Chuck Hagel is right about North Korea

Chuck Hagel, Republican U.S. Senator from Nebraska, went onto CNN's Sunday show Late Edition and made a demand that the Administration go beyond the status quo of the Six Party Talks and instead talk directly with North Korea to solve the nuclear crisis:

"We are not anywhere close to talking about attacking North Korea, and we should shut up and stop it," said Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb.

"We need to talk directly with North Korea. The sooner we do that,the sooner we're going to get this resolved," Hagel, the second-rankingRepublican on the committee, told CNN's "Late Edition."

This policy demand from Hagel is a sharp contrast to the current Bush policy of refusing to talk one-on-one with the DPRK regime.  The last time we engaged in bilateral talks was during the Clinton Administration.  The then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Clinton brokered a peace deal with the regime, called the 1994 Agreed Framework, which would have helped fund the construction of a light water reactor to supply power to the country in exchange for Kim Jong IL abandoning his nuclear weapons program.  Unfortunately, when the GOP took control of Congress in 1994 they attacked Bill Clinton for what they said was appeasement, and the agreement fell apart as a result.  The U.S. and North Korea have been on shaky ground ever since.

If you have not studied North Korea in depth, there is one thing that you need to know.  North Korea has two economies: a civilian economy and a military economy.  Think of a civilian economy as any economy based on taxes and the means of production.  A military economy, however, consists of building arms and selling them to other countries.  Ever since the late-70s, before the death of Kim Jong IL's father, the civilian economy has been in the tank.  In order to make up for that lost revenue, the regime has had to compensate by bolstering its military economy.  Obviously, the thought of an unstable rogue state selling arms to other rogue states is an unsettling one.

So, with that said, the only way we can get North Korea to reduce its military economy is by working with them to bolster their civilian economy.  Bill Clinton understood this fact, and was almost successful in turning things around -- of course, until the Republicans blocked that effort.  Direct talks between the United States and North Korea is the only way to solve the matter.  But the people in the current Administration compare Iran and North Korea as part of an axis of evil -- even though, in reality, the two have completely opposite economies and geopolitical traits.

After studying U.S.-DPRK relations in depth in the spring of 2005, I am so overjoyed to hear that Chuck Hagel, or any Republican for that matter, is beginning to understand why one-on-one talks with the North Korean regime is the best way to solve the current standoff.

Comments

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If he keeps going like this, he might get my vote. Lord knows none of the Democrats are standing up.

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