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AFP/KCNA via KNS – North Korean leader Kim Jong Il (right) poses with former US president Bill Clinton in Pyongyang. Clinton … A controversy-prone ex-president rides to the rescue to defuse a crisis provoked by an erratic dictatorship on the Korean Peninsula. Most people breathe a sigh of relief, but there are skeptics who wonder if the breakthrough was won through appeasement.
Bill Clinton has not only seen this movie before, he’s starred in it—though in a different role than the one he’s playing this week with his burst of globe-trotting diplomacy in North Korea.
The 42nd president’s success in forging a behind-the-scenes deal for the release of two American journalists in exchange for Clinton’s surprise appearance in Pyongyang may signal a new chapter in one of the United States’s most vexing and dangerous relationships. Or it may turn out to be another false start with an isolated and paranoid regime.
In either event, however, this week marks a curious full circle in the life of Bill Clinton, who until this week was an elder statesman who seemed without a clear identity or useful role in Barack Obama’s presidency. A Clinton adviser said the former president is ready and eager for more Obama assignments.
History, it turns out, is full of inside jokes.
The first time Clinton found himself in a stare-down with North Korea was in the spring of 1994. Then, Clinton was an unseasoned new president, still seen by many in the public and some of his own aides as wobbly in the face of foreign crises.
With deep reluctance, Clinton was on the brink of ordering a major military build-up in response to North Korea’s decision to end international inspections and start a nuclear bomb-building program. Inside Clinton’s government, many thought the build-up itself might provoke war on the peninsula. North Korea, delicate as ever, was warning of a “sea of flames.”
In 1994, the ex-president roaming on the Korea scene was Jimmy Carter. The Clinton White House had not exactly invited him to go to North Korea, but—since Carter made clear he was going anway—it had not tried to dissuade him either.
At the last minute, even as Clinton was in a meeting to approve the build-up, Carter struck a deal in which North Korea claimed it would halt its nuclear program in exchange for direct talks with the United States. Carter went on CNN to announce the deal, while Clinton’s aides in Washington stared at their sets and groaned at the former president’s grandstanding.
Unlike Carter, Clinton was plainly not freelancing on his assignment to win the release of documentary journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee. Though ostensibly in Pyongyang as a “private citizen,” he was there with the approval of the White House and his wife, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Like Carter, however, Clinton is finding that the best place to prove his relevance as an ex-president is in international hot spots.
A Clinton admirer, Democratic commentator Donna Brazile, said the North Korea trip shows “Bill Clinton still has the juice.
“I hope this is a sign of things to come,” she added, “given all the fires that this country faces. People trust him, and he has an important role to play. And this shows President Obama’s determination to try all kinds of diplomacy, including third-party diplomacy.”
Obama advisers were not willing to discuss Clinton’s role on the record. On background, one said, “This big victory helps him get his groove back.” The sentiment is notable, given the skepticism that still exists in many quarters of Obama’s inner circle since the Obama-Clinton sniping during the 2008 Democratic primaries.
Historical legacies change constantly with new events and new interpretations of old events. So far, however, the Obama presidency has had the effect of dimming Clinton’s light. Obama is dealing with economic crises and wars abroad that seem far larger than what Clinton grappled with, and many Democrats are delighted to have a president eager to embrace a big and interventionist role for the national government.
But even before he became president, Bill Clinton always displayed a knack for jostling his way to the center of the action. A top Clinton adviser said: “It’s not like he’s been called on to broker Middle East peace. But [the hostage release] shows he has incredible respect and appeal. And we hope he’ll have a way to use that going forward.”
Former North Korea negotiator Robert Gallucci, now president of the MacArthur Foundation, said Clinton was an obvious choice to serve as intermediary to defuse this episode, given his history with the peninsula and his celebrity.
“Bill Clinton may have the highest profile on the planet so I don’t think it was a hard choice for them,” said Gallucci.
Clinton’s presence was a highly visible way for the North Koreans to prove that deference was being paid to their regime in exchange for a concession. A senior administration official said Tuesday night that his intervention was requested by the families of the journalists, who were on assignment for Current TV, a citizen documentary channel co-founded by former vice president Al Gore.
Clinton may also have believed he had special insight into the psychology motivating the Koreans. In “Going Critical,” a memoir that Gallucci and two fellow Korean diplomacy veterans wrote about 1994 crisis, Clinton gave his view of the climb back from the ledge—in a comment that illuminated his larger philosophy about dealing with adversaries.
“Look, I knew I was going to take some heat for letting Carter go there,” Clinton recalled. “But I also knew I needed to give the North Koreans an escape hatch, some way to climb down without losing face. I figured if they could say to themselves that a former president had come to their country, it would allow them to do that.”
The debate now is whether the United States may be losing face in trying to engage with a nation that skeptics believe has proven itself impervious to diplomatic blandishments and incapable of reform.
After the 1994 crisis, North Korea signed on to the “Agreed Framework,” in which the regime said it would abandon any nuclear bomb ambitions in exchange for billions of dollars in subsidies from foreign government for energy production. But the agreement eventually broke down amid allegations that the North Koreans were cheating on its terms and continuing a nuclear program.
But confrontation has not been notably more successful. George W. Bush for most of his presidency was a diplomacy skeptic who labled North Korea part of the “axis of evil.” But the regime continued with its aggressive behavior and its bomb-building capacity flourished during the Bush years.
Clinton’s trip, and the rush of publicity it has occasioned, will renew the U.S. debate about whether coaxing or confrontation is the right approach to North Korea.
“North Korea does this all the time. They do all these provocations and get everyone all pissed off until someone comes and helps them off that ledge,” observed Victor Cha, who was Director for Asian affairs at the White House from 2004-2007 and is now Korea Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Dan Senor, a Bush administration official now with the Council on Foreign Relations, said: “It’s unlikely that [dictator] Kim Jong II would have agreed to a pardon [of the journalists] without something tangible in return. No matter how justified, given the lives on the line, those tangibles may make some people nervous, especially among our allies in the region.”
Yet another Bush veteran, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton , was even more skeptical: “Obviously everyone is happy that the two hostages have been released, but whenever you’re in a situation like this you want to make sure that the result doesn’t make it more difficult in trying to deal with future hostage situations.”
Bolton added that North Koreans will “see this as weakness and they will link the hostage situation to the nuclear weapons program.”
But Joel Wit , who was a senior advisor to Gallucci and co-authored Going Critical with him and Dan Poneman, offered a more hopeful interpretation. North Korea may be signaling that the regime is ready to respond to a new president in Washington by reviving diplomacy.
“I would hope that [Clinton’s trip] means that the administration understands that in addition to taking tough steps after North Koreas recent actions they need to open some dialogue,” he said. “This may constitute the beginning of some new direction in the relationship.”
Andy Barr contributed to this report.
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