North Korea

A great graphic from the FT on the key members of Kim Jong-il’s mystery-shrouded family.

For a while this felt like it was going to be a bad night for Barack Obama. Hillary Clinton won a huge victory in Kentucky – and the television pundits had hours to dwell gloomily on Obama’s failure there. But Kentucky was then offset by a big win for Obama in Oregon.

The fact that Obama chose to give his evening speech in Iowa – the site of his first crucial victory – had excited speculation that he was going to claim that the Democratic race was over. Instead he contented himself with the claim that he is”within reach of the Democratic nomination” – which is undeniable. Instead Obama chose to signal his inevitable victory by a change in tone and focus. He was magnanimous towards Hillary, in the manner of a victor. And he focused the most effective part of his speech on an attack on John McCain.

Tony Blair is working right up to the last minute. Some FT colleagues and I went to see him earlier this week, for top-secret discussions about the future of Europe. But just as interesting as the off-the-record stuff (I thought), was what Blair had to say about the Oscar-winning film, “The Queen” – which portrays Blair and the Queen, dealing with the aftermath of the death of Princess Diana.

During the cold war, western diplomats told a joke about the frustrations of negotiating with the Soviet Union. It was like putting your money into a Coke machine and finding that the machine had not delivered you a Coke. At that point you had three options: you could put some more money in and hope that the machine delivered the second time around; you could try and break into the machine and get the Coke you had paid for; or you could give up and decide you didn’t want a Coke after all. But the one thing that was not going to work was trying to talk to the machine.

For hardliners in the Bush administration, trying to negotiate with the "axis of evil" is like trying to talk to a Coke machine – an exercise in futility.

Given this deep scepticism about the utility of chat, the North Korean nuclear deal announced yesterday represents a remarkable change of strategy. It has involved two things that are traditionally anathema to the Bushies: tortuous multilateral negotiations and compromise. As Gary Samore of the Council on Foreign Relations, who negotiated with the North Koreans for the Clinton administration, explains, the Bush administration has effectively abandoned its insistence on complete North Korean disarmament. Samore says –

I think this was available at least three years ago when the North Koreans indicated that they were prepared to accept a freeze on their plutonium production. At that time, the Bush administration was insisting on complete disarmament. And unfortunately, that just wasn’t an attainable objective. And I think the Bush administration recognized that it wanted to stabilize the situation on the Korean peninsula and avoid the danger that North Korea would walk away from the talks and resume nuclear testing. It was better to accept a more limited practical agreement to freeze and engage in subsequent negotiations, because insisting on total disarmament was simply not attainable.

Following the North Korean deal, the Bush administration finds itself in the unusual position of being condemned by neo-conservatives and praised by the editorial pages of the New York Times.

The obvious question is whether this new spirit of compromise in Washington will be extended to Iran.

It must be irritating – not to say alarming – for the world’s superpowers to be outwitted by a lunatic, operating from the world’s most isolated state, North Korea.  But if it’s any consolation, in the game of nuclear brinkmanship, lunatics may actually start with an advantage.
This theory was outlined by Richard Nixon to Bob Halderman during the Vietnam War. As Halderman recalled in his memoirs Nixon explained that he wanted the Vietnamese to believe that he might just be crazy enough to use nuclear weapons. Halderman recalled him saying: "I call it the Madman Theory, Bob. I want the North Vietnamese to believe I’ve reached the point where I might do anything to stop the war. We’ll just slip the word to them that, ‘for God’s sake, you know Nixon is obsessed about Communism. We can’t restrain him when he’s angry — and he has his hand on the nuclear button’ — and Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace."
It seems entirely possible that Kim Jong Il is following Nixonian logic – and was hoping that North Korea’s nuclear test will persuade the United States and his Asian neighbours to treat him with a little more kindness and consideration.