北朝鮮核問題／また不透明になってきた
北朝鮮の核問題をめぐる動きがまた不透明になってきた。/n河北新報 コルネット 社説 北朝鮮核問題／また不透明になってきた
北朝鮮は昨年１０月の６カ国協議で、３カ所の核施設の無能力化と核計画の申告を昨年末までに完了することに合意したが、いずれも履行されないまま年を越し、今後の見通しは立っていない。６カ国協議の次回会合も決められない状況にある。
無能力化と申告は、核施設の稼働停止・封印などの初期段階措置に続く「次の段階」に当たる。最終目標の核廃棄に向けた重要なステップだ。
北朝鮮の駆け引きや揺さぶりに動じることなく、５カ国が結束して履行させなければならない。
北朝鮮は初期段階措置の際も、マカオの銀行口座の資金凍結解除と資金移管を米に強く要求して、履行を大幅に遅らせている。
結局、米が要求を受け入れて資金を移管し、初期段階措置が動きだしたが、北朝鮮にすれば一時的にせよ米の金融制裁解除に成功したことになる。
今回の履行が遅れている原因について北朝鮮は、見返りとなる重油などの提供や米のテロ支援国家指定解除の手続きなど「政治経済的な補償の遅れ」を挙げている。だが、米から譲歩を引き出すための駆け引きと見るべきだろう。
核施設の無能力化と核計画の申告を実現させることは、任期が残り１年となったブッシュ米政権にとって大きな外交成果となる。当初は昨年末には実現する予定だっただけに、履行の大幅な遅れは米政権の打撃になりかねないからだ。
申告の焦点は、核兵器６個以上に当たる「最大５２キロ」を製造したとされるプルトニウムに関する情報を正確に開示するかどうか、高濃縮ウランによる核開発計画やシリアとの協力による核拡散疑惑などを認めるかどうかにある。
北朝鮮の外務省報道官は４日に談話を発表し「すべての核計画の申告」は昨年１１月に作成し、内容を通報したとしているが、米は申告と認めていない。申告内容をめぐって、米朝の水面下で激しい駆け引きが繰り広げられているもようだ。
米はあくまでも「完全で正確な申告」を要求し、それが提出されない限り指定解除に応じない考えとされる。その姿勢を緩めてはならない。
拉致問題を抱える日本は米に加えて、韓国との連携がとりわけ重要となる。
２月に発足する李明博次期政権は、金大中、盧武鉉両政権が続けた「包容政策」を修正し、南北関係は経済協力よりも核問題解決を優先させる姿勢を明確にしている。
拉致問題は韓国も抱えており、日韓の連携強化で問題解決を急ぎたい。
2008年01月21日月曜日
North Korea's True Colors
By John Bolton/nZACKlyRight
The Wall Street Journal
January 11, 2008; Page A11
There's more positive news from the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea: Its leaders have refused to make any further disclosure concerning its nuclear programs.
How is this umpteenth violation of the Feb. 13, 2006, agreement in the Six-Party Talks positive? Because at a critical moment on a gravely important issue, North Korea has again shown its true colors, thus providing the United States an opportunity to extricate itself from this unwise and dangerous deal.
Troubles in the six-party talks on Korea emerged long before this most recent public manifestation of Pyongyang's unwillingness to give up anything of consequence concerning its nuclear program. Israel's Sept. 6 raid against a likely Syrian-North Korea nuclear project was a fire bell in the night that the regime was up to its old tricks -- at least for anyone willing to listen.
The administration's continuing refusal to allow Israel to make public the true nature of this facility will only come back to haunt it, not only on North Korea, but also on its Middle East policy. If no North Koreans were involved, why not shout it out? If the facility was not nuclear, why not do the same? The significance of the Sept. 6 attack has not faded in Congress, nor will the demands for more public disclosure.
In the aftermath of the Feb. 13 agreement, North Korea had to develop a cover story for its uranium-enrichment activities, as well as a way to conceal its stock of plutonium and actual nuclear weapons. And yet -- despite the seemingly active and continuing collaboration by the U.S. State Department in coming up with a convincing line of patter -- Pyongyang still insists it never engaged in uranium enrichment, producing as evidence melted-down tubes. Melting the tubes was curious in and of itself, suggesting that in their original form they appeared much more like centrifuge equipment than artillery barrels. The regime made a fatal mistake, however, because the metal showed unmistakable traces of highly-enriched uranium (HEU).
Perhaps even the State Department's East Asia Bureau was shocked at this evidence of North Korean duplicity. In any event, the "dual use" dodge was now out of play, and Pyongyang had to be persuaded to come up with a more convincing cover story. Even this they have now refused to do.
The timing is important, because elements within the U.S. intelligence community were questioning the community's 2002 assessment that North Korea had launched a production-scope procurement effort for enrichment equipment. This effort, similar in origin and intent to the recent National Intelligence Estimate on Iran's nuclear program, may well have been sidetracked by the findings of HEU, which at least in part reinforced the 2002 conclusions.
Moreover, whatever the North Korean declaration says about its nuclear activities -- assuming just for sport that we actually get a declaration -- it was always only a first step in a long process of verification, and not even the most important one. If North Korea and the State Department, working together, can come up with something they think will pass the public smile test once it is released, we still need to verify the accuracy and completeness of the declaration. Here is where State has failed most obviously: There has yet to be, 11 months after the Feb. 13 agreement, even a hint of what specific mechanisms will verify a declaration. Unless and until this vacuum is filled, we are going nowhere fast in denuclearizing North Korea.
So, as Kim Jong Il's hero, Lenin, used to say, "what is to be done?"
President Bush can now argue without fear of contradiction that he has done more than anyone could expect to give fantasy a chance, and therefore make a policy course correction. North Korea has dragged out its performance for nearly a year, has less and less incentive to make Mr. Bush look good, and has in sight the possibility of a resumed Clinton administration, or something even weaker. By resuming a tough line on North Korea, Mr. Bush can at least make a future administration's retreat from a tougher, more realistic course, more difficult to explain.
Given the recent South Korean presidential election results, Mr. Bush will soon have a willing ally in Lee Myung-bak, who will be inaugurated on Feb. 25. After 10 years, a realist will once again occupy Seoul's Blue House, one who will support a tougher American line rather than oppose it.
Mr. Bush should meet with Mr. Lee as soon as practicable, and urge South Korea to join the Proliferation Security Initiative, a genuinely important Bush administration legacy. This will help squeeze the North, by adding South Korea's considerable knowledge and capabilities in the waters around the Korean Peninsula.
It will also reinforce Japan's continuing tough line under Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda -- given president-elect Lee's apparent willingness to confront North Korea on its horrifying oppression of its own citizens and its international record of kidnappings. If South Korea now joins with Japan in pressing the North hard on the kidnappings, Japan is less likely to bend under State Department pressure. This should certainly provide ample reason for the U.S. not to remove North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism for the remainder of the Bush administration.
Aligning Japan and South Korea with the U.S. will allow President Bush to increase the pressure on North Korea internationally by resuming financial sanctions and other "defensive measures." It would also help put the spotlight back on China, which has the real economic leverage to force a change in North Korea's nuclear policy, if it chose to exert it.
We are long past the point of allowing China to cover for Kim Jong Il without any cost in its relations with the U.S. Getting China to take concrete steps against North Korea's nuclear capabilities through increased economic and political pressure would be a true diplomatic success for the Bush administration in its waning days.
Mr. Bolton, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, is the author of the recently published "Surrender Is Not an Option: Defending America at the United Nations," (Simon & Schuster/Threshold Editions, 2007). (End of Wall Street Journal commentary.)
Consent and Advise
By JACOB HEILBRUNN
Published: January 20, 2008
Condoleezza Rice is a survivor. Of the foreign policy members of the original Bush cabinet, Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld are gone. Vice President Dick Cheney is on the defensive. It’s Rice, shunted to the sidelines during President Bush’s first term, who is now in the ascendant. The signs of her new influence as secretary of state are everywhere.
Rice’s former deputy Stephen Hadley succeeded her as national security adviser. She helped ensure that her old boss Robert Gates would become defense secretary. The United States is actively pushing for a Middle East peace settlement, negotiating with North Korea and reaching out to Western Europe. And the most that hard-liners like the former United Nations ambassador John Bolton can do is complain that Rice lacks the gumption to stand up for America’s true interests and that Bush “does not supervise her enough.”
The volte-face Rice has presided over is also a very personal one. During Bush’s first term, few officials publicly championed the Iraq war more fervently than did Rice, who dressed down skeptics as though they were errant schoolchildren in need of a starchy governess. She turned on old mentors like the former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft, who in August 2002 had the temerity to cast doubt on the wisdom of attacking Baghdad. So is she simply an opportunist who subordinates herself to her superiors? Or does Rice actually stand for something beyond smoothing her own political ascent?
In “Condoleezza Rice: An American Life,” Elisabeth Bumiller offers a fine opportunity to assess her. Bumiller is well prepared for the task: a Washington reporter for The New York Times, she covered the White House from Sept. 10, 2001, to 2006. She brings a keen eye to Rice, probing not only her tenure as a policy maker and her close ties to George W. Bush, but also her personal and professional past. Bumiller has conducted many interviews, including 10 with Rice herself. Several books about Rice have already appeared, but this one is probably the most measured, insightful and comprehensive.
As Bumiller astutely notes, both Bush and Rice are the products of American elites: Bush is the descendant of Northeastern WASPs, and Rice comes from the Southern black patriciate. While both are outwardly supremely self-confident, they share lingering resentments about being underestimated and taken for granted. But there is one important difference: while Bush spent many years indulging himself before he found his vocation, Rice had a steely drive for success from the beginning, imparted by her parents, John and Angelena Rice, during her childhood in Birmingham, Ala., in the early 1960s. The pressure was intense; according to Bumiller, “John and Angelena poured their hearts into the project of their lives: the teaching, molding and polishing of Condoleezza.”
Whether it was at piano, ballet, etiquette or French, Rice was expected to excel. Her parents piled so many books by her bedside table, Bumiller writes, that “she stopped reading for pleasure, and does not to this day.” The family’s self-help philosophy extended to the civil rights movement: Rice still resents the notion that Northerners traveled to the South and “saved” the helpless locals. Though her parents tried to shield their daughter, as far as possible, from racial tensions, she could hardly avoid having had an acute sense of who really wielded power in the South, given the turmoil in what was known as “Bombingham.”
Until she went to the University of Denver, however, Rice had only a passing interest in politics. That changed in 1973 when she took an introductory course in international politics taught by Josef Korbel, a Czech refugee and the father of former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. Rice was spellbound by Korbel’s depiction of the scheming and betrayals that made Stalin dictator. She became a staunch realist, shunning sentiment in foreign policy, and grew fascinated by the Communist Party’s ruthless exercise of power, immune to the normal restraints that operate in a democratic society.
Rice, you might say, pursued a very realistic policy to advance her own career. At the heart of her seamless rise has been her ability to attach herself to mentors, whom she has discarded once they outlived their usefulness. It was Scowcroft who provided her entree into the traditionally clubby oak-and-port world of the Council on Foreign Relations. He had been impressed by Rice’s tenacity at a Stanford University dinner with arms control specialists in 1985, and three years later offered her a job in George H. W. Bush’s administration, as a Soviet analyst for the National Security Council. There she would watch the country she had become an expert on disappear. In 1993, Stanford’s new president, Gerhard Casper, tapped her to become provost; Rice slashed the budget and challenged proponents of affirmative action (from which she herself had benefited), earning the enmity of many students and much of the faculty for her blunt style. Rice’s credo, as she told one protégée, was that “people may oppose you, but when they realize you can hurt them, they’ll join your side.”
Rice’s biggest coup, of course, was befriending George W. Bush. She wooed him. According to Bumiller, “Bush did not know many black people well, and it made him feel good about himself that he got along so easily with Rice.” Rice, in turn, “could see that he needed her far more than his father had, and that made her feel important and vital.” One big plus in her favor was that she was an exercise maniac; her friendship with Bush was forged on the elliptical trainer.
Despite their close relationship, Bush had only a hazy notion of what role a national security adviser should play. Bumiller chides Rice for catering to him: “As had been the case with the other important men in her life ― Casper, Korbel, Scowcroft, her father ― Rice would do what the president wanted.” There can be little doubt that Rice was badly out of her depth. Bumiller reports that Vice President Cheney, in the first days of the administration, tried to usurp her authority to run National Security Council meetings in Bush’s absence. Rice was stunned. “Mr. President,” she said, “this is what national security advisers do.” She won this battle, but lost the war. Cheney and Rumsfeld simply performed an end run, meeting with Bush in the Oval Office to oversee foreign policy and turning Rice’s position into a ceremonial one in which she obediently parroted the administration line on spreading freedom and democracy around the globe.
With another year to go before Bush leaves office, Bumiller’s final remarks are necessarily inconclusive, but she observes: “It was obvious from Rice’s many metamorphoses that her real ideology was not idealism or realism or defending the citadels of freedom, although she displayed elements of all of them. Her real ideology was succeeding.” Rice’s shortcoming has been, more often than not, to define success in narrowly personal terms, which is why she prostrated herself before Bush. Still, her flurry of diplomatic moves indicates that she’s aware she must tote up some actual accomplishments or risk complete irrelevance. For Rice, survival is no longer enough.
Jacob Heilbrunn, a regular contributor to the Book Review, is the author of “They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons.”
Condoleezza Rice: An American Life - Elisabeth Bumiller - Book Review - New York Times