Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Oct 9 2006 (IPS) — In its initial reaction to Monday’s North Korean nuclear test, the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush indicated it will seek the strongest possible sanctions against Pyongyang at the U.N. Security Council but was not considering taking military action on its own, at least for now.

At the same time, independent analysts said the test will almost certainly strengthen administration hawks, led by Vice President Dick Cheney, who have strongly opposed bilateral talks with North Korea in favour of a strategy of escalating unilateral and international pressure designed to weaken and ultimately bring down the regime.

“Cheney and his supporters see negotiating with North Korea as the worst idea possible, because any meaningful discussion, let alone any agreement, with the regime would extend (its) lifespan,” said John Feffer, a Korea specialist with Foreign Policy in Focus, a progressive think tank here.

“With this test, they can now argue that North Korea has gone past the point of no return, and the only ethical option is to squeeze it until it collapses,” he added.

Feffer and a number of other analysts, however, believe that such an approach remains unrealistic, particularly because China and South Korea, while willing to impose stronger sanctions than they have considered in the past, will oppose measures that would significantly enhance the possibility of regime collapse.

“The question is really whether the Bush administration will want to persist in what has been a failed approach or will combine inevitable sanctions with the possibility of moving back to the negotiating table,” said Alan Romberg, a Korea specialist at the Henry L. Stimson Centre here.

Given the administration’s past rejection of Chinese and South Korean appeals to engage Pyongyang, however, Romberg said he was not optimistic. “The likelihood is that there won’t be progress (in negotiations) between now and the end of the Bush administration,” he said, adding that “the North’s decision to test was importantly based on that calculation.”

Monday’s underground test came just six days after Pyongyang publicly announced that a test was forthcoming.

The announcement came as little surprise to a number of policy experts here, including former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, who had warned that such a test was likely if Washington continued to rebuff appeals for direct talks after Pyongyang conducted a series of missile tests last Jul. 4.

The administration not only failed to heed those appeals; it also began planning to add to stringent financial sanctions against Pyongyang’s alleged money-laundering and counterfeiting activities that it imposed last November by implementing a comprehensive new set of sanctions designed to isolate North Korea from much of the global banking system.

Pyongyang had demanded that Washington lift the first set of sanctions as a condition for returning to the so-called “Six-Party Talks” – a negotiation involving North and South Korea, Russia, China, Japan and the U.S. – that in September 2005 reached agreement in principle that North Korea would abandon its nuclear programmes in return for a far-reaching aid package and security guarantees.

Despite entreaties by China and South Korea, which both condemned the North’s missile tests and imposed milder sanctions of their own to underline their disapproval of Pyongyang’s behaviour, Washington refused to lift the sanctions or to engage in direct talks.

During the past week, China, South Korea, Russia, and Japan all joined with Washington in warning Pyongyang against conducting a test. The Security Council added its voice last Friday, expressing “deep concern” about Pyongyang’s stated intent and noting that a test “would bring universal condemnation”.

But the North appears to have concluded that it had nothing to lose by going ahead.

“North Korea’s final goal is survival, and a test is their final option,” Ahn Yinhay, a Korea University professor in Seoul, told the Washington Post after last week’s announcement. “Given the current situation – the enormous pressure from the U.S.’s hard-line policy – the North Koreans may think they have no other means to try to get out of this deadlock. They may think they have nothing else to lose.”

Whether or not Pyongyang miscalculated – as many experts here believe it has – remains to be seen.

The Bush administration, which has received strong backing from Japan, clearly hopes that international reaction, particularly from what its U.N. ambassador, John Bolton, has referred to as Pyongyang’s “protectors” on the Security Council – China and Russia – will go along with far-reaching financial and related sanctions to punish and weaken the regime.

Its most ambitious hopes include a Security Council resolution that would authorise searching ships coming in and out of North Korea for nuclear- or missile-related equipment or technology consistent with Washington’s Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI).

Bush appeared to be setting the foundation for such an approach in his initial reaction to Monday’s test. Calling it a “threat to international peace and security” – the phrasing normally reserved for invoking Chapter VII of the U.N. Charter that authorises military force to back up Security Council demands – Bush stressed that he was at least as concerned about the dangers posed by Pyongyang’s proliferation record as by any direct threat its now-demonstrated nuclear capability could pose to the U.S.

“The transfer of nuclear weapons or material by North Korea to states or non-state entities would be considered a grave threat to the United States,” he said in a White House statement in which he noted that North Korea was already “one of the world’s leading proliferators” of missile technology.

“And we would hold North Korea fully accountable for the consequences of such action,” he added.

Most analysts here believe that Washington will gain support for sanctions, but not so far-reaching as it would like, particularly given the opposition by China, which denounced North Korea’s test in unusually harsh terms, to measures that it thought would cause Pyongyang’s downfall.

“There will be sanctions, but the question is how serious they will be,” said Scott Bruce, an expert at the California-based Nautilus Institute. “For Beijing, the only thing scarier than a North Korea with nuclear weapons is a nuclear North Korea in a state of collapse,” he added, noting that China had followed up its condemnation of Pyongyang Monday with an appeal for negotiations.

“North Korea’s situation is indeed threatening, but there’s not a lot the U.S. and other countries can do without courting the destruction of the regime, which no one, except the U.S. and maybe Japan, wants,” according to Don Oberdorfer, chairman of the U..S. Korea Institute at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS).

“China is going to want to express its anger very clearly, but it will not want to cut off the diplomatic process, which represents, in most people’s view, the only way forward, and South Korea will adopt a similar position,” according to Romberg. “They will take harsher action than they have to date, but they will also want to preserve the diplomatic option.”

“A key point is whether North Korea will now feel it has demonstrated enough strength to move back to the table even while U.S. financial sanctions remain in place. That shouldn’t be ruled out, and, if the North is really prepared to sit down even in this new situation and negotiate seriously on denuclearisation of the peninsula… there is some prospect for getting unstuck.”