Beyond Realism
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

Not long ago, President Bush caused a stir by stating something obvious about North Korea’s leader. During an internationally televised press conference on April 28, Mr. Bush said, “Kim Jong Il is a dangerous person. He’s a man who starves his people. He’s got huge concentration camps.”
Nearly four months later, plain talk has all but vanished from the president’s North Korea policy. On Friday, the White House finally named, without ceremony, Jay Lefkowitz as its Special Envoy on Human Rights in North Korea. One would think, a former domestic policy adviser who was asked to be the president’s deputy chief of staff, would deserve at least a press conference coordinated in a manner to influence the news cycle. Instead the White House deputy press secretary released a two paragraph statement to reporters as if the new envoy were no more important than a special trade representative to the Marshall Islands.
As Michael Horowitz, an adviser to the group that pushed Congress to create the position, said, “Friday press releases are a notorious means by which administrations announce actions with which they don’t especially want to be associated.” Indeed, Mr. Horowitz had asked for a signing ceremony in Washington with the Korean-American leaders, pastors, human rights activists, and feminists that comprise the coalition that lobbied successfully last year for Congress to pass, and the president to sign, the North Korea Human Rights Act.
For something as vital to American national security as its policy toward a totalitarian state with nuclear intentions, Friday’s evasion does not bode well. Were this only a matter of stagecraft, the press management could be dismissed as an error. But the downplaying of the Lefkowitz appointment is part of a larger pattern. Today it appears that the president’s concern for the victims of North Korean tyranny has been overtaken by a policy not to offend their tormentor.
Not only is Washington abuzz with talk that American diplomats will be offering a new set of incentives to North Korea if it makes more promises of the kind it has already broken on nuclear proliferation, but State Department officials are going out of their way to whisper that Mr. Lefkowitz will have no role in influencing American strategy for the six-party talks scheduled to restart on August 29.
The president’s critics are already celebrating this sort of diplomacy. “The Bush doctrine has collapsed,” Gideon Rose of the Council on Foreign Relations crowed in the New York Times last week. For such critics, the president’s prior statements about gulags and tyranny in North Korea were at best distractions and at worst hindrances to the allegedly serious work of persuading North Korea to abandon the nuclear program it built while it pretended to be obeying the strictures of the nuclear nonproliferation treaty. Believe it or not, adherents of this view in Washington are called “realists.” One might ask what is realistic about expecting the North Koreans to keep their word this time around?
To be sure, a conventional military strike on North Korea would have catastrophic consequences. Kim Jong Il at any moment can incinerate Seoul with conventional artillery rounds positioned at the line demarcating the two Koreas. It is asking too much of a competent intelligence service, let alone the Central Intelligence Agency, to gather the sort of information one would need to spark an armed revolution in a society as closed as the Hermit Kingdom.
But just because two traditional regime change options are unattractive does not make it prudent to trust the promises of Kim Jong Il, a man who ordered his henchmen to kidnap a Japanese movie producer in order to compel him to make state propaganda films. Nor does it mean in any way that America cannot simultaneously negotiate with North Korea and press the Chinese government to end its practice of repatriating North Korean refugees back to the very Gulags from which they escaped.
A policy that seeks only to deal with North Korean proliferation and says nothing of its prison camps visible from space is not so much realism as it is appeasement. America has negotiated with dictators before. But only when these talks were coupled with relentless pressure on human rights – such as the masterstroke of President Reagan’s emphasis on the third basket of the Helsinki Accords – have the nation’s security interests been advanced. Before Helsinki, the best America could hope for with the Soviets was detente. But once the Soviets agreed in principle to discuss the fate of their political prisoners, the conditions were set for our Cold War victory.
The appointment of Mr. Lefkowitz has the potential to be as significant as Reagan’s choice of Max Kampelman to lead America’s delegation to Madrid for the Helsinki talks. For the new envoy to succeed, however, he will need the kind of moral clarity from the president so many of his critics are hoping he has abandoned. Anything less will relegate our North Korea policy to the realist fantasy that it’s possible to disarm Kim Jong Il without speaking up for the people he oppresses.