![]() ![]() He felt unable to leave the country.Īfter Bush won, Clinton’s staff briefed incoming Secretary of State Colin Powell on the promising state of relations. Clinton was also mired in the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal, and preoccupied with Arab-Israeli negotiations. Kim Jong-il then invited Clinton to a summit in North Korea.īut it looked like Vice President Al Gore might lose the 2000 presidential election to George W. Clinton viewed it as the basis for a peace deal. The vice marshal carried a letter from Pyongyang. Relations warmed in a series of meetings, culminating in a top North Korean military leader’s visit to Washington on October 12. Former president Jimmy Carter resolved the standoff with a trip to Pyongyang, and as Clinton’s presidency drew to a close, he was eager to cement a deal. In June 2000, after intelligence suggested North Korea’s Yongbyon nuclear reactor might be refining nuclear weapon components, Clinton nearly ordered an airstrike on it. Some North Korean military hardliners opposed peace with America and South Korea. His landmark summit with Kim Jong-il led to brief reunions between North and South Korean relatives, and several joint business and tourism ventures. Kim announced a “Sunshine Policy” - engagement with the North. That same year, South Korea’s hard-line approach to the North ended with the election of President Kim Dae-jung, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate and former democracy activist. Clinton invoked executive authority to send fuel aid to North Korea. North Korea rattled its sabers on August 31, 1998, launching its first intermediate-range ballistic missile, the Taepodong-1. In exchange, a multinational consortium would build North Korea two light-water reactors, which aren’t as useful for building nuclear weapons. claimed was also developing nuclear warheads. Under the Agreed Framework, Pyongyang would “freeze” its nuclear energy program, which the U.S. This didn’t sit well with the Clinton administration, but in October 1994, the two reached a deal. His son, Kim Jong-Il, adopted a policy of greater military spending known as songun, or “military first.” Pyongyang repeatedly used potential nuclear weapons as a bargaining chip. State media reported that his deathbed wish was for the Korean peninsula to be free of nuclear weapons. In July 1994, after four decades in power, Kim Il-Sung died from a heart attack. In 1993, North Korea threatened to withdraw from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. In other words, North Korea wanted to be friends.īut as Chinoy describes it, any deal “had to be based on a projection of strength.” Pyongyang had a strategy: developing missiles and nuclear warheads as a safety deterrent, and a bargaining chip. ![]() North Korean leader Kim Il-sung and his son Kim Jong-il evidently concluded that their regime’s only chance of survival was to forge diplomatic and trade ties with the sole remaining superpower, according to former CNN correspondent Mike Chinoy, who has visited North Korea 17 times, and is the author of Meltdown : The Inside Story of the North Korean Nuclear Crisis. military pre-eminence, and the willingness to use it. America’s 1991 war against Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had proven U.S. Other Communist regimes in East Germany and Romania had collapsed. North Korea was also isolated politically. North Korea faced fuel shortages, and was entering a famine that would kill between 900,000 and 2.5 million people by 1998. This meant the end of aid from the Soviets, North Korea’s biggest sponsor since China began forging close ties with America in the 1970s. When the Soviet Union collapsed 1991, there was jubilation in the West- but definitely not in Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea. North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-Il with top military generals in an undisclosed location on April 3, 2003-less than a week before his reclusive nation left the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |