North Korea's cries for attention

Opinion: The West is unlikely to make much immediate progress with North Korea.

Joel BrinkleyMay 8, 2009 16:45Updated May 30, 2010 11:54

Almost every day, it seems, North Korea throws up another threat or accusation designed to infuriate the West. One day it threatens war with the South, the next it arrests two American journalists and charges them with espionage. It launches a ballistic missile, engendering worldwide opprobrium. Most recently it warned that it would test another nuclear weapon.

By now everyone who follows this hermit state recognizes the pattern. North Korea is saying: Pay attention to me. Pay me!

This time it doesn’t look as if anyone is going to pay up. Recent history shows that it will accomplish little.

The prevailing wisdom right now is that when dealing with North Korea, “it’s impossible to get results on full denuclearization," said Michael Green, the White House’s North Korea specialist during the Bush administration. "But we can try to contain the problem and lay the groundwork for some future administration” in Pyongyang.

History argues in favor of Green’s point of view.

The Clinton administration alternately threatened and cajoled Pyongyang. Near the end of his second term, then-President Bill Clinton ordered a broad easing of economic sanctions to persuade the North to abandon its nuclear program. Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright said that decision would start Washington and Pyongyang down "a road that holds out the possibility of long-term stability and even eventual reconciliation on the Korean peninsula."

That did not happen.

At first, then-President George W. Bush tried the opposite approach: Don't talk to North Korea, don't listen to them. Let the nation whither and die, and then perhaps one day President Kim Jong Il's government will collapse.

That didn't work either. Soon enough, Bush learned that North Korea had been hard at work on nuclear weapons for several years. But toward the end of his term, Bush tried negotiation and compromise — he even “paid” the regime, with cash and fuel. So now look where we are.

“Nothing works,” Green averred.

But Green also pointed out that many of North Korea’s threats are hollow. Its nuclear enrichment equipment is old and unreliable. When in use, it frequently breaks down. Its military is untrained and ill-equipped. The country is so poor that pilots are allowed to fly only a few hours a year. None of its recent missile tests have worked as planned. A missile tested in 2006 blew up less than a minute after launch. Even its underground nuclear test that year was judged to have fizzled.