The sanctions and other financial measures codified in Treasury rules and executive orders didn’t immediately cripple the Iranians, but they made their financial transactions more expensive and far more difficult. We eventually succeeded in blacklisting some of Iran’s biggest banks, including Bank Saderat Iran and Bank Sepah, as well as companies and individuals affiliated with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), which supervises the regime’s unconventional weapons program and is suspected of maintaining extensive ties to terrorist organizations throughout the Middle East. Given how deeply entrenched this military apparatus had become in economic affairs of the state, our thinking was that legitimate entities would want to limit their interactions with Iranian businesses—even those that had not been specifically blacklisted—to avoid running afoul of the U.S. financial system.
The process of getting other countries to join us in this effort was slower than we expected. But forced to choose between their activities in Iran or access to the United States financial system, many Western institutions opted to scale back their operations in Tehran. Hank Paulson and Stuart Levey’s leadership was crucial in achieving that result, and I understood why it worked. I’d been a corporate director for two financial institutions. Reputation was their most important asset, and no CEO wanted to face the board of directors and say that a banking partner had been found to be supporting the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.
IRONICALLY, THE COOPERATION with Treasury on sanctions that began with North Korea would come full circle as we tried to find a way back to the Six-Party Talks. The North Korean issue was both a blessing and a curse in our relationship with China. I was reminded of the Chinese characters wei ji, which seemed to capture the situation. Wei means “danger” and ji, “opportunity.” Together they form the Chinese word for “crisis.” The challenge with the North Korean nuclear problem was to turn the crisis into an opportunity rather than a danger to the larger relationship with Beijing and the region more broadly.
Although it faced a number of regional security challenges, Asia lacked robust institutions to deal with them. Unlike in Europe, where NATO provided a multilateral alliance for the democracies on the continent and across the Atlantic, the United States maintained separate bilateral defense arrangements with South Korea, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, and the Philippines. The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) gave multilateral cover to efforts to defuse so-called frozen conflicts from the Cold War era in the Caucasus and Eastern Europe. Though the organization was not always successful in its pursuits, in large part due to Russian intransigence, the OSCE could be helpful in lending legitimacy and focusing the diplomacy of multiple parties. There was no such thing in Asia. Rather, the Pacific Rim was a web of bilateral—and mostly bad—relationships: Japan with South Korea; South Korea with China; Japan with Russia; Japan with China. All bore the unhealed wounds of World War II. The United States thus became the hub of a wheel with spokes radiating in several directions. We succeeded over the course of the administration to cultivate better relations with each of the parties than they had with each other. But the challenge posed by North Korea, given the many competing interests and priorities among the key regional players regarding the fate of Pyongyang, pushed the bilateral approach to its limits.
The original rationale for the Six-Party Talks had been to prevent North Korea from playing the parties off one another. But it occurred to us that it could do more: it could become a security forum where the parties of Northeast Asia dealt with nuclear proliferation, terrorism, and ultimately even security disputes among themselves. There was no intention to replace the strong bilateral ties that we enjoyed, only to augment them. In fact, we had significantly modernized our defense alliances with South Korea and Japan. The implementation of the Defense Policy Review Initiative, for example, was an ambitious effort aimed to adapt the Japan-U.S. alliance to twenty-first-century security threats. There were also the regular meetings of the 2+2, a joint summit between the U.S. secretaries of state and defense and their Japanese counterparts. I held trilateral meetings with Japan and South Korea, as well as with Australia and Japan. We engaged our allies in numerous fora. Nevertheless, the President had immediately seen the potential of a multilateral forum through the Six-Party Talks that would include China.
This led to language in the Joint Statement of September 2005 that anticipated the establishment of a “peace and security mechanism” once the nuclear issue was resolved satisfactorily. We deliberately left open the timing and definition of what would constitute “satisfactorily” so that we could preserve flexibility in discussing broader issues beyond North Korea’s nuclear program when we deemed it appropriate.
In our most ambitious designs for the forum, we thought that the Six-Party Talks might ultimately lead to a final resolution of the Korean War, even a peace treaty. This would have been a big leap from where we were presently, but it was worth contemplating. What if the North could be persuaded to give up its nuclear weapons—really give them up verifiably—in exchange for the recognition that would come from actually ending the Korean War legally? Would the tyrannical regime of Kim Jong-il be strengthened by such a step, or would the end of the conflict deprive the dictator of a raison d’être in the way that the end of the Cold War destroyed East Germany? Would Kim be willing to open North Korea to international institutions such as the World Bank in a bid to improve the lives of his people, only to find that his vampire-like regime couldn’t live in the bright sunlight? It was a bold idea and one that I wasn’t sure would sit well with the President, who’d let it be known that he loathed Kim Jong-il.
We first discussed the new approach in an NSC meeting in early 2005. I laid out the case, careful to say that the North would not receive any concessions without serious movement toward disarmament. Not surprisingly, the Vice President was not persuaded, but he didn’t dismiss the notion out of hand. Don, on the other hand, was remarkably supportive. “Sometimes when you’ve got an insoluble problem [North Korean nukes], it is best to enlarge it—make it bigger,” he said helpfully. He promised to have the Pentagon look into what post–Korean War security arrangements might look like, both bilaterally and multilaterally. Don’s interest was sparked too by his view that the South Koreans needed to take more responsibility for their own defense and free up our forces. That was certainly one way to bring about that redistribution of obligations.
The President didn’t say much at the first session; he simply took in the arguments. But one evening at dinner at the White House, he turned to the issue again. “Do you think Kim will give up his weapons if he thinks we’ll let him survive?” he asked. I replied honestly that there was no way to know the answer to that question without testing the authoritarian leader. “Let’s test him, then,” the President said.
“Are you going to be comfortable with what we’ll have to do?” Steve asked, suggesting that such overtures would mean that “regime change” was off the table.
“No,” the President said. “It’s just regime change by other means. He’ll never survive if that place is opened up.”
In April 2006 Hu Jintao came to Washington for an official visit—with nearly all the trappings of a state visit. The distinction is lost on most people who are not steeped in the finer points of diplomatic protocol. But I can assure you it was of great importance to our guests, who knew precisely what activities were included in each level of recognition. A state visit entailed a South Lawn welcoming ceremony, complete with the Colonial Fife and Drum Corps, which was led by a drum major in a large hat made of bear fur. Those visits culminated with an elaborate state dinner in the State Dining Room. An official visit, on the other hand, might simply be an Oval Office meeting with the President, followed by a working lunch with members of the Cabinet. It was possible to mix and match a little, but state visits were rare; there were only eight in the Bush years, and they were reserved for leaders with whom we wanted to highlight our extraordinarily clos
e relationship.
The Chinese presented a problem in this regard. They wanted all the trappings, but in a Washington environment where Chinese currency issues and trade surpluses made management of the relationship hard enough, it was better not to appear too close. That was true too from the point of view of our significant differences on human rights and religious freedom.
We decided on a South Lawn ceremony but a fancy lunch instead of a dinner. The Chinese were satisfied—or at least they were until a Falun Gong protester shouted out from the press riser as Hu was delivering his remarks. It was a moment of deep embarrassment both for us and for them—but Hu soldiered on and managed to appear unfazed by the outburst. Hopefully, he didn’t notice that the White House announcer had introduced him as the president of the Republic of China. That, of course, would be Taiwan.
Despite those hiccups, the visit proceeded smoothly, but the President encountered the problem that I had had in Beijing during my earlier visit. Every meeting with Hu was too large to discuss really sensitive matters, and the President had a particularly sensitive one in mind. He wanted to tell Hu to communicate the grand bargain to Kim Jong-il: give up your nuclear weapons, and we’ll give you a peace treaty that ends the Korean War and recognizes your regime. That message couldn’t be delivered with too many people around.
By the time we reached lunch, there had still been no opportunity to raise the issue. So the President became his own social secretary, rearranging the seating so that I sat on one side of Hu and he on the other. Then he politely turned to the others at the table: William Daley, the former commerce secretary; Michelle Kwan, the Olympic figure skater; and Richard Levin, the president of Yale. “Condi and I have something to talk to President Hu about,” the President said. “Excuse us for a moment.” The translator, Hu, the President, and I then conducted our conversation. Hu nodded his understanding and said that he would deliver the message. We reinforced the message through Henry Kissinger, who used his long and deep contacts with the Chinese to add his own assessment that the President was serious. It was a real turning point in how we approached the North Korean issue and in our interaction with Beijing.
From that moment on we pursued the denuclearization of North Korea with three goals in mind: increasing the transparency of Kim Jong-il’s nuclear program by “getting our people on the ground”; reducing the ability of the North to make, sell, or use nuclear weapons by retarding Kim’s capacity to produce plutonium; and, if Kim was willing to give up his weapons, ending the Korean conflict. And perhaps through diplomacy—not just confrontation—we could end the loathsome regime itself.
The President had made a strategic leap in his thinking. That was what permitted us—through Chris Hill, the assistant secretary for East Asian and Pacific affairs—to pursue active negotiations with the North that we’d eschewed in the first term. It was not a softening of policy toward the North; the President was not abandoning regime change in favor of the State Department’s well-known desire to negotiate with rogue regimes. Rather, it was a kind of strategic gamble—a safe one from the United States’ perspective because the North would get no real benefit until it demonstrated its willingness to give up its nuclear arsenal. North Korea was one of the world’s most sanctioned regimes, and those instruments would be the stick in our hands. We would remove constraints selectively if we made progress. And we were confident that with this bold approach we could keep the five parties of the six united in pressuring Pyongyang.
Ironically, the nuclear test gave us an opening to launch this strategy. I set out for Northeast Asia with three goals: to reassure our allies; to get support for full implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 1718, which had imposed stiff sanctions on the transfer of large-scale weapons, nuclear technology, and luxury goods into the North Korean state; and to deescalate the crisis expeditiously and move back to the Six-Party Talks. I’ve always thought that the argument about whether to “talk” to bad guys was misleading. Sometimes in diplomacy you have to negotiate with rogue regimes. You can’t overthrow every one of them by force, and diplomatic isolation, though perhaps psychologically satisfying, is not always effective. But if I have to negotiate with an adversary, I want to do it from a position of strength. Suddenly, because of the North’s aggression, we had the upper hand. What better time to engage Pyongyang than when it had lost all international support, including that of Beijing?
After an NSC meeting at which we established the policy framework for dealing with the crisis, I headed to Northeast Asia on October 17 and began my trip in Japan. The Japanese were relatively calm, reassured by the strong statements that the President had already made reaffirming the United States’ security commitments to them. My meeting with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was productive but rather typical of my usual engagements with the Japanese. It was quite unlike meetings with Prime Minister Koizumi, who had always been an animated personality. When engaging foreigners, the Japanese are known for their reserve—hiding their emotions and obscuring messages in impenetrable formality. That was never the case when we dealt with Koizumi, who was as ebullient, open, and candid an interlocutor as any of the leaders with whom we dealt. I’d first met him when he visited Camp David early in the President’s first term. There he talked openly about Japan’s stagnation and what he wanted to do to reform the economy and society—and he largely delivered. He also sang Elvis Presley songs; quoted lines from his favorite movie, High Noon; and tossed around a baseball with the President in full view of the press. He was a fierce defender of the U.S.-Japan alliance and of the Freedom Agenda, committing Japanese forces to support missions in both Afghanistan and Iraq.
By contrast, Prime Minister Abe was a more traditional and reserved leader, but I found him quite forceful on that particular day. When we talked about what North Korea had done, he was very clear that he had no intention of raising the prospect of a Japanese nuclear option should the North go further. “But,” he cautioned, “there are many who want to do exactly that, and their voices are getting louder.” It was useful to have those noises from Japan, so that Beijing could see that an unchecked North Korean nuclear program had real consequences. Still, Japan was deeply distrusted in the region, not just by China but by our South Korean friends as well. A little bit of posturing about what Japan might do was helpful—but not too much.
Tokyo wanted North Korea’s program stopped but feared that we might make a deal with Pyongyang before the tragic Japanese abduction cases could be resolved. While Foreign Minister Taro Aso mentioned the issue of the abductions at our joint press conference, I focused on the nuclear issue at hand and the Security Council resolution. I didn’t want to get a deal to halt North Korea’s nuclear program only to have to resolve the abduction issue fully before it could go into effect. It would be a constant balancing act throughout the next two years.
I left Japan having affirmed, as expected, the government’s willingness to carry out the comprehensive sanctions of UNSCR 1718 faithfully and to take the toughest possible stance against North Korea. What, though, of Seoul? The South Korean president, Roh Moo-hyun, was hard to read. He would sometimes say things that suggested an anti-American streak, such as his lecture to me on an earlier visit suggesting that South Korea needed to act as a balancer between China and the United States.
Then there was the incident the following year that summed up his erratic nature. As their meeting was coming to a close, Roh asked the President to state his willingness before the press to move toward normal relations with the North if it gave up its nuclear weapons. There was nothing new in that; it had been a part of the September 19 framework agreement of 2005. The President dutifully restated the promise when the press entered the room. Suddenly Roh turned to the President and said, “I think I might be wrong—I think I did not hear President Bush mention the—a declaration to end the Korean War just now. Did you say so, President Bush?” The President, somewhat surprised by this intervention, repeated his statement. “If you could be a little bit cl
earer in your message, I think—” Roh insisted. Now everyone was embarrassed. The shocked interpreter stopped translating, but Roh looked at her and insisted that she continue. After that drill the President called a halt to the press availability. The two leaders shook hands, and Roh smiled and thanked the President—seemingly unaware of how bizarre the moment had been.
Aware of his unpredictable behavior, I frankly did not know what to expect in South Korea. Through my first couple of years as secretary, I’d relied on my foreign minister colleague, Ban Ki-moon, to “interpret” his president. But Ban had left the ministry to become secretary-general of the United Nations. His replacement, Song Min-soon, was also very capable and broad in his thinking. Yet I had the sense that he was more reluctant to challenge his president’s unorthodox thinking.
I needn’t have worried. The North Koreans had succeeded in toughening Seoul’s stance considerably. There was not an inch of daylight between the United States and South Korea on the sanctions or their implementation. Even the usual pro-North protesters had disappeared from the streets this time.
In Beijing, I found a Chinese leadership that was tougher in private on North Korea than I’d ever seen them, if still engaged in sloganeering in public. Hu had sent the third-ranking Chinese official, State Councillor Tang Jiaxuan, to North Korea after the nuclear test. Tang’s visit “had not been in vain,” I was told, but I was not given further details at the time. I learned through other channels that the Chinese had quietly cut off the supply of spare military parts to Pyongyang. That news made me take more seriously my Chinese interlocutors’ insistence that they’d not let Kim Jong-il off the hook for his ill-advised nuclear gambit. The Chinese appeared willing to discuss the future of the North.
Tang had another message, though. Pyongyang knew that it had made a mistake—despite the public blustering about sanctions being an act of war. Would the United States consider a resumption of the Six-Party Talks? I’d agreed to allow Hill to attend a quiet trilateral meeting in Beijing with the Chinese and the North Koreans. I was furious when I learned that the Chinese had showed up only long enough to get the meeting started and then departed, leaving Chris in a bilateral with his North Korean counterpart. That night at my hotel, Chris had called from the putative trilateral to explain what was happening. “End it as soon as possible,” I said. “I’ll raise it with the Chinese tomorrow.”
No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington Page 63