Regime-Change Works

Claudia Rosett 12.18.08, 12:01 AM ET

"Regime change" is not a phrase we're likely to hear from the Obama administration. Even the Bush White House scrapped it after overthrowing Saddam Hussein five years ago. Today, America's stress is on diplomacy, and President-elect Barack Obama will take office having promised to negotiate, without preconditions, with the likes of Iran. In the post-unipolar order, America doesn't overthrow tyrannical governments that threaten the free world with weapons of mass murder; America tries to multilaterally "manage" them. Yet, regime change has an advantage over talks that it would be foolish to ignore--namely, it works. History gives us five examples of countries that have given up nuclear weapons: Belarus, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, South Africa and Libya. Of these, the first three inherited their arsenals from the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union and gave them up soon after independence. The core Soviet state of Russia, which kept its arsenal, was at least bumped for a generation from the roster of imminent threats to the U.S.--thanks to the same Soviet collapse, aka regime change.

South Africa gave up its bombs in the early 1990s, as its apartheid regime gave way to a system of majority rule. And in Libya, the most recent case, while there was no change of Gadhafi's regime, there was a proxy effect. Gadhafi agreed to hand over his well-advanced nuclear kit in late 2003, while the fear was still fresh on him that having imposed regime change on Baghdad, America's cowboy president might next turn his sights on Tripoli.

In every case, the surrender of nuclear weapons was achieved not by way of drawn-out dickering over inspection regimes, or payments of nuclear blackmail, but by way of willing cooperation by the governments involved. There is a colossal difference between disarming a regime that wants to hand over its nuclear portfolio, and one that is trying to bamboozle inspectors and extort concessions while building bombs.

That difference has been amply showcased for years now in both Iran and North Korea. Diplomatic efforts to talk Iran out of its bomb program have been going on for at least the past five years, courtesy of the European Union, the United Nations and now via an agglomeration known as the 5+1 plus Arab countries (the 5+1 being the U.N. Security Council permanent five, plus Germany). And still, Iran is enriching uranium at speed.

In North Korea, after more than four years of Six-Party Talks, punctuated by declarations of commitment to de-nuclearization, Kim Jong Il's regime has pulled in vast stores of free food and free fuel. North Korea has gotten itself off the U.S. State Department's list of terror-sponsoring regimes, is out from under the Trading With the Enemy Act, has (with the help of the U.S. Federal Reserve, no less) retrieved $25 million in allegedly crime-tainted funds frozen in 2005 at Macau's Banco Delta Asia, and, earlier this year, billed America $2.5 million for the sham of blowing up a cooling tower at its on-again off-again Yongbyon nuclear complex.

After all this, the Six-Party Talks are on the rocks, with North Korea refusing to agree to any reasonable verification setup. And the Democratic People's Republic of Korea has neither dropped its nuclear interests, nor surrendered an ounce of bomb fuel.

Instead, North Korea's state-run Korean Central News Agency released a brief news item last week that ought to serve as an epitaph for the Six-Party Talks. Under the headline "U.S. Recognizes DPRK as Nuclear Weapons State," Pyongyang reported with evident pride that for "the first time" the U.S. "officially recognized the DPRK as a nuclear weapons state and announced it in its government report."

The source from which North Korea derived this news flash was the Defense Department's 2008 annual report on the Joint Operating Environment, a 51-page document where, on page 32, North Korea's policy wonks discovered the statement that "the rim of the great Asian continent is already home to five nuclear powers: China, India, Pakistan, North Korea and Russia." Whether the inclusion of North Korea was a slip of the pen by U.S. officialdom--which has not previously acknowledged North Korea as a nuclear power--is a question I will leave for the moment to others.

But what bears noting is that while this item got little attention in the U.S., it was picked up by the Agence France Presse news agency, and within hours was in turn picked up by the Tehran Times--which advertises itself as "an international media outlet" set up to "export the ideas of the revolution"--meaning Iran's Islamic revolution. It seems that in the eyes of nuclear-wannabe Tehran, the example of North Korea's nuclear blackmail racket--with its attendant successes in wringing concessions from the U.S.--warrants close attention.

The dangers emanating from these regimes go well beyond the already horrific threats that their nuclear weapons might be used against Israel, or handed off to terrorists to attack America. A slew of recent reports warn that the examples of Iran and North Korea are pushing the world toward an era of nuclear proliferation that is--to say the least--unlikely to end well.

To cite just a sampling: The same Defense Department report that listed North Korea as a nuclear power went on to warn that "the confused reaction in the international community to Iran's defiance of external demands to terminate its nuclear programs is an incentive for others to follow in their path." An interim report, released this week by the Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States, warns that "Unless the Iranian program is halted short of weapons capability and the North Korean program reversed and its arsenal dismantled, there is likely to be a proliferation cascade that would greatly increase the risks of nuclear use and terrorism."

The conundrum for American policymakers is that the carrots offered to the likes of Iran and North Korea as inducements to give up nuclear programs can all be pocketed at the bargaining table by these same regimes--to buy time or even help support their nuclear ventures. As for sticks, such as tough sanctions or military threats, to be credible, they require an administration willing to carry all the way through to regime change.

Obama, if he heeds these realities, might want to re-package the phrase. There would be great virtue in translating it back into such old-fashioned terms as, say, "the overthrow of tyrants." Call it what you will, the records tells us that in 2003, America led a coalition that imposed regime change on Iraq.

The result is that Saddam's totalitarian, war-prone, mass-murdering sanctions-busting (and yes, according to the CIA's Duelfer report, nuclear wannabe) regime has been replaced by a system in which a reporter last week felt free to throw his shoes at President Bush. From North Korea and Iran, where the regimes carry on, the threat is not shoe-lobbing, but nuclear proliferation and attack. Go figure.

Claudia Rosett, a journalist-in-residence with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, writes a weekly column on foreign affairs for Forbes.com.