North Korea

Officials: Hawaii Anti-Missile Move a Safeguard | Washington Post

Cecille Isidro — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 15:48:00 -0400

"I don't see any evidence that Hawaii is in more danger now than before the last TD-2 launch," said Jeffrey Lewis, director of the Nuclear Strategy and Nonproliferation Initiative at the New America Foundation. It took North Korea about 12 days to ...

How Should the U.S. Handle North Korea?

Cecille Isidro — Sun, 03 May 2009 08:36:00 -0400

Within Washington, a consensus seems to have emerged that the Obama administration will have to wait for North Korean leader Kim Jong-il to die before re-engaging with Pyongyang.

It worked so well with Fidel Castro.

Steven Clemons in the New York Times | 'Bush Rebuffs Hard-Liners to Ease North Korean Curbs'

Communications — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 07:52:00 -0400

Two days ago, during an off-the-record session with a group of foreign policy experts, Vice President Dick Cheney got a question he did not want to answer. “Mr. Vice President,” asked one of them, “I understand that on Wednesday or Thursday, we are going to de-list North Korea from the terrorism blacklist. Could you please set the context for this decision?”

Mr. Cheney froze, according to four participants at the Old Executive Office Building meeting. For more than 30 minutes he had been taking and answering questions, without missing a beat. But now, for several long seconds, he stared, unsmilingly, at his questioner, Steven Clemons of the New America Foundation, a public policy institution...LINK

Steven Clemons the Sydney Morning Herald, the Age | 'N Korea Soon off Terrorist Blacklist'

Communications — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 07:58:00 -0400

...Steven Clemons, who also writes the blog The Washington Note, said there were signs within the Administration and the State Department that the lifting of the terrorism designation was imminent.

"This is seen as a key confidence-building step by North Korea and China in moving towards North Korea's eventual return to the nuclear non-proliferation club," he wrote.

But he said the office of the Vice-President, Dick Cheney, was a dissenting voice in the Administration's internal discussions... LINK

Yonhap News Agency Quotes Jeffrey Lewis on N. Korea Nuclear Programs

Communications — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 04:41:00 -0400

Verifying North Korea's nuclear programs is going to be more of a political question than a technical one, with key American negotiators having to make a "gut call" on whether the communist state is being truthful, a U.S. nonproliferation expert said Wednesday.

Jeffrey Lewis, director of nuclear strategy and nonproliferation initiative at the New America Foundation, said the central issue will be North Korea's declaration of its suspected uranium enrichment program.

Access to operating records allows a comfortable degree of confidence for the plutonium-based program, but for uranium enrichment there is not the same kind of technical analysis available, he said at a symposium hosted by the Institute of Corean (Korean)-American Studies (ICAS) in Washington.

"I think that even if North Korea's declaration is accurate... I think the politics of the debate in the U.S. are going to be extremely difficult," Lewis said.

"(It would be) very easy if you are an opponent of the deal to say that you do not believe the uranium enrichment program has been fully accounted for." ...

For the complete article from Korean news agency Yonhap, please follow this link.

Inter Press Service Quotes Daniel Levy on Necon Strategy

Communications — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 07:48:00 -0400

The Bush administration has maintained a hard-line policy stance on Syria. It has not had high-level diplomatic relations with the country since the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri in 2005. The U.S. has alleged that Syria played a role in the assassination.

Neoconservatives appear to be re-igniting a political narrative that fits neatly with the infamous cast of the "axis of evil". While not explicitly mentioned, Syria has often been designated as a junior partner of Iran, Iraq, and North Korea's "reign of terror" because of its support for Islamist opposition groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas in Gaza.

"They want to torpedo the North Korea deal, they have clung doggedly to making sure that there is no cooperation in Syria, and they're the same people who got us into this mess in the Middle East in the first place," said Daniel Levy, a former Israeli peace negotiator and senior fellow at the Washington-based New America Foundation...

For more information on this article, please visit the Inter Press Service website.

Steve Clemons on the Administration, Iran in Agence France Presse

Communications — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 23:05:00 -0500

After years meting out regular scoldings to Iran, Syria and North Korea, the United States is set to come face-to-face with its sworn foes in a sudden burst of diplomatic activity.But the Bush administration fiercely denies it has undergone an overnight foreign policy conversion on the road to Damascus, Tehran or Pyongyang.After weeks of accusing Iran of boosting Iraqi militias and the dispatch of two aircraft-carrier groups to the Gulf, top officials will now not rule out direct US-Iranian contacts in just scheduled regional meetings on Iraq.And after six years of decrying one-on-one talks with Pyongyang as a reward for bad behavior, a senior US negotiator will meet a North Korean envoy next week to start thawing Cold War relations under a landmark nuclear deal...Some foreign policy analysts dispute the administration line the contacts resulted from months of painstaking diplomacy which nudged its foes into a corner, namely through six-nation talks on North Korea, and a European-US front on Iran's nuclear challenge."This is very clearly an effort to bring the Iranians and the Syrians into a regional security discussion," said Jon Alterman, a Middle East expert with the Center for… more

Anatol Lieven on U.S.-Russian Relations in AFP

Communications — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 21:23:00 -0400

Rocky US-Russian relations will complicate US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's bid to win Moscow's support to contain Iran and North Korea over their nuclear ambitions, analysts say.

Rice heads to Moscow this week after a visit in Asia aimed at pressing Washington's partners to fully enforce UN sanctions against North Korea over Pyongyang's nuclear test.

The fact that Rice has to travel to Moscow is already a bad sign, said Anatol Lieven, an expert at the New America Foundation, a Washington think tank.

"After the way they (the Russians) feel they have been treated, they don't see any reason to do anything in particular for America," Lieven said...

"The Russian administration is not actually trying to stir things up but it is also not going to give in anything of what it sees is in its own interest, except in return for serious concessions from Washington," Lieven said.

Lieven notably referred to Russia's bid to join the World Trade Organization, which has yet to be cleared by the United States.

On the North Korean nuclear bomb test, Russia will likely take the same position as China, which it considers its main ally in the face of what it sees as an increasingly anti-Russian US… more

Steven Clemons on Japan's Nuclear Options in The Japan Times

Communications — Fri, 13 Oct 2006 00:05:00 -0400

OSAKA -- Despite Tokyo's pledge to remain nonnuclear and assurances from top U.S. officials that their most important Pacific ally will do just that, North Korea's apparent atomic test is expected to further weaken taboos about talk of a nuclear-armed Japan in both Washington and Tokyo.

Influential academics and researchers, as well as politicians on both sides of the Pacific, have long called for Japan to seriously consider developing a nuclear deterrent...

"Key American Japan-handlers are helping to coax politicians like (former Prime Minister Yasuhiro) Nakasone, (Democratic Party of Japan President Ichiro) Ozawa and others to publicly discuss Japanese nuclear options," said Steven Clemons, director of foreign policy programs at the New America Foundation, a Washington-based think tank.

"These people, especially those who have left the Bush administration but are still influential, are helping to enable the thinking, and sparking synapses in Tokyo about this politically volatile topic.

"Obviously, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe can't publicly repudiate the nonnuclear principles, but he can, perhaps, privately work to establish a new consensus," Clemons said of Japan's stated principles of not possessing, not producing and not allowing the entry into the country of atomic weapons...

Declassified records show that the U.S. military stored atomic weapons in Okinawa and… more

North Korea Isn't Our Problem

Cecille Isidro — Thu, 12 Oct 2006 08:37:00 -0400

The United States is bogged down in what appears to be an unwinnable war in Iraq; it is facing very unpleasant options in regard to neighboring Iran’s nuclear program; senior NATO officers say that the situation in Afghanistan is deteriorating fast; in the former Soviet Union, Georgia and Russia are moving toward military confrontation, with the U.S. seemingly unable to restrain either; in large swaths of Latin America, new nationalist and populist movements are challenging U.S. interests.

And now the totalitarian regime in North Korea has defied the international community by testing a nuclear bomb -- and the U.S. appears to have neither military nor effective economic measures with which to respond.

If all this does not prove the reality of American overreach, what does? If U.S. power is to be placed on a firmer basis, its exercise must be more limited. Certain commitments will have to be scaled back or even eliminated if the U.S. is to be able to concentrate on dealing with its most truly vital challenges and enemies.

This is not an argument for isolationism but for the kind of calm, clearheaded global strategy adopted in the past by American leaders such as Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon: a morally courageous willingness to recognize the greatest threats to the U.S. and to deal with secondary concerns accordingly. When Roosevelt formed an alliance with the Soviet Union against Hitler, or Nixon went to China to do a deal with Chairman Mao, it was assuredly not because they admired the Stalinist or Maoist systems or were prepared to sacrifice vital U.S. interests to them.

Charles de Gaulle defined the nature of statesmanship when he said that "to govern is to choose -- usually between unpleasant alternatives." This is something that the U.S. is finding it increasingly difficult to do. For it is torn among a multitude of different domestic lobbies and presided over by an administration that has grossly overestimated U.S. power.

In consequence, it has involved itself in fights in several different parts of the world simultaneously, sometimes over trivial issues.

Consider, for example, that at a time when the U.S. is facing crises of truly vital importance in the Middle East, it is also drifting toward a dangerous confrontation with Russia, a key player in the Middle East, over ... South Ossetia.

What next, we wonder? Massive U.S. involvement in a Chilean-Argentine conflict over control of the Beagle Channel? A huge commitment of U.S. energy and resources to help Paraguay recover the Gran Chaco?

There is one region that the U.S. can and should bow out of now: Korea. North Korea’s bomb test is obviously a very serious problem for the U.S., given its heavy military presence in South Korea. However, we should ask why, more than 50 years after the Korean War and 15 years after the end of the Cold War, the United States still has about 37,500 troops on the Korean peninsula.

In the long run, North Korea’s nuclear weapons are an overwhelming problem only for its neighbors, and it should be their responsibility to sort this problem out. Of course, they may fail -- but then, the U.S. record in the region over the last decade has not exactly been one of success.

The U.S. is already reducing its troop levels on the Korean peninsula; it should accelerate the process and move rapidly toward ending its military presence. Moreover, it should negotiate a peace treaty with North Korea. This will remove Pyongyang’s motive to attack U.S. interests, ensure that China could never again attack U.S. forces in a ground war and allow the U.S. to concentrate instead on maintaining its overwhelming lead over China in naval and air power.

We must be very clear, however, that this withdrawal would also mean ceding to China the dominant role in containing North Korea’s nuclear ambitions -- along with Japan, South Korea and Russia -- and in managing the eventual collapse of the North Korean state and the appallingly difficult and expensive process of the reunification of the two Koreas.

Given how costly and difficult reunification has proved to be for the Germanys after the fall of the Berlin Wall, we should be only too happy to throw this particular time bomb into China’s lap. It would grant Beijing international prestige and an extra share of regional influence in an area vital to its interests, while saving us great costs and dangers.

North Korea must be treated as a regional problem to be managed by a regional concert of powers, with China in the lead. The U.S. role in all this should be sympathetic -- and distant.

Lieven and Hulsman are co-authors of Ethical Realism: A Vision for America’s Role in the World