Newswise — Bruce Cumings, Professor of History at the University of Chicago and one of the nation's leading authorities on North Korea says that North Korea's nuclear test represents the final failure of American attempts going back to 1991 to keep North Korea within the non-proliferation regime.
"After the North left the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) the first time, Bill Clinton nearly carried out a preemptive strike in June 1994 on the North's plutonium reactor complex. Jimmy Carter intervened, talked directly to Kim Il Sung, and got a complete freeze on the complex, codified in the Framework Agreement of October 1994.
"For eight years UN inspectors were on the ground, the complex was sealed, 8000 fuel rods were encased in concrete. Furthermore in 2000 Clinton had a deal nearly signed with Pyongyang to indirectly buy out their medium and long-range missiles.
"The Bush administration chose not to pursue that agreement, placed North Korea in the "axis of evil," and targeted it for preemptive strikes in September 2002. A few weeks later James Kelly went to Pyongyang and accused the North of cheating on the 1994 agreement. The North responded by again leaving the NPT, kicking out the UN inspectors, getting control of the 8,000 fuel rods, and restarting their reactor. Because Bush was fixated on Iraq--and still is--the North has paid no significant penalty for kicking the NPT regime in the teeth. It is impossible to call the results of the past five years anything but a failure.
"Neither Clinton nor Bush understand their enemy in Pyongyang. We stumbled into a political, cultural and historical thicket in 1945 when we divided Korea, North Korea was our enemy then and remains so today; we have 28,000 troops based in the South, and are stuck in the aspic of a 60-year-old conflict that could have been solved long ago if wise policies had been followed. Now we are paying the cost of that dereliction, and may have a heavier cost to bear in coming years."
Cumings is Gustavus F. and Ann M. Swift Distinguished Service Professor in History at the University of Chicago.
He is the author of The Origins of the Korean War (Grupo Ilhsa S.A., two volumes, 1981, 1990); War and Television (Verso Books, 1993); Korea's Place in the Sun: A Modern History (W. W. Norton, 1997); and Parallax Visions: American-East Asian Relations at the End of the Century (Duke University Press, 1999).
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