Subsidies for a psychopath

John Podhoretz:

FOR decades, intelligence agencies have assured the world that Kim Jong Il, the dictator of North Korea, is a psychopathic lunatic with a massive collection of pornography and a habit of kidnapping people from Japan, Hong Kong and South Korea to serve his whims.

He has made decisions about where to spend his government's money in a time of government-made famine that has caused the deaths of at least 1 million of his countrymen and women. He has built giant skyscrapers that are so structurally unsound they cannot be inhabited.

Psychopathic monster he almost certainly is. Almost everyone who has spent time in North Korea reports that it is, without question, the most horrifying place on this planet - a world in which the totalitarian fantasy imagined by Madeline L'Engle in the great 1962 children's book "A Wrinkle in Time" has been made flesh and bone.

But a lunatic Kim is not. He is a master geopolitician. Though we don't yet know the terms of the tentative deal announced yesterday under which North Korea has supposedly agreed to end its nuclear program, chances are very good that once again Kim has forced the world's powers - including the United States - to pay him a massive bribe that will help him maintain his stranglehold on power.

Since 1985, North Korea has used its reputation for insanity to manipulate not only the United States, but even the Evil Empire to its West. In that year, the Soviet Union agreed to provide the North Koreans with light nuclear reactors if the Norks agreed to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Showing stunning sangfroid against the ruthless bunch in Moscow, Kim's father signed the treaty and then simply refused to abide by any of its provisions. He spent five years refusing to allow a single inspector into the country, and when he did finally allow their entry in 1990, he deceived them and lied to them.

And how did North Korea pay for its recalcitrance? It didn't. In 1991, the United States agreed to remove its short-range nuclear weapons from the Korean peninsula in exchange for a promise from North Korea (and South Korea) not to do anything nuclear.

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Of course they violated that deal and the subsequent deal with the Clinton administration. The fact is that the word of a psychopath is no good. We are supposed to have safe guards in this agreement to prevent cheating, but we are allowing them to keep the product of their earlier misconduct, which does not suggest any real seriousness on the part of the Norks. What we are doing is paying a high price to buy time for a future war in the hope that the entity that we are subsidizing will change. That is true insanity.

Attila the Hun was not German but an invader from the east. When he conquered what is now eastern Europe he stopped at the border of the Byzantine empire. His policies were very similar to Kim's. He extort money from the Byzantines and at the same time demanded that they return people who had fled his despotic rule. Not much has changed.

Claudia Rosett takes a look at the Norks illicit money trail. It will be interesting to see if anything in this agreement deals with the North Korean RICO problem. James Robbins says the terms of the deal sound suspiciously like the Clinton era 'Agreed framework." The key to whether this agreement will be successful in buying off the psychopath is whether the mechanisms for verifying compliance are adequate to the job of dealing with people whose word is no good.