WASHINGTON, Aug. 12 (Yonhap) -- A U.S. scholar Thursday urged the Obama administration to engage North Korea directly rather than through multilateral dialogue to influence the reclusive communist state just as dramatically as the Nixon administration did with China.
"The Nixon administration didn't wait for the perfect moment to engage Beijing," John Feffer, co-director of Foreign Policy in Focus (www.fpif.org) at the Institute for Policy Studies, said in a contribution to the Web site of "38 North," specializing in North Korean affairs.
File photoIt "didn't wait for the Chinese to work out their internal political squabbles before extending the olive branch, nor did Washington wait for some sign that Beijing was committed to economic reform, rapprochement with Taiwan, or a repudiation of its support for leftist national liberation movements overseas," Feffer said. "To the extent that Nixon or Kissinger considered such variables, they assumed that change would come after engagement or as a result of engagement, not prior to engagement."
The scholar was challenging the two basic tenets of the Obama administration's North Korea policy; the six-party nuclear talks and strategic patience.
The Obama administration has been delaying any active engagement until Pyongyang shows commitment to denuclearization and more recently to stop provocations like the torpedoeing of a South Korean warship.
Washington joins Seoul in refusing to push ahead with an early resumption of the six-party nuclear talks, which the North has boycotted since early last year, when the U.N. Security Council imposed sanctions for Pyongyang's nuclear and missile tests.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said last month that a new round of the nuclear talks "is not something we're looking at yet," citing no commitment by the North to halt provocative actions or forswear nuclear weapons.
Senator John Kerry (D-MA), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, last month called for "engaging in direct, candid, high-level dialogue" with North Korea, saying, "Strategic patience, the popular shorthand for the administration's North Korea policy, must not be allowed to turn into strategic indifference."
Denying involvement in the sinking of the Cheonan that killed 46 sailors in the Yellow Sea in March, the North insists on the removal of the sanctions and the signing of a peace treaty to replace the armistice that ended the 1950-53 Korean War as conditions to returning to the six-party talks. The negotiations involve the two Koreas, the U.S., China, Japan and Russia.
China, the North's staunchest communist ally, wants all parties concerned to "turn the page" on the Cheonan incident toward an early revival of the multilateral talks that have been on and off since their inception in 2003.
Feffer said Washington "has put the cart before the horse."
"They see engagement as a reward for North Korea's good behavior," he said on the Web site of the U.S.-Korea Institute at the Paul Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University.
"But as the case of detente with China demonstrates, changes take place either as part of the short-term engagement process or, more likely, somewhere down the line when the leadership can safely embrace the changes as indigenous rather than imposed by outside actors," he said. "If we want to influence the political succession in North Korea, the economic reforms, the environment of human rights, and so on, we can do so only by being a player."
The U.S. is currently a spectator, being "on the sidelines, cheering or mostly booing, and vainly calling on the players we know, such as China, to act according to our wishes," the scholar said. "That strategy has yielded practically nothing."
Feffer said that a bilateral deal with North Korea can meet the geopolitical considerations of both Washington and Pyongyang against China, which emerged rapidly in Northeast Asia under the Bush administration, immersed in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"Pyongyang could diminish its dangerous dependency on Beijing by negotiating a deal with Washington," he said. "Washington could drive a wedge between North Korea and its primary benefactor, reduce Chinese influence on the Korean peninsula, and find a new way of inserting itself into a region that has witnessed a relative decline in U.S. influence over the last decade or so."
China, a lifeline for North Korea as the major provider of food, oil and other necessities, has invested heavily in the isolated communist neighbor. South Korea, once another major trading partner and donor, has cut off North Korean aid since the launch of the conservative Lee Myung-bak government in 2008. Lee has called for the North's denuclearization commitment and an apology for the Cheonan's sinking before resuming economic ties.
North Korea "has reluctantly opened up its mineral resources to a voracious Chinese extraction industry, relies now on Chinese trade to offset the decline in inter-Korean relations, and still depends heavily on Beijing for food and energy," Feffer said. "It remains distinctly uncomfortable with this reliance on its considerably larger and more powerful neighbor."
The U.S. has often called on China to use more of its leverage on North Korea toward the North's nuclear dismantlement, but some experts say China's influence is so limited that it may have to acknowledge North Korea's nuclear armament despite Beijing's commitment to the six-party talks.
Beijing is said to prefer a nuclear-armed North Korea to any instability that would lead to a flood of refugees. Also distasteful to China, experts say, is Korean reunification, which could place U.S. troops at its border.
Feffer noted the recent rapprochement between the U.S. and onetime foe Vietnam in formulating military ties. Vietnam took part in search and rescue operations during joint naval drills this week in the South China Sea.
China considers that ocean area vital to its national interest in terms of the territorial rights to disputed islands, fishing rights and the seabed rich with oil and natural gas reserves.
"North Korea is not quite the powerful balancer that China was in the 1970s," he said. "But by engaging North Korea as part of a regional strategy that includes strong relations with other powers wary of Chinese influence such as Vietnam, the United States can prevent the resurrection of the Chinese tributary system that held sway in the region for hundreds of years."
Feffer called on the Obama administration to pursue a secret diplomacy with North Korea at least at the initial stage, saying, "Game-changers of this nature" will invite "immediate criticism, from naysayers within the administration and certainly from political opponents in Congress and the media."
He took note of the State Department having been sidelined by the Nixon's White House in the normalization of ties with China, the breakthrough in U.S.-Libyan relations made after nine months of secret talks and the Oslo accords, negotiated in secret talks for two years.
The nuclear-armed North is located "in a vital location," he said. "Resolution of the North Korean issue, if done more on U.S. than Chinese terms, could provide considerable long-term economic and political dividends for the United States" despite some drawbacks, including South Korea "feeling slighted or worse."
"But the benefits in terms of peace and security in the short term and economic and social transformation in the long term far outweigh these drawbacks," he said.
A game changer with North Korea "could be the triumph that Obama needs to rescue the remaining two years of his term," during which Obama "will continue to struggle with foreign policy debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan and encounter serious challenges to its domestic agenda after the mid-term elections this fall," the scholar said.
hdh@yna.co.kr
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