Blowback, Second Edition: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire

North Korea’s launch of a missile with a range of several thousand miles transformed this debate. The Japanese finally agreed to buy into the TMD. On September 20,1998, to the jubilation of Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Secretary of Defense William Cohen, Japan reversed itself and joined the missile defense research program. Whether Japan and the United States together will ever overcome the stupendous technological problems, not to mention the strategic issues of decoys, reliability, lack of defense against cruise missiles (because they fly too low), the ability to deliver weapons of mass destruction through much less sophisticated ways than missiles (for example, via boats, helicopters, airliners), and the likelihood that civilian populations will never actually trust defensive missiles are all open questions, to say the least. The history of the Cold War demonstrated that stable, credible deterrence is the only rational answer to weapons against which there is no defense. Nonetheless, the North Korean missile launch, together with evidence that North Korea is working on even longer-range missiles, gave great renewed impetus to the TMD idea.

The unraveling of the Agreed Framework was not entirely caused by Pyongyang. The drumbeat demonizing North Korea has continued unabated in Washington. In February 1999, Republican congressman Benjamin Gilman, chairman of the House International Relations Committee, was convinced that “North Korea could nuke Seattle,” and the director of central intelligence, George Tenet, testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee, told the senators, “I can hardly overstate my concern about North Korea.”¹¹ It seemed evident in the spring of 1999 that North Korea was being groomed as Public Enemy Number One until events in Yugoslavia overtook this campaign.

Even though it remains a small, failed Communist regime whose people are starving and have no petroleum, North Korea is a useful whipping boy for any number of interests in Washington. If the military needs a post–Cold War opponent to justify its existence, North Korea is less risky than China. Politicians seek partisan advantage by claiming that others are “soft” on defending the country from “rogue regimes.” And the arms lobby had a direct interest in selling its products to each and every nation in East Asia, regardless of its political orientation.

There is considerable evidence that since the signing of the Agreed Framework in 1994, a series of mysterious incidents has been created deliberately to undermine diplomatic efforts to reduce tensions. In September 1997, for instance, the United States, South Korea, China, and North Korea were scheduled to hold negotiations on replacing the forty-five-year-old Korean armistice with a peace treaty. In the same month the United States also said it hoped to obtain North Korea’s adherence to an international agreement first negotiated in 1987 called the Missile Technology Control Regime. This agreement sought to bring under control the transfer of technologies that could be used to make intercontinental ballistic missiles. The United States had indicated in advance that it would lift some of its economic sanctions against North Korea if it would halt deployment and sales of its missiles.

On August 22, 1997, the eve of the talks, the North Korean ambassador to Egypt, a key player in North Korea’s missile sales to the Middle East, “defected” to the United States. R. Jeffrey Smith, a reporter for the Washington Post, quoted a CIA source as saying, “There will be people in the intelligence community who will be salivating to see this guy.”¹² In the New York Times Steven Lee Myers noted that the defection threatened the peace talks but quoted another U.S. official as saying, “The alternative of turning down a bona fide plea for asylum from a state like North Korea is pretty unthinkable.”¹³ Jamie Rubin, a State Department spokesman, insisted that the defection “will not affect the four-party peace talks.”¹⁴ Then Newsweek revealed that the former ambassador had in fact long been on the CIA’s payroll.¹⁵ Informed observers concluded that he had not so much defected as been called in from the cold at a time of the CIA’s choosing and with an eye toward scuttling the upcoming talks. North Korea in retaliation declined to attend either set of scheduled meetings.