Kissinger on North Korea

Henry Kissinger offers his thoughts on Clinton's visit and its ramifications. From Sunday's NYT (emphasis added):

Context matters. It is less than six months since Pyongyang conducted a nuclear test and resumed the production of weapons-grade plutonium in violation of an agreement signed at the six-power conference in Beijing in February 2007. North Korea refused a visit by the new U.S. envoy charged with discussing its proliferation efforts. Pyongyang has rejected various U.N. Security Council resolutions to desist from these activities and to return to the six-party talks. A visit by a former president, who is married to the secretary of state, will enable Kim Jong-il to convey to North Korea, and perhaps to other countries, that his country is being accepted into the international community — the precise opposite of what the U.S. secretary of state has defined as the goal of U.S. policy until Pyongyang abandons its nuclear weapons program.

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The root cause of our decade-old controversy with Pyongyang is that there is no middle ground between North Korea being a nuclear weapons state and a non-nuclear weapons state. At the end of a negotiation, North Korea will either destroy its nuclear arsenal, or it will become a de facto nuclear state. So far, it has used the negotiating forums available to it in a skillful campaign of procrastination, alternating leaps in technological progress with negotiating phases to consolidate it.

We seem to be approaching such a consolidating phase now. North Korea may return to its well-established tactic of diverting us with the prospect of imminent breakthroughs. This is exactly what happened after the last Korean nuclear weapons test in 2006. Pyongyang undoubtedly will continue to seek to achieve de facto acceptance as a nuclear weapons state by endlessly protracted diplomacy. The benign atmosphere by which it culminated its latest blackmail must not tempt us or our partners into bypaths that confuse atmosphere with substance. Any outcome other than the elimination of the North Korean nuclear military capability in a fixed time period is a blow to non-proliferation prospects worldwide and to peace and stability globally.

Full story here.