verify.

To this day, the US does not know how many nuclear warheads Russia has in reserve or storage, and the error in our estimates could be in the thousands.

So it is hard to understand how we could unilaterally verify a treaty in which North Korea agreed to dismantle all of its nuclear weapons and not build more.

Certainly it would take a degree of intrusiveness well beyond that we have previously discussed, and, just as importantly, it would take some progress on the road to normalization.

 

But even if we can’t get at this first meeting agreements on all aspects of disarmament, we could get a disarmament process started.

Given that NK has a nuclear arsenal, we must contain and deter that arsenal.

And we can strengthen our containment by reaching an agreement with NK on a testing ban and a ban on any transfer of nuclear technology or components.

Such an agreement would not be as desirable as denuclearization, but it could be negotiated and, once negotiated, it could be verified.

Even on this lesser agreement, verification is not simple, especially with the ban on transfer, which would require intrusive inspection features such as we negotiated years ago with the Soviet Union.

 

A ban on testing would be valuable in and of itself, but the negotiation to achieve the testing ban could also be used to set up a process for denuclearization.

North Korea could begin the process of denuclearization while we began the process of instituting security assurances.

Denuclearization is likely to be a long and difficult process, and its ultimate success is tied to progress in normalization, which itself takes time.

And while normalization with the US is important, normalization between the two Koreas must be taking place at the same time.

Indeed, in some ways, the talks between the North and South, scheduled for later this month, are perhaps more important than the US-North Korea talks.

I believe that between the US and South Korea we could set up a process that in the long term could lead to normalization and to a non-nuclear Korean Peninsula;

And in the short term, make us safer through the ban on testing and transfer, and the beginning of concrete steps towards normalization.

 

So very useful results could be obtained from negotiations, but not, I believe, the immediate and full denuclearization that some are expecting.

My fear is that the negotiations could result in failure if we enter them with unrealistic expectations.

But I believe that we could negotiate an agreement that would quite significantly improve security on the Korean Peninsula---and that would be a stepping stone to even stronger agreements.

We should not pass up such an agreement because we had hoped for a better one.

We should not let the better be the enemy of the good.