Christopher Hill’s Outpost: Things Fall Apart (Part II)

Yesterday, I reviewed the sections of Christopher Hill’s memoir, Outpost: Life on the Frontlines of American Diplomacy, dealing with the negotiation of the September 2005 Joint Statement and the Banco Delta Asia problem. The resolution of BDA set the stage for two operational agreements: the Initial Actions for Implementation of the Joint Statement of February 13, 2007 (here) and the Second-Phase Actions for the Implementation of the September 2005 Joint Statement of October 3, 2007 (here). The strategy pursued by the US was clear, and according to Hill was understood all the way up to the President. The idea was to pay the North Koreans—through heavy fuel oil shipments—to start to disable and ultimately dismantle Yongbyon; that was the entering wedge. A host of other difficult issues were effectively pushed off in a phased fashion: getting a full declaration, addressing the evidence on the existence of an HEU program, getting some kind of agreement on proliferation and—above all—negotiating a verification agreement. Hill traces the near-comic episodes of the North Koreans allowing samples to be taken of aluminum tubing that came back with traces of enriched uranium; even the declaration finally submitted by the North Koreans had such traces. But it was widely believed that reprocessing was the main route to fissile material at that point and that waiting to do everything at once risked getting nothing at all.

Here the detail in Hill’s memoir actually sidesteps a few points that could have received more attention. Both the North Koreans—who can be highly legalistic--and critics of the administration on the left noted that verification was technically not part of the Phase I and Phase II agreements. The North Koreans clearly did not see verification as a component of their obligations in the summer of 2008. But under alternative accounts to those offered by Hill, verification rose in importance within the administration as Secretary Rice handled the internal politics of a highly-imperfect North Korean declaration. The declaration put a squeeze on the President because he had to take the highly-visible action of removing the North Koreans from the state terrorism list, one of the quid-pro-quos for keeping momentum. Not only was this move unpopular with hawks—Bolton, now out of office, criticized it openly—but it annoyed the Japanese, who saw the history of abductions as an example of state terrorism.

Hill outlines briefly the last gasp of his deputies to negotiate a verification protocol and his final trip to Pyongyang in October 2008. But by that time the stalemate was clear: the North Koreans wanted a verification protocol that was limited to the already-declared Yongbyon site. This would have left the HEU program, which clearly reached beyond Yongbyon to research and production of centrifuges elsewhere, a complete mystery.

It is hard to know whether any alternative strategy could have threaded the needle. The entire first Bush administration made little progress on the issue. BDA was a costly detour, but would it have mattered if Treasury could have been reined in? Would it have been wiser to make sure that verification was baked into the 2007 agreements more firmly?

My guess is that Kim Jong Il’s stroke in August 2008 had far-reaching implications that we cannot even fully imagine. Suffice to say that the circumstances were hardly ripe for new concessions. Moreover, Pyongyang might have felt that they could play the incoming administration, on which they sorely miscalculated. In one of the few off notes in the book, Hill portrays the 2008 breakdown as a "propitious pause." There was nothing propitious about it. By the time of the second nuclear test in 2009, North Korea had firmly broken out and seemed to have declining interest in negotiations of any sort. But this was not for lack of trying. Iut internal politics in North Korea appeared to turn hard-right in late 2008-9 and have remained that way since; debates about incentives and sanctions probably matter less than we think.

Other memoirs we have covered: