It has been widely speculated that there is a debate within the administration of US President George Bush regarding policy toward North Korea. At one end are the Pentagon hawks who prefer some form of regime change as the most ideal, effective, and enduring solution. As Maureen Dowd of the New York Times commented on April 21, 2003, the hawkish camp led by US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld generally includes US Vice President Dick Cheney, US Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Weekly Standard editor William Kristol, New York Times writer William Safire, the Wall Street Journal editorial board, the Defense Policy Board (including Richard Perle, James Woolsey, Harry Rowen), and the US Undersecretary of State for Arms Control, John Bolton.

At the other end of the debate on North Korea are the moderates led by US Secretary of State Colin Powell. They believe that disarmament of North Korea is best achieved through continued discussion. Members of this group do not believe that US engagement will change North Korean intentions. Yet they argue that talks with North Korea will bring about a negotiated settlement and will build a coalition among concerned countries for taking action if engagement fails. Individuals in the “Powell camp” include Director of Policy Planning Richard Haass, most of the US Foreign Service, US Senator Joe Biden, political journalist Bob Woodward, and many in the liberal media and academic elite.

The split in views on North Korea became particularly apparent during the US-Sino-North Korea talks in Beijing in August 2003. Pyongyang’s 11th-hour threat to reprocess plutonium led to vigorous internal debates about possible countermeasures. Those in the Powell group advocated continuing the talks. Those in the hawkish group opposed US attendance at the talks and, after the decision to attend was made, tried to replace James Kelly, US Assistant Secretary of State and leader of the Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs, with John Bolton as the US delegation head.

While policy gaps on North Korea clearly exist, they are not nearly as wide as the press suggests. Both parties involved agree that the United States should not tolerate North Korea’s blackmail attempts, and that Pyongyang needs to come clean on its nuclear weapons programs before any form of engagement can be considered. Where differences do lie are in how one should define “coming clean.” While Pentagon hawks might demand total disarmament before serious engagement, others are considering more flexible requirements for negotiations to start. The bottom line is that both groups demand real, immediate, and irreversible steps by North Korea toward disarmament.

Both groups are concerned about North Korea’s admission of April 2003 to chief US negotiator James Kelly, that it possesses nuclear weapons. Pundits wrote off the admission, because it only confirmed what intelligence estimates had suspected for some time. Advocates of engagement with North Korea saw its nuclear confession as an almost desperate cry for negotiation. They reasoned that North Korea had put its weapons on the bargaining table in exchange for US security assurances and international aid. In spite of these assessments, I believe that both groups saw that Pyongyang’s nuclear confession brought it one step closer to recognition as a nuclear state, one of North Korea’s major goals.

It is widely agreed that the premeditated nature of the nuclear weapons admission, which was made on the first day of meetings, fits well with Kim Jong Il’s ultimate goal. What North Korea wants is not a simple quid pro quo of nuclear disarmament for US security assurances. What Kim Jong Il really wants is bilateral negotiations with the United States to attain security assurances and international support, and to retain an extant nuclear weapons arsenal.

This suspicion is further confirmed by the North Korean delegation head Li Gun’s statements to Kelly at the end of the first day of the Beijing talks. Li, the Deputy Director- General of the North Korean Foreign Ministry’s American Affairs Bureau, reportedly told Kelly that the North could test its nuclear weapons or sell them depending on what the United States did next. These statements changed the terms of negotiation for Pyongyang. Previously, North Korea had expressed a willingness to give up its nuclear programs in exchange for security assurances from the United States. Now the North is basically declaring that it will forgo testing or sale of these weapons but not give up their development.

There is little disagreement that North Korea’s nuclear affirmation was designed to extort concessions from its richer neighbor, South Korea. A skeptic would say that nuclear weapons do not threaten South Korea. Why is North Korea extorting when asking may be enough to get concessions from a new South Korea itching to continue its Sunshine Policy, which stresses peaceful engagement?

The answer is that North Korea does not like to ask for anything because asking implies weakness. The nuclear crisis has cut short South Korea’s economic recovery and lowered investor confidence. Skepticism about South Korean markets abounds on Wall Street, as investment houses like J.P. Morgan and Goldman Sachs advise against investing in Korean companies even though they acknowledge that their shares are undervalued. US foreign direct investment in Korea plummeted 72 percent since January 2003, when North Korea began breaking its nonproliferation commitment in earnest, and South Korea’s stock market has dropped 18.3 percent since then. The day after the North’s nuclear weapons declaration in Beijing, stock markets in Seoul and Tokyo opened down four percent.

Few in either policy camp believe that North Korea will abandon its aggressive strategy. Pyongyang adheres to a time-honored practice of using threats to turn South’s economic advantage into its own bargaining leverage. Recently released communist foreign ministry archives from Eastern Europe contain Kim Il Sung’s view that even if North Korea could not catch up to South Korea economically, it could use limited military provocations to create havoc in the South. Bizarre as the strategy might sound, it was the implicit rationale for the 1968 commando raid on the presidential palace in Seoul, the terrorist bombing of a civilian South Korean airliner in 1987 to disrupt Seoul’s hosting of the Olympics, and the attempted assassinations of two South Korean presidents in 1974 and 1983. Moreover, it shows the extent to which relative power and control continue to define North Korea’s state of relations with its southern neighbor.