The world has
become a much more dangerous place since Monday, when Mohammad Javad Zarif, Iran’s foreign
minister – and the diplomatic architect
of the Iran Nuclear Agreement - suddenly resigned after an internal political
struggle.
He was quoted
in an interview with the Jomhoori Eslami newspaper as saying: “A deadly
poison for foreign policy is that it becomes the subject of factionalism and
parties’ quarrel.” He also reportedly complained about constant attempts to
undermine him as he negotiated the 2015 nuclear deal
with the West. “We were more worried by the daggers that were
struck from behind than the negotiations,” he said. “The other side never
managed to wear me down but internal pressure wore me down both during and
after the talks.”(“Zarif resignation is a telling moment in Iran’s battle between moderates and hardliners,” Times, 26 February 2019; https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/world/zarif-resignation-is-a-telling-moment-in-irans-battle-between-moderates-and-hardliners-rwwzh02jk)
This was
followed within 24 hours by the very quick escalation of the India-Pakistan
military conflict in Kashmir and border areas with Pakistan, reaching the
chilling possibility of a catastrophic nuclear exchange, leading to the terrifying
headline this morning:
Imran Khan to consult nuclear chiefs after India’s first
air strike on Pakistan in decades
(ABC News,
27 February 2019; https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-02-27/imran-khan-stages-meetings-response-to-indian-air-strikes/10853290)
Newswires reported that “Pakistan's
Prime Minister Imran Khan will stage an emergency parliamentary session and
meet with the body in control of Islamabad's nuclear arsenal in response to
India's first air strikes on Pakistan since 1971.
Key points:
·
Indian fighter jets struck an area 50
kilometres into Pakistan on Tuesday
·
India said the strike was in response to a
terrorist attack that killed 44 Indian police
·
Pakistan said its own warplanes had
scattered Indian jets, forcing them to drop their payload over uninhabited
areas
The two nuclear-armed
neighbours have fought three wars since partition in 1947, and the majority of
them have been over Kashmir — a territory both India and Pakistan claim in
full.
All of this
provided the prelude to the second bilateral meeting on nuclear disarmament and security on the Korean peninsula
between President Kim Jong-un of North Korea and US President Trump ironically
and symbolically in Hanoi, capital city of Vietnam, the only nation to have
defeated the United States in war in the modern era.
A former
diplomat who defected to South Korea in 2016 said that the North Korean leader
had no intention of relinquishing his nuclear weapons.(New York Times, 27
February 2019;https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/26/world/asia/trump-kim-summit-vietnam.html)
Although these are bilateral nuclear
negotiations, the US’s closest military and security ally, the UK, could play a
very important supporting role in these very important discussions,
because North Korea developed
nuclear weapons with the crucial assistance copied British atomic bomb-making
technology.
There is significant
evidence that the British Magnox nuclear plant design – which was primarily
built as a military plutonium production factory – provided the blueprint for
the North Korean military plutonium programme based in Yongbyon. Here is what Douglas
(now Lord) Hogg, then a Conservative minister, admitted in a written
parliamentary reply in 1994: “We do not know whether North Korea has drawn on
plans of British reactors in the production of its own reactors. North Korea
possesses a graphite moderated reactor which, while much smaller, has generic
similarities to the reactors operated by British Nuclear Fuels plc. However,
design information of these British reactors is not classified and has appeared
in technical journals.”
(Douglas
Hogg, written parliamentary reply to Labour MP Llew Smith, Hansard 25 May 1994;
http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/written_answers/1994/may/25/korea#column_186w)
The uranium enrichment
programmes of both North Korea and Iran also have a UK connection. The
blueprints of this type of plant were stolen by Pakistani scientist, A Q Khan,
from the URENCO enrichment plant in The Netherlands in the early 1970s.(see
the book by David Albright, President of the Institute for Science and International
Security in Washington DC, http://isis-online.org/about/staff/albright/,
Peddling Peril,2010 pp 15-28,Free Press, New York)
This plant was - and
remains - one-third owned by the UK government. The Pakistan government
subsequently sold the technology to Iran, who later exchanged it for North
Korean Nodong missiles.
A technical delegation
from the A Q Khan Research Labs visited North Korea in the summer of
1996. The secret enrichment plant was said to be based in caves near
Kumch’ang-ni, 100 miles north of the capital, Pyonyang, where US satellite photos
showed tunnel entrances being built. Hwang Jang-yop, a former aid to
President Kim Il-sung (the grandfather of the current North Korean President)
who defected in 1997, revealed details to Western intelligence investigators
(Levy A, Scott-Clark C Deception:
Pakistan, the United States, and the Global Weapons Conspiracy, 2007,
p.281, Atlantic Books)
Backstory
Imran Khan to consult nuclear chiefs after
India's first air strike on Pakistan in decades
Pakistan's Prime Minister
Imran Khan will stage an emergency parliamentary session and meet with the body
in control of Islamabad's nuclear arsenal in response to India's first air
strikes on Pakistan since 1971.
Key points:
·
Indian fighter jets struck an area 50
kilometres into Pakistan on Tuesday
·
India said the strike was in response to a
terrorist attack that killed 44 Indian police
·
Pakistan said its own warplanes had
scattered Indian jets, forcing them to drop their payload over uninhabited
areas
The two nuclear-armed
neighbours have fought three wars since partition in 1947, and the majority of
them have been over Kashmir — a territory both India and Pakistan claim in
full.
The air strike near
Balakot, a town 50 kilometres into Pakistan from the Indian border, was the
deepest raid launched by India since the last of its three wars with Pakistan,
but there were competing claims about any damage caused.
India said its air force
jets hit a training camp of Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM), the militant group that
claimed credit for a February 14 suicide bombing attack that killed more than 44 Indian paramilitary
police in Kashmir.
Indian Foreign Secretary
Vijay Gokhale said "a very large number" of militants were killed in
the strikes in north-east Pakistan, which were launched as a result of
government intelligence that JeM was planning more attacks
"The
existence of such training facilities, capable of training hundreds of jihadis,
could not have functioned without the knowledge of the Pakistani
authorities," Mr Gokhale said.
A senior Indian
Government source said 300 militants had been killed in the strikes and
warplanes had ventured as far as 80 kilometres inside Pakistan, but they
provided no evidence.
'You all know what that means'
Pakistan has disputed
India's claims of success, and later said that its own warplanes had scattered
Indian jets and forced them to drop their payload over uninhabited areas,
resulting in zero casualties.
An Indian official later
said air force jets intercepted Pakistani planes in Kashmir in a separate
incident, and said an Indian jet crashed, killing two pilots and a civilian.
Pakistan's National
Security Committee (NSC), comprising top officials including Mr Khan and army
chief Qamar Javed Bajwa, said the Prime Minister would "engage with global
leadership to expose irresponsible Indian policy".
A government spokesperson
added that a command and control authority meeting, which decides over the use
of nuclear weapons, had been convened for Wednesday, and noted: "You all
know what that means."
Speaking to the ABC's AM
program, Dhruva Jaishankar from the Brookings Institute said
Pakistan's retort was an attempt to quell further military escalation.
"Pakistan
has reason to deny and downplay the effectiveness of the strikes," Ms
Jaishankar said.
"It helps to manage
domestic political opinion and ensure that there's not a demand for escalation,
and India, I think, has been very clear that something did occur," she
said.
Indians celebrate Pakistani
strike
While the results of the
strikes in the early hours of Tuesday were disputed, that did not stop many in
India from believing their government's version of events.
"Modi ji (Indian
Prime Minister Narendra Modi) has finally done it," said Sandeep Sharma, a
driver in the Jammu region of India's border state of Jammu and Kashmir.
"There's
a lot of anger against Pakistan here."
India's opposition
leaders, many of whom have banded together against the ruling Bharatiya Janata
Party (BJP), congratulated the Indian Air Force (IAF), though they stopped
short of praising the Prime Minister.
"I salute the pilots
of the IAF," Rahul Gandhi, leader of India's main opposition Congress,
said in a tweet.
In a village 100 metres
from the Line of Control that acts as the de facto border with Pakistan, men
gathered around a bunker for security forces that is under construction and
shouted slogans hailing India.
Pakistan ‘shoots
down two Indian jets’ over Kashmir
Hugh Tomlinson,
Delhi | Aoun Sahi, Islamabad
February 27 2019, 9:00am, The Times
Indian
soldiers and onlookers gather round the remains of the Indian fighter jet that
was shot down near the line of control that divides KashmirTAUSEEF
MUSTAFA/AFP/GETTY
Pakistan
said that it had shot down two Indian jets, captured two pilots and bombed
targets in Kashmir as Islamabad struck back after yesterday’s airstrike by
Indian jets.
Two
Indian aircraft were alleged to have crossed into Pakistani airspace for a
second day and Major-General Asif Ghafoor, Pakistan’s military spokesman, said
the downed planes had fallen either side of the line of control that divides
Kashmir.
Pakistan
then announced it had launched airstrikes of its own against “non-military
targets” across the line of control. There was no immediate confirmation of the
claim by India but local reports suggested that at least one Indian aircraft
had crashed in Kashmir, killing both airmen.
In
a statement, Pakistan’s foreign ministry said: “We have no intention of
escalation but are fully prepared to do so if forced.”
Pakistan
released video footage of what it claimed was one of the captured Indian
pilots, identifying his name, rank and service number. “Two Indian jets entered
Pakistani airspace. The PAF was ready, faced them. The two planes were shot
down. One fell in our space, another on their side. Two pilots were arrested,”
General Ghafoor said.
The
move comes a day after Delhi launched airstrikes
deep into Pakistan, the first since 1971, claiming it had killed
hundreds of militants planning terrorist attacks on Indian soil. The strike was
at an alleged terrorist training camp near the town of Balakot, about 120 miles
north of Islamabad.
Imran
Khan, the Pakistani prime minister, had vowed to respond to calls for action
from senior politicians who were outraged at gloating by the Indian government
after yesterday’s strike. Mr Khan had already summoned a meeting today of the
National Command Authority, the body that oversees Pakistan’s arsenal of
nuclear weapons.
Some
in Pakistan have argued that the country’s nuclear deterrent would be rendered
useless if it continued to allow Indian incursions on its airspace without
reply. “If India is striking at so-called terrorist backers without a shred of
evidence, we also retain reciprocal rights to retaliate,” the Pakistani
government said.
Hardliners poisoned
my dealings with the world, says Iran’s foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif
Richard Spencer,
Middle East Correspondent
The Times, February 27 2019
Mohammad
Javad Zarif said that infighting had left him with no credibilityTHE ASAHI
SHIMBUN /GETTY
Iran’s ruling
regime was plunged into an extraordinary public row after its popular foreign
minister tried to resign, saying hardliners had poisoned his dealings with the
outside world.
Mohammad Javad
Zarif went public after Monday’s unexpected late-night offer of resignation,
making his statement by the unprecedented means of a post on the social
media site Instagram.
He said that
official photographs of President Assad of Syria, who was shown in Tehran
earlier on Monday with the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and
President Rouhani, but with Mr Zarif conspicuously absent, were the last straw
in a series of crises caused by factional infighting.
“After the
photos of today’s meetings, Javad Zarif no longer has any credibility in the
world as the foreign minister,” he said in a message to a journalist.
Earlier he was
quoted in an interview with the Jomhoori Eslami newspaper as saying: “A
deadly poison for foreign policy is that it becomes the subject of factionalism
and parties’ quarrel.”
He complained
about constant attempts to undermine him as he negotiated the 2015 nuclear deal
with the West. “We were more worried by the daggers that were
struck from behind than the negotiations,” he said. “The other side never
managed to wear me down but internal pressure wore me down both during and
after the talks.”
After his offer
to resign he won public backing from the reformist Mr Rouhani, who posted a
message on his Instagram account saying that he had rejected it. The text was
accompanied by a picture of Mr Rouhani and Mr Zarif together and smiling, with
the hashtags “#Zarif_is_not_alone” and “#Zarif_is_staying” in Farsi. The
president said in a speech that the foreign ministry and Mr Zarif were “in the
front line” against the United States.
<img class="Media-img"
President Assad
of Syria with President Rouhani of Iran during a visit to Tehran on
MondayHO/AFP/GETTY
Mr Rouhani and
Mr Zarif have been subjected to sniping from regime hardliners since they
negotiated the nuclear deal, and in particular since President Trump withdrew
from it last year. After Mr Zarif announced his resignation, some were
delighted. One said that Mr Zarif was running away from confronting America
over the failure of the deal; another said he should be subjected to a travel
ban and his entourage investigated to see if it contained western spies.
Mr Zarif is
said to have tendered his resignation unsuccessfully before but his decision to
articulate his reasons publicly represents a clear split in the regime, or at
best a sign of dissatisfaction with the support he received from Mr Rouhani and
the supreme leader.
Esfandyar
Batmanghelidj, founder of the Europe-Iran Foundation, said that Mr Zarif was
among the most popular politicians in Iran, which would make it hard for the
regime, even hardline figures within it, to accept his departure with
equanimity.
“Some people
have suggested that he was trying to force the issue,” Mr Batmanghelidj said.
“I suspect that he may well remain and will end up in a stronger position.”
The Trump
administration has been accused of playing into the hands of hardliners by pulling
out of the nuclear deal. However, it insists that there is little real
difference between the positions of the different Iranian factions.
Mike Pompeo,
the US secretary of state, “noted” the resignation offer. “We’ll see if it
sticks,” he said, adding that Mr Zarif and Mr Rouhani were “front men for a
corrupt religious mafia” and that the supreme leader “makes all final
decisions”.
Zarif resignation
is a telling moment in Iran’s battle between moderates and hardliners
February 26
2019, 5:00pm, The Times
Richard
Spencer, Beirut
Even the way
you post your letter of resignation sends a message in Iran. The battle between
the regime “moderates” against “hardliners” in the establishment is being waged
on American social media platforms: Twitter, which is formally banned, and
Instagram, which only last month prosecutors said they wanted to block too.
Mohammad Javad
Zarif is President Rouhani’s most popular minister, seen by ordinary Iranians
as having both stood up to America and yet won relief from crippling sanctions
in the 2015 nuclear deal. He knows this, and so his offer of resignation can be
read as a “put up or shut up” to hardline elements not only on his own behalf
but on that of Mr Rouhani too.
Both men have faced
criticism for the 2015 deal, and Mr Rouhani for Iran’s economic hardships too.
However, it is no secret that all major decisions have to be signed off by the
Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, which makes his refusal to defend Mr Zarif
and Mr Rouhani from those in his own conservative faction hard for them to
take.
Mr Rouhani has
thrown his weight behind Mr Zarif, sending out coded messages himself and more
overt messages via his chief of staff, Mahmoud Vaezi.
That leaves the
regime on something of a knife-edge. If Mr Zarif stays in his post, it will be
read as an unequivocal sign of his backing from the supreme leader, one that
makes serious further criticism all but impossible.
If the
resignation stands, then Mr Rouhani, too, is fatally undermined.
One obvious
result of that could be an even more hostile stance by the regime, perhaps
involving a decisive rejection of the nuclear deal now the US has pulled out,
and even a wider drift to a North Korea-like international isolation.
A compromise is
more likely, with Mr Zarif replaced by a similar figure such as Mr Vaezi or his
deputy foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi. However, it would leave Mr Rouhani a
lame duck president for his last two years in office, and encourage further
attacks by the conservatives on “moderate” positions.
Intel: Iran’s top diplomat
offers resignation after being iced out of Syria talks
Al-Monitor Staff February 25, 2019
Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif
suddenly resigned Monday in a post on Instagram where
he expressed gratitude “to the dear and honorable Iranian people for the last
67 months” while apologizing for “all the shortcomings during my
service.” Zarif was the face of Iranian diplomacy throughout the nuclear
talks and their aftermath and has faced relentless criticism from hard-liners
over his outreach to the West.
Why it matters: The timing of Zarif’s
resignation, which has so far not been accepted by President Hassan Rouhani, coincides with a visit
from Syrian President Bashar al-Assad at which the foreign minister was
noticeably absent. That has fueled speculation that Zarif quit after losing
influence.
Well-informed sources told Al-Monitor that
Zarif expressed indignation that his ministry had not been informed of Assad’s
visit and at having been left out of Rouhani’s meeting with the Syrian leader.
The apparent rupture appears driven by disagreements with the Iranian
president. Entekhab news site quoted Zarif as saying he had “no
credibility in the world” after he was left out of a meeting with Assad that
was heavily publicized, and thereby missing from official photographs.
"The main reason behind Zarif’s
resignation is clear: He was upset that he wasn’t at the meeting with Assad
alongside Rouhani," a source familiar with the matter told Al-Monitor on
condition of anonymity. Assad also met with Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and
Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani.
The larger context of Zarif’s resignation may
signal several potential scenarios, including dissatisfaction with Iran’s
regional policies. Some sources even speculate it could be a protest against an
impending Iranian decision to withdraw from the nuclear deal.
Nuclear deal: Zarif led the nuclear
negotiations with six world powers for more than two years, resulting in the
July 2015 nuclear deal. Following the US withdrawal under President Donald
Trump, Zarif and the European signatories — namely the European Union as well
as Britain, France and Germany — have sought to save the deal by launching a
mechanism to uphold trade benefits promised to Iran.
In this vein, the Europeans recently launched
their so-called Special Purpose Vehicle after many months of delay. But the
fledgling mechanism will require close cooperation between Iran and Europe to become
operational. Zarif has been the man entrusted with salvaging the nuclear deal
by both Khamenei and Rouhani, making his departure at this juncture a
devastating blow to cooperation between Iran and Europe — all while Rouhani’s
policy of “constructive engagement” may come under more pressure from
hard-liners.
What’s next: It is still unclear
whether Rouhani will accept Zarif’s resignation. Unconfirmed rumors circulated
on social media shortly after the Instagram post went up suggested he had tried
to resign on multiple occasions — and that Rouhani had finally accepted this
time.
However, the presidential chief of staff,
Mahmoud Vaezi, has in a tweet “strongly denied” any rumors that Rouhani has
accepted Zarif’s resignation. Nonetheless, it is not clear if Zarif is prepared
to stay on. There is also the prospect that the current situation in Iran may
lead high-ranking officials to urge him to take back his resignation letter.
Vaezi, who served as minister of information
and communications technology during Rouhani’s first term, is among the
possible candidates to replace Zarif and has long been described as having a
strong desire to take the job.
Know more: Read our coverage of Zarif’s
defiance of US sanctions and of Iranian hard-liners' attempts to
impeach him, and our exclusive interview with Zarif on
the margins of the UN General Assembly meeting in New York in September.
Engel promises
tough oversight of Trump's North Korea nuclear talks
House Democrats
are ready for a deal, but only if it offers permanent denuclearization
The Trump
administration must be more transparent about its North Korea policy if it
wants congressional support for implementing any nuclear agreement that could
come out of this week’s summit in Hanoi, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs
Committee said Monday (25 February).
Chairman Eliot L. Engel, D-N.Y., said House Democrats
are ready to be constructive partners in implementing a possible U.S.-North
Korea nuclear deal, but only if it offers a credible path toward Pyongyang’s
permanent denuclearization.
At this point,
the Trump administration’s North Korea policies, which Engel characterized as
scattershot, hollow and inscrutable, do not engender much confidence, he said.
“Democrats
aren’t going to stand in the way of a real opportunity” for a lasting peace
with North Korea, regardless of whether it is President Donald Trump doing the
negotiating, Engel told an audience at the Center for American Progress,a
liberal think tank. “So far, what we’ve gotten from the administration has not
been credible, and it certainly has not been transparent.”
Trump will meet
for the second time with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Hanoi on Wednesday.
Unlike the hoopla surrounding the duo’s first summit last summer in Singapore,
the Trump administration this time is tempering expectationsfor what might come
out of the meeting.
According to
administration officials, U.S. goals from the second summit include reaching a
shared understanding of what “denuclearization” means, developing a roadmap and
timeline for future nuclear disarmament steps and getting atotal freeze on all
of North Korea’s nuclear weapons work, including the production of enriched
uranium and plutonium needed to fuel a warhead.
Experts agree
that those are more realistic goals than the administration’s 2018 hopes of
reaching a sweeping agreement that would see Pyongyang give up its nuclear
weapons before Trump’s first term was over. Still, even the new goalsare fairly
ambitious, given North Korea’s record of reneging on agreements and the
potential that Trump in a one-on-one meeting with Kim would agree to
concessions his subordinates would otherwise oppose.
For example,
after his private meeting in Singapore with Kim, Trump’s declaration of a halt
to major U.S. military exercises with South Korea came as a surprise to the
Pentagon and to Seoul.
“The
president’s penchant for one-on-one personal diplomacy presents real risk to
the national interest,” Tom Donilon, a former national security adviser to
President Barack Obama, now a senior
fellow with the Belfer Center, said in a statement. “Congress and senior
administration officials still do not have a complete understanding of what Trump
and Kim discussed at Singapore. Given President Trump’s serious informationand
experiential deficit . . . the North Koreans would readily exploit a
free-wheeling one-on-one session.”
Democrats demand transparency
Getting more
clarity about what happened in Singapore as well as what occurs in Hanoi “will
be at the top of the list” for the Foreign Affairs Committee’s work in the
116th Congress, Engel said. He said that list also will includegetting
information on the current status of North Korea’s nuclear weapons program.
“I think
Congress, and the House in particular, has its biggest role to play in
conducting rigorous oversight on all matters pertaining to North Korea,” Engel
said. “The administration may have gotten away with circumventing Congresswith
the Republican majority in the House, but we as a new Democratic majority will
simply not stand for it.”
Last week
Engel, House Armed Services Chairman
Adam Smith, D-Wash., and House Intelligence Chairman Adam B. Schiff, D-Calif., co-signed a letter
to Trump expressing their alarm with the “growing disconnect” between “the
administration’s statements about Kim Jong Un’s actions, commitments, and
intentions” and the official U.S. intelligence community’sassessment that North
Korea is continuing its nuclear weapons work.
The three
chairmen said it was “unacceptable” that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had still not briefed Congress on
what took place at the Singapore summit or that the Office of the Director of
National Intelligence last fall notified Congress that lawmakers’ access to
intelligence about North Korea’s conventional and nuclear weapons program would
be sharply curtailed.
“On the eve of
the second summit, we once again insist that you lift the access restrictions,
which severely hamper Congress’ ability to evaluate the threat posed by North
Korea,” Engel, Smith and Schiff wrote.
“It’s time that
we exercise our prerogatives . . . We do have legislative tools at our
disposal,” Engel said on Monday, without elaborating on what those tools were.
Engel said he
was particularly concerned about “the sequencing of sanctions relief,”
referring to the timeline by which the United States and the international
community would lift various sanctions on North Korea in exchange for nuclear disarmament
actions.
In a Sunday
interview with CNN, Pompeo left the door open to North Korea receiving some
initial sanctions relief, though he underlined that the toughest sanctions —
legally enshrined through multiple U.N. Security Council resolutions — would
remain in place until there is verifiable and complete denuclearization.
“There are
other things we could do — exchanges of people, lots of other ways that North
Korea is sanctioned today that if we get a substantial step and move forward we
could certainly provide an outlet which would demonstrate our commitment to the
process as well,” Pompeo said.
Engel said he
was open to “altering our sanctions” if North Korea really does change its
behavior but that the United States should not be lifting human rights
sanctions on Pyongyang if there is no improvement in that area.
“We shouldn’t
lift sanctions in response to hollow gestures,” Engel said. “Empty gestures may
be enough for this president, but they won’t fool me.”
|
The United States and the North Korea Nuclear Threat
U.S. Attempts to Blunt North Korea’s Nuclear
Threat Have a Complex History
Republican and Democratic Presidents Shared
Concerns over Nukes and Regional Instability
Declassified Records Reflect Military,
Economic, and Diplomatic Challenges
National Security Archive Electronic Briefing
Book No. 664
 Washington D.C., February 26, 2019 – Prior U.S. administrations from both
political parties wrestled intensively with complex security, economic, and
diplomatic challenges in trying to rein in successive North Korean dictators’
nuclear ambitions, a review of declassified documentation makes clear. Today,
the National Security Archive at The George Washington University presents an
array of records from the Nixon, Bush 41, and Clinton administrations that
describe the many concerns and tests that have confronted U.S. policymakers
and negotiators alike.
These records provide
essential historical context for the upcoming February 27-28 meeting in Hanoi
between President Donald J. Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. They
underscore the recognition that war with North Korea would mean immense
casualties; the concern of officials such as Defense Secretary Dick Cheney
that diplomatic strategy not be jeopardized by discussions of military
action; the realization that bilateral diplomacy had to go hand-in-hand with
multilateral negotiations; the recognition that China’s critical role cannot
be overlooked; and the awareness that the larger question of stability on the
Korean peninsula and the wider region would inevitably encompass non-nuclear
concerns as well, notably the economic viability of the North.
Check out today's
posting at the National Security Archive
Find us on Facebook
Read Unredacted,
the Archive blog
THE NATIONAL SECURITY
ARCHIVE is an independent non-governmental research institute and library
located at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C. The Archive
collects and publishes declassified documents acquired through the Freedom of
Information Act (FOIA). A tax-exempt public charity, the Archive receives no
U.S. government funding; its budget is supported by publication royalties and
donations from foundations and individuals.
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National Security Archive, Suite 701
Gelman Library The George Washington University 2130 H Street, NW Washington, D.C., 20037 Phone: 202/994-7000< Fax: 202/994-7005 nsarchiv@gwu.edu
Washington Post, 27 February 2019
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