“Agreed framework,” “KEDO,” “light-water reactors,” “six-party talks,” “CVID,” “Sept. 19, 2005 and Feb. 13, 2007 Joint Statements.” Only people with very good memories might know what these meant. The laborious outcomes of denuclearization talks in Geneva and Beijing since the 1990s are now in oblivion and what remain in our troubled minds are North Korean nuclear tests repeated four times since 2006, the last one just two weeks ago.   

Days after Pyongyang announced the underground detonation of a “hydrogen bomb,” we watched representatives of Iran, the world’s major powers and the IAEA in Vienna celebrate the launching of a nuclear deal with the lifting of international sanctions on Tehran in return for its vowed termination of nuclear programs. We felt both envy and apprehension.

It is not exactly a deja vu, but we remember a similar package tried between the United States and North Korea two decades ago to halt Pyongyang’s then nascent nuclear ambition in exchange for substantial aid and normalization of relations. By 2003, the bilateral deal was dead and the six-party talks ensued in Beijing only to remain moribund after a decade of useless debates and joint statements.

Domestic politics in Washington interfered with the implementation of the 1994 Agreed Framework, which was not a treaty but a nonbinding political commitment between the two hostile parties. Republican-controlled Congress opposed the Democratic administration’s “appeasement with the rogue state” and practically stalled funding for energy aid to the North. Seoul was to build two light-water reactors, which were supposedly proliferation resistant, for the North but it suffered the crippling impact of the Asian financial crisis at the time.

More than anything else, distrust in the North’s sincerity to abide by the terms of the agreement led to its breakdown. We recall a spate of stateside media reports on North Korea’s clandestine program for uranium enrichment with Pakistani help and about construction of underground facilities attributed to nuclear-related activities. Critics argued that American stalling on its part of the deal forced Pyongyang to seek new approaches to nuclear armament, but skeptics finally won when the North detonated a 1,000-kiloton nuclear device on Oct. 9, 2005.

After the first nuclear test, the five parties – the United States, Japan, China, Russia and South Korea – solicited North Korea to return to the Beijing conference table and somehow produced yet another joint statement on Feb. 13, 2007, assuring “complete, verifiable and irreversible dismantlement” of its nuclear program. In June 2008, we witnessed the great hoax of the North destroying the cooling tower in the Yongbyon nuclear facility. Less than a year after the deceptive gesture, Pyongyang conducted its second nuclear test on May 25, 2009.

Throughout the past two decades, the world’s top military and economic powers simply failed in their joint efforts to deter North Korea from making the bomb. They had the consensus about their task but it was not strong enough to beat the persistent will of North Korean leaders.

In the early 1990s, North Korea alarmed the world with signs of nuclear development with threats of withdrawal from the NPT. Washington considered destroying its nuclear complex in Yongbyon with a cruise missile attack, but Seoul, fearing devastating retaliation, opposed it and eventually doves prevailed in the U.S.

Washington accepted Pyongyang’s offer of a package deal in 1994 shortly after the death of Kim Il-sung. If the North Korean founder had lived longer and Kim Young-sam met him in Pyongyang as arranged by Jimmy Carter, the Korean Peninsula could have taken a different course. Short of a regime change, however, Pyongyang’s nuclear program would have survived, if delayed a little.

Then we passed the era of the “Sunshine Policy” under liberal President Kim Dae-jung. “DJ” pushed engagement with the North with the vision of a soft landing in the event of reunification and with the more immediate goal of gaining greater leverage in inter-Korean politics. DJ declared “no danger of war on the Korean Peninsula anymore” upon returning from an inter-Korean summit in Pyongyang, but there is no denying that cash from the South helped the North finance its nuclear and missile programs.

The succeeding Roh Moo-hyun administration saw the start in 2003 of the six-way talks in Beijing that proved to be one of the most unproductive multilateral processes in modern history. China wanted to flex its superpower muscle for the first time by gathering the parties that had stake in the nuclear issue. But the host was more interested in displaying its regional leadership than achieving substantial progress with adequate exercise of its influence over North Korea.

UNSC resolutions have become perfunctory procedures just to mark each stage of North Korea’s WMD development while their atomic bomb yields grew from the initial 1,000 tons to 10 kilotons and missiles flew intercontinental distances. International society, preoccupied with al-Qaida and IS terrorism, regarded the North’s latest nuclear feat as nothing but a single line added to the long timeline of the North Korean nuclear program. President Obama made no mention of it in his State of the Union address, whether for strategic ignorance or not.

Then, what shall we do now? Shall we develop own nuclear program to counterbalance the threat, ask the U.S. to bring tactical nuclear weapons back into this territory, or wait indefinitely for self-destruction of the Northern regime, possibly expedited by the loudspeaker broadcasts across the border? Or, seriously consider Pyongyang’s “standing offer” of simultaneously ending its nuclear program and our joint military exercises with the U.S., knowing its tricky nature?

We cannot expect Beijing to twist the arms of Pyongyang, its blood ally, in our favor as long as the Chinese blame Americans for forcing it into nuclear armament in the first place. There is no magic to resolve the problem; the only choice for our current and next administration is the realist and pragmatist approach to give and take what are available and necessary between the two Koreas, chasing no fantasy but remembering what chances we had and lost over the past two decades.

The Iranian nuclear deal and the failed denuclearization process on this side of the globe can provide lessons to each other, primarily with call for noninterference of domestic politics before and after an accord with the adversaries. With all Republican candidates opposing detente with Iran, there is no guarantee that the Iranian settlement would have a different fate from the “Agreed Framework” on the Korean Peninsula. 

By Kim Myong-sik

Kim Myong-sik is a former editorial writer for The Korea Herald. – Ed.