Tag: North Korea

28 December 2000

Posted on by William Arkin

 

President Bill Clinton announces that he will not travel to North Korea before the end of his term, citing “insufficient time to complete the work at hand.”

White House national security adviser Sandy Berger and other White House officials were hesitant to have the president leave the country during the ongoing election dispute between Al Gore and George W. Bush. Berger called it a “potential Constitutional crisis.”

Whether Clinton’s trip to North Korea would have achieved anything anyhow is questionable, but the precedent had also been set for an outgoing president not to leave new and pressing national security business for their successors. Hence the real reason behind not “retaliating” for the October attack in Yemen on the USS Cole: that the reverberations might have locked the new administration into some specific action.

15 November 1997

Posted on by William Arkin

 

In a speech in Sacramento, California, President Bill Clinton portrays a bleak future if nations do not cooperate against “organized forces of destruction,” telling the audience that only a small amount of “nuclear cake put in a bomb would do ten times as much damage as the Oklahoma City bomb did.” Stopping the spread of nuclear materials and not letting weapons “fall into the wrong hands” is “fundamentally what is stake in the stand-off we’re having in Iraq today,” he says.

Clinton asked Americans not to view the current crisis as a “replay” of the Gulf War in 1991. Instead, “think about it in terms of the innocent Japanese people that died in the subway when the sarin gas was released [by the religious cult Aum Shinrikyo in 1995]; and how important it is for every responsible government in the world to do everything that can possibly be done not to let big stores of chemical or biological weapons fall into the wrong hands, not to let irresponsible people develop the capacity to put them in warheads on missiles or put them in briefcases that could be exploded in small rooms. And I say this not to frighten you.”

It is a good reminder that the WMD phantom—with Iraq, North Korea, Iran, etc.—is perpetual and also, short of destroying Iraq and war, we are so unable to peacefully resolve the bigger question of proliferation in the most difficult cases.

24 October 2000

Posted on by William Arkin
Madeleine Albright visits Kim Jong Il

 

In the category of nothing ever changes… Secretary of State Madeleine Albright concludes a two-day visit to Pyongyang, North Korea, meeting with Kim Jong Il, the father of Kim Jong Un. During the visit, Kim tells her that North Korea would not further test its Taepo Dong-1 long-range missile. In addition to discussing Pyongyang’s indigenous missile production, the talks cover North Korean missile technology exports, and greater nuclear transparency.

On the agenda also are the carrot of the normalization of relations and a possible trip by President Bill Clinton to Pyongyang before he leaves office.

In the final presidential debate of the 2020 election season, former Vice President Joe Biden and President Trump traded barbs over North Korea, Biden criticizing Trump for being too chummy with Kim. Trump shot back that the Obama administration had watched North Korea develop its nuclear weapons and missiles without doing much, failing as well to secure a meeting.

Biden shot back: “We had a good relationship with Hitler before he, in fact, invaded the rest of Europe. The reason [Kim] wouldn’t meet with President Obama is because [Obama] said we’re going to talk about denuclearization.”

Biden and company continue to argue that pursuing denuclearization makes no sense because… because it’s not going to happen. “What has he done?” Biden said of Trump. “He’s legitimized North Korea…” And yet that’s been the American endeavor for decades, and not only that, but backwater North Korea has learned that nuclear weapons earn it a place in American foreign policy—as much an incentive as any other to be a nuclear power.

As for the connection to 9/11, the attacks completely took the American eye off the peninsula and North Korea went on to test its first nuclear device on October 9, 2006, while the Bush administration was amidst the worst phase of violence in Iraq and still aggressively pursuing the war against al Qaeda and the Taliban.