Redstate

Bill Richardson on Iran and North Korea

By Dan McLaughlin Posted in 2008 — Comments (2) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

Bill Richardson may or may not be a serious contender for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination - he does, at least, have far more experience in executive and foreign policy roles than the top three contenders combined - but it's a safe bet that the former Clinton Administration UN Ambassador and current New Mexico governor will play a significant role in the next Democratic Administration, and may well be a frontrunner for the VP job. So, Gov. Richardson's foreign policy op-ed piece in Saturday's Washington Post deserves some scrutiny.

Unfortunately, the results aren't pretty. Gov. Richardson wants us to use the recent nuclear deal with North Korea as a model to deal with Iran. Let's start with his description of that agreement:

The recent tentative agreement with North Korea over its nuclear program illustrates how diplomacy can work even with the most unsavory of regimes. Unfortunately, it took the Bush administration more than six years to commit to diplomacy. During that needless delay North Korea developed and tested nuclear weapons -- weapons its leaders still have not agreed to dismantle. Had we engaged the North Koreans earlier, instead of calling them "evil" and talking about "regime change," we might have prevented them from going nuclear. We could have, and should have, negotiated a better agreement, and sooner.

Of course, this is rather a different tune than Richardson sang on his visit with the North Koreans in 2003:

North Korea has no intentions of building nuclear weapons, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson said Saturday as he concluded three days of talks with two envoys from the communist nation.

"We discussed issues very frankly, but in a positive atmosphere," Richardson said.

North Korea's deputy ambassador to the United Nations, Han Song Ryol, said during the talks that "North Korea has no intentions of building nuclear weapons," Richardson said.

Well, so much for that. But has he learned anything from the experience? The agreement with North Korea is an improvement over the 1994 Clinton Administration agreement because it involves North Korea's patron and powerful next-door neighbor, China. That's worth something in terms of the costs to the North Koreans of violating the agreement, or at least the costs of being publicly caught again violating the agreement. But other than that, the deal is essentially the same leap of faith, with little in the way of verifiable benchmarks North Korea can be held to. As even Gov. Richardson now concedes, the agreement doesn't even require North Korea to dismantle its weapons, plus it rewards the North Korean strategy of nuclear blackmail.

The virtue of the North Korean agreement, if there is one, is in getting a temporary delay in the day of reckoning with the North Korean threat so that more of our military and diplomatic resources can be focused on the primary theater of the current struggle against international terrorism: the tyrannies and struggling democracies of the Muslim and Arab worlds, in particular the Middle East and Central Asia. While North Korea is a serious threat in itself and - to the extent it proliferates its weapons and technology - also a part of that broader struggle, a temporary mollification of the North Korean regime, even at the price of more suffering and starvation for its downtrodden people, can help our strategic position in dealing with the major front.

But Richardson instead wants to see the Band-Aid that's been stretched over this side injury applied to the major wound. He throws around appeals to sensible propositions like "speaking credibly from a position of strength" and having "a record of meaning what you say." And, to his credit, he eschews the bizarre insistence of some Democrats that the U.S. should insist on unilateral negotiations, and recognizes that Russia would need to play the role with Iran that China does with North Korea (left unsaid is the fact that Russia appears to have no interest in taking the U.S. side in this fight). But his ultimate message is an exclusive focus on a negotiated resolution that appears to ignore the multifaceted nature of the Iranian menace:

A better approach would be for the United States to engage directly with the Iranians and to lead a global diplomatic offensive to prevent them from building nuclear weapons. We need tough, direct negotiations, not just with Iran but also with our allies, especially Russia, to get them to support us in presenting Iran with credible carrots and sticks.

No nation has ever been forced to renounce nuclear weapons, but many have chosen to do so. The Iranians will not end their nuclear program because we threaten them and call them names. They will renounce nukes because we convince them that they will be safer and more prosperous if they do that than if they don't.

Now, lining up a diplomatic coalition to pressure Iran on its nuclear program is all well and good - that's largely the path the Bush Administration has signalled in recent years - but at the end of the day, an agreement with the Iranians is no more likely to hold up than the current or past agreements with North Korea. The problem with Iran - as it was with Saddam Hussein's Iraq - is inherent in the nature of the regime, and by no means limited to the nature of the regime's armaments. Validating and rewarding that regime in exchange for nuclear concessions of dubious enforceability will only weaken our position in dealing with Iran's support of terror groups in Iraq and Lebanon. Unfortunately, Richardson - whether out of naivete or an effort to appeal to the ostrich faction in the Democratic primaries - is all too willing to get fooled again.