May 22, 2015 | Forbes

North Korea’s Takeaway From The Iran Nuclear Talks

In defense of the Iran nuclear talks, Obama administration officials have made a number of unlikely claims, including the repeated proposition that under the current Tehran regime Iran’s nuclear program could be transformed into something “exclusively peaceful.” But one of the most bizarre statements yet came just last weekend from Secretary of State John Kerry. Speaking to reporters in Beijing, Kerry said he hopes an Iran nuclear deal could have a “positive influence” on North Korea.

Seriously? To whatever extent the past 15 months of Iran talks have had any effect so far on North Korea’s behavior, it’s hard to discern anything positive. Actually, it’s impossible. Over the past few weeks alone, North Korea has hyped its program for submarine-launched missiles, threatened to fire without warning on South Korean ships in disputed waters, threatened America’s ambassador to Seoul with a “bigger mishap” than the knife attack he suffered in March, and bragged of having already succeeded in miniaturizing nuclear warheads — which would allow for missile delivery of nuclear bombs.

It might be tempting to write off a lot of this activity as bluster. North Korea’s state-released photos of Kim watching a submarine missile launch appear to have been doctored to suggest a program more advanced than whatever North Korea currently has. But consider the larger picture.

Since the Nov. 2013 announcement of the Joint Plan of Action that launched the Iran nuclear talks, North Korea has prepared its Punggye-ri nuclear test site for another detonation and used the United Nations press podium to put the world on notice to expect a fourth nuclear test, possibly of a new kind. At the U.N., North Korea this February served notice, via a letter from its ambassador to the Security Council, that the U.S. “should be mindful that the time of nightmare is coming nearer when they will meet the most disastrous, final doom on the U.S. mainland.”

If that sounds overwrought, bear in mind North Korea is pursuing multiple pathways to do at least substantial damage. Last fall North Korea with its burgeoning asymmetric warfare capabilities snaked right into the U.S., via a massive cyber attack on Sony Pictures. This included terror threats against Americans who might choose to go see a Sony comedy, “The Interview,” which mocks North Korean tyrant Kim Jong Un. If that struck some Americans as farce, North Korea’s cyber foray into Hollywood could yet prove an exploratory prelude to devastating tragedy.

Mixed in with North Korea’s hype are its growing capabilities for mass murder, pursued by a Pyongyang regime that in 2010 torpedoed and sank a South Korean frigate, the Cheonan and shelled a South Korean island. This is a regime with a history — as a matter of state policy — of kidnapping, assassinations, counterfeiting, narcotics-peddling and arms smuggling, with a special affinity for other rogue states and disregard for civilized norms. Nor does the Kim regime hesitate to execute, imprison, torture, starve and stunt its own.

According to recent public statements by U.S. officials, North Korea is homing in on the ability to hit the U.S. with a nuclear strike. Speaking to reporters at the Pentagon last month, Admiral William Gortney, head of the U.S. Northern command, said it is the U.S. military’s assessment that North Korea has already acquired the ability to miniaturize a nuclear warhead and mount it on a road-mobile KN-08 long-range missile that could be used to target the United States. While it seems this system has yet to be tested, North Korea has gone into overdrive generally on its long-running missile program. In testimony this February to the Senate Armed Services Committee, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said that North Korea has “expanded the size and sophistication of its ballistic missile forces, ranging from close range missiles to ICBMs.” He added that in tests conducted in 2014, “North Korea launched an unprecedented number of ballistic missiles.”

The purpose of a ballistic missile is to deliver a nuclear weapon. It appears that North Korea has also ramped up its program for making nuclear bombs. Having unveiled an illicit uranium enrichment facility at its Yongbyon nuclear complex in 2010, North Korea has expanded that facility, may be secretly operating others, and in tandem with its re-started plutonium-producing Yongbyon reactor now appears to be making fuel for both uranium and plutonium-based nuclear weapons.

According to Chinese officials, as reported last month by The Wall Street Journal, North Korea may already have some 20 nuclear warheads, and based on its uranium-enrichment capacities alone could double that to 40 by next year.

This scene is a fast-growing threat not only to South Korea, but to the United States and to its allies as far afield as Israel in the Middle East. North Korea has a record of selling its weapons and technology, especially to the Middle East, where its roster of longtime clients includes terror-sponsoring Syria and Iran, and Iran’s Lebanon-based chief terror mascot, Hezbollah. Among the potential clients are such terrorist groups as Al Qaeda and ISIS.

Now comes Kerry’s hope that the inducements the U.S. and its nuclear negotiating cohorts are offering to Iran might inspire North Korea to seek its own rapprochement with the “global community.” As Kerry described it in Beijing, an Iran nuclear deal would be good for Iran’s economy and global standing, while allowing it to keep a “peaceful nuclear power program.” All Iran has to do in return is commit to “a verifiable, irreversible denuclearization for weaponization.”

So what’s not to like? Kerry’s big question about the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea is “whether or not the DPRK is capable of internalizing that kind of message.”

That might make sense were North Korea run by a benign regime (in which case, this nuclear bomb problem might not exist in the first place). But North Korea is ruled by a totalitarian dynasty that places its own survival and monolithic rule above all else, and has built its strategy for survival around its long-running, deeply rooted, extensively staffed nuclear weapons program.

Not least, the Pyongyang regime has already internalized the record of Libya’s late tyrant, Muammar Qaddafi, who in 2003 cut a deal in which he actually surrendered his nuclear program. For a few years, Qaddafi enjoyed a whirl on the world community circuit, including a seat for his government on the U.N. Security Council. Then, in 2011, the Libyan people rose up against him, and, with the Obama administration leading from behind, Qaddafi was dragged from a drain pipe and killed. One need not mourn his death in order to observe that North Korea drew a lesson from it, as well as from the failure of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein to roll out the nuclear weapons he was suspected of developing. This week, North Korea responded to U.S. overtures with an article in its strictly state-run press, describing its nuclear force as “the nation’s treasure,” and saying “The U.S. is foolishly seeking to denuclearize and stifle the DPRK. However, the U.S. would be well advised to clearly know that the DPRK is neither Iraq nor Libya.”

Over the years, the Pyongyang regime has demonstrated its ability to internalize a large inventory of insights into the blind spots of American politics and foreign policy, to judge by its success in playing both the Clinton and Bush administrations, with their relays of nuclear-dealing diplomats. Repeatedly snookering the U.S., North Korea has cut a series of nuclear deals in which it has collected concessions, rubbed shoulders as a player with major world powers at the bargaining table, then bamboozled, cheated and reneged its way toward its current arsenal.

Recall the (failed) Agreed Framework signed in 1994 under President Bill Clinton, followed by the Six-Party Talks under President George W. Bush, which produced the (failed) 2005 “Joint Statement” about “commitment for commitment,” followed by the (failed) 2007 North Korean nuclear climbdown agreement.

Which brings us to Iran, longtime ally and weapons client of North Korea. Iran, in its current nuclear negotiations, appears not only to be following the North Korean playbook, but embellishing on it. Tehran has already obtained concessions that even North Korea never got at the bargaining table, such as the “right” to enrich uranium. With a twice-extended deadline, now set for the end of June, the Iran nuclear talks have become a marathon spectacle of Iranian demands and U.S. surrender.

With some Iran sanctions officially eased, and others eroding at speed, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei stipulates terms for retaining nuclear facilities and limiting access that would make any deal both reversible and unverifiable. Against the backdrop of Iran’s flag planted among those of the world’s major powers, flanked by senior western diplomats, Iran’s foreign minister and chief negotiator, Javad Zarif, smiles as the star of media photo-ops in Geneva, Lausanne and Vienna. Meanwhile, Iran expands its reach in the Middle East, jockeys with U.S. naval forces off war torn Yemen, ramps up its threats to commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, and, according to a Reuters dispatch last month, sourced to a leaked report by the U.N.’s panel of experts on Iran sanctions, maintains an active nuclear procurement network.

There is nothing here to suggest that out of the Iran nuclear talks will emerge a deal that would inspire North Korea to give up its rapidly advancing nuclear program. If anything, there’s a danger that Iran’s regime, awash in additional billions of oil revenue, could spend some of that lucre at the Pyongyang nuclear bazaar. As for North Korea, at best Kim Jong Un might be enticed to send his envoys to the nuclear bargaining table to see what concessions Pyongyang might next collect, before cheating and reneging. The real message of both the past North Korean nuclear talks, and the current Iran talks, is that nuclear extortion works. That is the message the entire world is now internalizing, and unless the U.S. changes course to send a dramatically different message, this does not end well.

Claudia Rosett is journalist-in-residence with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and heads its Investigative Reporting Project. Follow her on Twitter @CRosett

Issues:

Iran North Korea