Did
US President Barack Obama score a great victory for the United States
by concluding a deal with Russia on Syria's chemical weapons or has he
caused irreparable harm to the US's reputation and international
position? By what standard can we judge his actions when the results
will only be known next year? To summarize where things now stand, last
Saturday US Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister
Sergei Lavrov concluded an agreement regarding Syria's chemical weapons
arsenal. The agreement requires Syria to provide full details on the
size and locations of all of its chemical weapons by this Saturday. It
requires international inspectors to go to Syria beginning in November,
and to destroy or remove Syria's chemical weapons from the country by
June 2014.
Obama and Kerry have trumpeted the
agreement as a great accomplishment. They say it could never have been
concluded had the US not threatened to carry out "unbelievably small"
punitive military strikes against the Syrian regime in response to its
use of Sarin gas to massacre 1,400 civilians in the suburbs of Damascus
on August 21.
And then there is the perception
of an "Iran dividend" from the US-Russian deal. Just two days after last
Saturday's agreement, speculation mounted about a possible breakthrough
in the six party negotiations with Iran regarding its illicit nuclear
weapons program.
According to Der Spiegel,
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani may consider closing down Iran's
illicit uranium enrichment facility at Fordo under IAEA supervision in
exchange for the removal or weakening of economic sanctions against
Iran's oil exports and its central bank.
The
White House has not ruled out the possibility that Obama and Rouhani may
meet at the UN General Assembly meeting later this month. These moves
could pave the way for a reinstatement of full diplomatic relations
between the US and Iran. Those relations were cut off after the
regime-supported takeover of the US embassy in Teheran in 1979.
Obama's
supporters in the US media and Congress have hailed these developments
as foreign policy victories for the United States. Thanks to Obama's
brilliant maneuvering, Syria has agreed to disarm from its chemical
weapons without the US having had to fire a shot. The Iranians'
increased willingness to be forthcoming on their nuclear program is
similarly a consequence of Obama's tough and smart diplomacy regarding
Syria, and his clever utilization of Russia as a long arm of US foreign
policy.
For their part, critics have lined up to condemn Obama's decision to cut a deal with Russia regarding Syria.
They
warn that his actions in that regard have destroyed the credibility of
his threat to use force to prevent Iran from developing or deploying
nuclear weapons.
To determine which side is right in this debate, we need to look no further than North Korea.
In
April 1992 the IAEA concluded that North Korea was hiding information
on its nuclear program from the UN and declared it in breach of the
Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty it signed in 1985. In March 1993 North
Korea announced its intention to vacate its signature from the NPT.
Later that year, it later offered to begin negotiations related to its
illicit nuclear program with the US.
Those
negotiations began in early 1994, after the US canceled planned joint
military exercises with South Korea as a goodwill gesture to the North.
The talks led to the Agreed-Framework Agreement concluded later that
year under which North Korea agreed to shutter its nuclear installation
at Yongbyon where it was suspected of developing plutonium based nuclear
weapons. In exchange the US and its allies agreed to build light water
nuclear reactors in North Korea, and to provide North Korea with oil for
energy production until the reactors were up and running.
In
November 2002 the North Koreans acknowledged that they were engaging in
illicit uranium enrichment activities. In January 2003 Pyongyang
announced it was withdrawing from the NPT.
In
February 2005 it announced it possessed a nuclear arsenal. And on
October 9, 2006, North Korea launched its first test of a nuclear bomb.
The
US suspended its talks with North Korea in 2003. It responded to the
nuclear test by renewing those negotiations just weeks after it took
place. And in February 2007 the US and North Korea reached an agreement
under which Pyongyang agreed to close down Yongbyon in exchange for a
resumption of shipments of free oil.
In
September 2007, against the strenuous opposition of then secretary of
state Condoleezza Rice, who was the architect of the US's renewed push
to cut a deal with North Korea, Israel destroyed a North Korean built
nuclear reactor almost identical to the Yongbyon nuclear reactor in the
Syrian desert. Had it become operational, Syria would likely have
developed a nuclear arsenal by now.
In June 2008, the North Koreans demolished Yongbyon's cooling tower.
Amidst
fears that North Korea had reopened the reactor in the fall of 2008,
the US removed North Korea from the State Department's list of state
sponsors of terrorism.
Six months later, in
April 2009, Pyongyang resumed its reprocessing of spent fuel rods for
the production of plutonium. And the next month it conducted another
nuclear test.
In 2010, North Korean scientists
at Yongbyon told Siegfried Hecker, a former director of the Los Alamos
National Laboratory that the plutonium reactor had been shuttered.
Later in 2010, the North Koreans began open enrichment of uranium at Yongbyon.
Enrichment
activities have doubled in scale since 2010. US experts now assess that
with 4,000 centrifuges operating, North Korea produces enough enriched
uranium to build three uranium based nuclear bombs every year. On
February 12, 2013 North Korea conducted a third nuclear test. Experts
were unclear whether the tested bomb a plutoniumbased or uranium-based
nuclear weapon.
On September 11, the media
reported that the latest satellite imagery indicates the North Koreans
have resumed their plutonium production activities at Yongbyon.
Although
the media claim that this represents an abrogation of the 2007 deal, it
is unclear why that deal was considered in place given that North Korea
began its reprocessing activities in April 2009 and tested another
nuclear weapon the next month.
Although it
issued a strong statement condemning the reopening of the plutonium
operation at Yongbyon, the Obama administration remains committed to the
sixparty talks with North Korea.
When viewed
as a model for general US-non-proliferation policy, rather than one
specific to North Korea, the North Korean model involves a rogue state
using the Chinese and Russians to block effective UN Security Council
action against its illicit development and proliferation of weapons of
mass destruction.
Faced with a dead end at the
UN, the US is forced to decide between acting on its own to compel a
cessation of the illicit behavior, or to try to cut a deal with the
regime, either through bilateral or multilateral negotiations.
Not
wishing to enter into an unwanted confrontation or suffer domestic and
international condemnations of American unilateralism, the US opts for
diplomacy. The decision is controversial in Washington. And to justify
their decision, the champions of negotiating deals with rogue
proliferators stake their personal reputations on the success of that
policy.
In the case of Rice, her decision to
open negotiations with North Korea following its nuclear test was
staunchly opposed by vice president Dick Cheney. And once the policy was
exposed as a failure first by the intelligence reports proving that
North Korea was proliferating its nuclear technologies and know-how to
Syria, and then with its early suspension of its agreement to the 2007
agreement, rather than acknowledge her mistake, she doubled down. And as
a consequence, under the nose of the US, and with Washington pledged to
a framework deal to which North Korea stood in continuous breach, North
Korea carried out two more nuclear tests, massively expanded its
uranium enrichment activities, and reinstated its plutonium production
activities.
Just as importantly, once the US
accepted the notion of talks with North Korea, it necessarily accepted
the regime's legitimacy. And as a consequence, both the Clinton and Bush
administrations abandoned any thought of toppling the regime. Once
Washington ensnared itself in negotiations that strengthened its enemy
at America's expense, it became the effective guarantor of the regime's
survival. After all, if the regime is credible enough to be trusted to
keep its word, then it is legitimate no matter how many innocents it has
enslaved and slaughtered.
With the US's
experience with North Korea clearly in mind, it is possible to assess US
actions with regards to Syria and Iran. The first thing that becomes
clear is that the Obama administration is implementing the North Korean
model in its dealings with Syria and Iran.
With
regards to Syria, there is no conceivable way to peacefully enforce the
US Russian agreement on the ground. Technically it is almost impossible
to safely dispose of chemical weapons under the best of circumstances.
Given
that Syria is in the midst of a brutal civil war, the notion that it is
possible for UN inspectors to remove or destroy the regime's chemical
weapons is patently absurd.
Moreover, since the
agreement itself requires non-compliance complaints to be discussed
first at the UN Security Council, and it is clear that Russia is willing
to do anything to protect the Syrian regime, no action will be taken to
punish non-compliance.
Finally, like his
predecessors with regard to Pyongyang, Obama has effectively accepted
the continued legitimacy of the regime of Bashar Assad, despite the fact
that he is an acknowledged war criminal.
As
was the case with Pyongyang and its nuclear brinkmanship and weapons
tests, Assad won his legitimacy and removed the US threat to remove him
from power by using weapons of mass destruction.
As
for Iran, Rouhani's talk of closing Fordo needs to be viewed against
the precedents set at Yongbyon by the North Koreans. In other words,
even if the installation is shuttered, there is every reason to believe
that the shutdown will be temporary. On the other hand, just as North
Korea remains off the State Department's list of state sponsors of
terrorism despite the fact that since its removal it carried out two
more nuclear tests, it is hard to imagine that sanctions on Iran's oil
exports and central bank removed in exchange for an Iranian pledge to
close Fordo, would be restored after Fordo is reopened.
Like North Korea, Iran will negotiate until it is ready to vacate its signature on the NPT and test its first nuclear weapon.
The
critics are correct. And the danger posed by Obama's decision to seek a
false compromise rather than accept an unwanted confrontation following
Syria's use of chemical weapons will only be removed when the US
recognizes the folly of seeking to wish away the dangers of weapons of
mass destruction through negotiations. Those talks lead only to the
diminishment of US power and the endangerment of US national security as
more US enemies develop and deploy weapons of mass destruction with the
sure knowledge that the US would rather negotiate fecklessly than
contend responsibly with the dangers they pose.
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.
© 2013 Caroline Glick
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