In the 1950s a gem of an article appeared called "The Fluke That Saved Formosa." The idea was that an outbreak of fluke-borne schistosomiasis among Chinese troops, then preparing to invade Taiwan, saved the island from communism. In November 2000 an election fluke to end all election flukes handed the presidency to George W. Bush, the loser in the popular contest by half a million votes. But the absence of any kind of mandate from the American people has not prevented the Bush administration from barging, like a bull in a China shop, into the thicket of Asian problems. George the Younger has been in office less than two months, and already we seem on the verge of a crisis in East Asia: The only question is whether this crisis will be with Japan, Korea or China.
Before the inauguration, even if few clues existed on what Bush might do about China and Korea, we thought we knew what he would do about Japan: Focus more attention on it. Along came another unimaginable fluke, and a full bath of attention -- of the wrong kind. On February 9th, the captain of the USS Greeneville took his nuclear attack submarine out for maneuvers off Waikiki Beach. Why? Because several fat-cat civilians were in town hoping for a submarine ride, courtesy of the U.S. taxpayer. (Reporting subsequent to the event has shown that the ship was not on routine maneuvers, but went out only because the Navy didn't want to disappoint the civilians.) As these guests milled around and play-acted at the controls, the captain ordered his ship to leap to the surface just in time to capsize the Japanese fishing boat Ehime Maru and kill nine of its crew, four of them teenagers. This accident mingled tragedy and farce in an absurd mix, with the feckless Japanese Prime Minister getting the news but deciding he would play out his golf round, and the Bush administration taking weeks to make a proper apology to the Japanese people.
Bush is bungling Korea policy too. Bill Clinton and the two Korean leaders have done more in the past three years to lessen tensions in the Korean peninsula than all heads of state going back to the country's division in 1945. Yet in early March we learned that Bush's key advisors, instead of continuing this progress, were already at loggerheads about whether there had even been any -- although you might expect this division to be less pointed and obvious. A few days before South Korean President Kim Dae Jung showed up as the first foreign leader to meet with Bush in the White House, Secretary of State Colin Powell told reporters that he would pick up where the Clinton administration left off in working toward a deal that would shut down North Korea's missiles. Soon he had to backtrack, caught up short by the President's own hard line taken in his Oval Office meeting with Kim -- a meeting that was a diplomatic disaster by any standard.
Kim Dae Jung, fresh from winning last year's Nobel Peace Prize, was expecting to welcome the North Korean leader to Seoul this month or next, as the follow-up to the summit last June in Pyongyang, where the leaders of the two Koreas shook hands for the first time since the country was divided. He returned from the U.S. to his advisors publicly calling the meeting embarrassing, and privately cursing our new president. The upcoming summit and Kim's "sunshine policy" were suddenly in deep trouble, with Pyongyang abruptly canceling a Cabinet-level meeting that had been scheduled for this month in Seoul.
As Powell squirmed and right-wing Republicans lambasted him for "appeasement," Bush tried to say that the North hadn't been keeping its agreements. But the only important recent agreement was the 1994 deal that mothballed North Korea's only nuclear reactor, and his advisors had to admit that the North wasn't violating that one. The President had meant to speak in the future tense, they explained; Bush was concerned that Pyongyang wouldn't keep to a potentialmissile agreement. When asked why the President can't keep his verb tenses straight for even one sentence, an advisor said, "that's the way the President speaks."
The 2000 Fluke may also affect Taiwan. Now an April treat is in store for East Asia, as the Bush people try to get their act together on whether to sell Taiwan the Aegis "air-defense and battle-management system," a huge qualitative advance in their capabilities that Chinese leaders have said will provoke an immediate crisis in Sino-American relations. Since the last major upgrading saw George the Elder sell 150 F-16 fighters to Taiwan, look for sonny-boy to follow suit.
Bush now says his people will conduct a thorough review of Korea policy before deciding what to do about the North. Yet two years ago, the first post-Cold War overhaul of Korea policy went on for six months under the direction of William Perry, a former Defense Secretary and a Republican, and this review culminated in a missile deal that was deeply in the American interest. Pyongyang was willing to forgo construction, deployment and international sales of all missiles with a range of more than 300 miles. Had Clinton visited Kim Jong Il in Pyongyang, American negotiators were convinced that Kim would also have agreed to enter the Missile Technology Control Regime, which would limit all North Korean missiles to an upper range of 180 miles (and remove a threat felt deeply in nearby Japan). In return the U.S. would have provided $1 billion in food aid to the regime. In other words, getting North Korea into the MTCR would cost $1 billion and a summit meeting between the American President and Kim Jong Il; National Missile Defense -- said by Bush spokesmen to be directed particularly at North Korea -- has already cost $60 billion, according to The New York Times, with the sky the limit under Bush.
The sticking points between Washington and Pyongyang were: the presidential visit to Pyongyang, verification of the missile control agreement, and what to do about existing stocks of North Korean missiles. None of these "sticking points" are really very sticky; a key insider says that the U.S. can do almost all the necessary verification without in-country or on-site inspections. The existing missile stocks simply present a problem of finding an effective way to buy them out. And the President wanted to go to Pyongyang, indeed, his negotiators had their bags packed for weeks -- but as Clinton's National Security advisor Sandy Berger later put it, it wasn't a good idea for the President to leave the country last November, when they didn't know "whether there could be a major constitutional crisis." After the Supreme Court stepped in to give the election to Bush, it was too late.
Kim Dae Jung's statesmanship has been at the root of all of the success in negotiations with North Korea over the past three years, and it would be a terrible shame if his efforts should go for naught because of a new and shaky administration in Washington. The Florida election fluke did provoke the constitutional crisis that Berger feared -- and now appears to have derailed a highly successful strategy for dealing with North Korea.
