Open thread, Sep. 21 - Sep. 27, 2015

MrMind

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

Notes for future OT posters:

1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.

2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one. (Immediately before; refresh the list-of-threads page before posting.)

3. Open Threads should be posted in Discussion, and not Main.

4. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

Notes for future OT posters:

1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.

2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one. (Immediately before; refresh the list-of-threads page before posting.)

3. Open Threads should be posted in Discussion, and not Main.

4. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.

The argument here seems to be: North Korea built nuclear weapons, the 1994 treaty was supposed to prevent that, therefore let's blame the guy who was President in 1994 for North Korea building nuclear weapons.

Similar reasoning could just as easily place the blame on the Reagan administration.

Unless I'm missing something, and there is some reason why that 1994 treaty left the US in a hopeless position in 2002, unable to intervene while North Korea kicked out IAEA inspectors, unsealed its fuel rods, and built nuclear weapons.

9satt11y

I made a grab for some low-hanging knowledge on the counterfactual question by looking at the first couple of pages of a Google Scholar search for articles I could access which offered background on the topic. (I don't have the time or the interest to do anything like a real literature review, but I expect even a cursory Google Scholar search to be more reliable than a lone NewsBusters article.) Ignoring the books and paywalled Foreign Affairs articles I can't read, I got * Michael J. Mazarr's 1995 "Going Just a Little Nuclear: Nonproliferation Lessons from North Korea" in International Security * Larry A. Niksch's 2005 Congressional report "North Korea's Nuclear Weapons Program" * Stephen M. Walt's 2000 "Two Cheers for Clinton's Foreign Policy" in Foreign Affairs (accessible only because Walt mirrors it on his Harvard website) * Andrew Mack's "A Nuclear North Korea: The Choices Are Narrowing" in the summer 1994 issue of World Policy Journal * The 1999 "Review of United States Policy Toward North Korea: Findings and Recommendations", by a "North Korea policy review team, led by Dr William J. Perry" I haven't perused these from start to finish, and even if I had I couldn't discuss them comprehensively in a blog comment. So I have to give a radically compressed (hence necessarily selective) digest of the bits I saw which shed light on the counterfactual question. First, Mazarr's essay. It summarizes itself, but even the summary won't fit here, so I skip to its p. 104, where Mazarr referred to NK's "alleged one or two nuclear weapons" (fitting NBC's report that NK had a nuclear weapon), and quote a longer block from the same page: [...] Mazarr adds that, in practice, the US "always resorts" to the softer approach "in cases of hard-core proliferation", having "accepted ambiguous proliferation in India and Israel for many years", and likewise didn't pursue an all-out approach against India & Pakistan. Further along, on p. 110, in the section on sanctions:

5satt11y

The linked article does an OK job of documenting that contemporary news reports were too optimistic about how much Clinton's 1994 deal would constrain North Korea's bomb seeking. However, I don't think that's an adequate basis for "Clinton let North Korea get nuclear weapons" — not least because the article itself echoes, in apparent agreement, NBC's contemporary claim that NK already had a nuclear bomb. Even setting aside that claim, I wouldn't be confident in inferring that "Clinton let North Korea get nuclear weapons" merely because Clinton made a deal and 12 years later (and 6 years after Clinton left office) NK set off a nuke. Given my original state of ignorance (I didn't know anything about this 1994 deal before this thread), I can't rule out the possibilities that (1) Clinton actually made smart moves which were later vitiated by Bush or a lower-ranked politician, or that (2) Clinton made the best of a bad hand, there being no reasonable counterfactual where a US president in 1994 could've ensured, without triggering some patently worse consequence, that NK's first nuclear explosion happened substantially after 2006. (1/2)