• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

PERRY TO THE RESCUE

At the moment of maximum peril to the administration's North Korea policy, it was widely agreed in the U. S. Congress, the executive branch, and such outside groups as the Council on Foreign Relations' Korea Task Force that the best chance for preservation was a high-level review and revision headed by a respected outsider. Nearly everyone's number-one choice to undertake this job was William J. Perry, the seventy-one-year-old former secretary of defense, who had led the nation's military establishment during the 1994 nuclear crisis. Perry was a figure of strength, maturity, and experience. More than almost anyone else, he had looked into the abyss of horrific bloodshed and destruction that had been threatened. Unknown to most outsiders, he had been seared by the experi ence. Having returned to the comfortable life of a Stanford University professor and board member of high-tech companies, he did not welcome the call from President Clinton asking him to become "North Korea policy coordinator" on an urgent basis. Perry saw it as "a difficult job, with a low probability of success ... but I also remembered the 1994 crisis, which I thought then and still do was the most dangerous crisis we faced in this period. And I saw us moving toward another crisis as bad as that one."

Perry recruited Harvard University Professor Ashton Carter, who had been one of his assistants in the Pentagon, and assembled a small team of U.S. government officials headed by Ambassador Wendy Sherman, counselor of the State Department and a close confidant of Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. Perry concluded early that it was essential to present North Korea with an unshakably close alliance of the United States, South Korea, and Japan, rather than risk the possibility that Pyongyang would play one nation off against another as it had done with the Soviet Union and China during most of the cold war. To cement the alliance, Perry created a three-way Trilateral Coordination and Oversight Group of the United States, the ROK, and Japan to consider North Korean issues. Second, he concluded that U.S. policy could not be at odds with that of the South Korean president, who had made engagement with the North the major thrust of his newly installed administration.

The essence of Perry's plan was to offer North Korea's leaders a proposal with two alternative tracks. Track one was to end their longrange missile programs and reconfirm the stand-down of their nuclear weapons program, in return for full diplomatic relations with the United States, a peace treaty ending the Korean War, and improved relations with South Korea and Japan. Track two was to continue down the road of missile tests and nuclear uncertainty, in which case the United States and its allies would take actions to enhance their own security and containment of the North, increasing the likelihood of confrontations.

It was not simple for Perry to persuade the U.S. administration to accept both the positive and negative elements of his plan. The positive road would accord a greater degree of legitimacy and acceptance to the North Korean regime than had been the case before. Perry argued that even though North Korea was undergoing extreme economic hardships it was not likely to collapse and "therefore we must deal with the DPRK regime as it is, not as we might wish it to be." In successive cabinet-level meetings at the White House, Perry argued convincingly that the status quo was unsustainable, and spoke in graphic detail from his 1994 experience of the awesome dangers of the downward track. Madeleine Albright, normally a strong opponent of antidemocratic regimes, was persuaded by Perry's views and a private briefing by General John Tilelli, the U.S. military commander in South Korea, that the downward road was exceedingly dangerous and thus a serious effort to put North Korea on the upper path was essential. Albright, and she believes Clinton as well, were