Last week, North Korea stunned the world by acknowledging that it has been working to produce nuclear bomb fuel despite a 1994 agreement with the United States to freeze nuclear weapons development.  It is a staggering admission, done with belligerence and arrogance.  We have much to learn from this confession.  How should we think about this?

• First, some background.  Faced in 1994 with Pyongyang’s threat to divert plutonium from a nuclear reactor to its weapons program, the Clinton administration contemplated preemptive action against North Korea.  The government considered strikes against North Korea’s nuclear facilities and mobilizing American troops for war.  At that time, North Korea had ejected the international inspectors at its nuclear facility at Yongbyon and begun steps that would have led in a few months to the extraction of enough plutonium to build about six nuclear bombs.  The US made it clear that it would bomb the Yongbyon facility and invade North Korea, with South Korea’s help, if necessary.  But the Clinton administration was also involved in diplomacy and the result was the so-called Agreed Framework.  Under the agreement, North Korea pledged to store the unprocessed plutonium at Yongbyon under the direct on-site verification of US and international inspectors.  This has been done.  They also pledged to eventually send this plutonium out of the country and destroy the Yongbyon complex altogether.  In return, the US and its allies agreed to provide North Korea with fuel oil and, eventually, two Western-style nuclear power reactors whose fuel would be under international control.  Today, that agreement has hardly even been implemented: the construction of the reactors has not yet started and it remains very controversial.  Today, we are confronted with another nuclear challenge from North Korea, designed to produce enriched uranium rather than plutonium for use in making a nuclear bomb.

• Second, why is this an important matter?  Why should the US be willing to risk war over this matter?  1.  Because the Korean War ended in an armistice in 1953, not a treaty, the threat of the North to the South is real.  That is why the US has nearly 40,000 troops in South Korea, most of them along the DMZ.  For North Korea to have nuclear weapons would threaten South Korea and upset the current balance.  2.  A nuclear North Korea would cause South Korea and other Asian nations to seek nuclear weapons as well.  This kind of proliferation is unacceptable.  3.  Since North Korea is so impoverished and in so much turmoil, what guarantees could we possibly have that those weapons could not be bought, stolen or commandeered by terrorists?  This is the threat of the future - nuclear materials available that can fall into the hands of terrorists.  The world cannot allow this situation to remain.  The policy must be preventative to insure that these kinds of weapons never proliferate.  The world and specifically the US have a daunting task.

• Third, this admission by North Korea validates President Bush’s argument that indeed North Korea, along with Iraq (and Iran), constitute an “axis of evil.”  It also validates that keeping nuclear weapons out of the hands of dictators who want them requires more than signed agreements.  North Korea not only has nullified the 1994 Agreed Framework, it has also violated the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty that it signed and a joint declaration it signed with South Korea not to develop nuclear weapons.  It is a regime that cannot be trusted.  What President Clinton and his secretary of state, Madeline Albright, believed was that economic promises would change dictatorial North Korea’s behavior.  The US poured $6 billion of foreign aid into North Korea (the largest recipient in the Asian Pacific region) and, per the agreement, gave them over 500,000 tons of fuel oil per year.  Real, verifiable peace agreements seem illusive with such dictatorial regimes.  There must be verification or there must be military action.  There really is no middle path.  That is the lesson we have now learned with North Korea.  May it be applied to Iraq as well.  We live in difficult times, but to ignore the reality of this “axis of evil” is to do so at our own peril.

See the very helpful article by Ashton B. Carter and William J. Perry in the Washington Post (20 October 2002).

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THE EUROPEAN UNION GROWS

The European Union (EU) is growing.  It recently approved plans to expand the EU by adding 10 additional member states to the 15 EU current members.  This development is the implementation of the Treaty of Nice, a document drawn up in December 2000 to set the complicated ground rules for the EU’s enlargement from 15 to 25.  The European Commission, the EU’s executive branch, said it plans to offer admission to the three Baltic States - Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania - as well as to Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Malta and Cyprus.  Two other hopefuls, Romania and Bulgaria, will need to wait until 2007.  Turkey was told to improve its human rights record before it could join.  How should we think about this growth?

• First, this larger EU will have a combined gdp of $8.4 trillion (2001), compared with a NAFTA (North American Free Trade Association of the US, Canada and Mexico) gdp of $11.4 trillion (2001).  Undoubtedly, such expansion will boost trade and economies not only within the bloc but also for its trading partners, namely the US and Asian nations.  In addition, these new members will need to embark on ambitious investment programs to get everything from roads to telecommunications up to the EU code.  Also, the new EU will have a population of over 450 million people.  

• Second, the situation with Turkey is a sore spot with the United States.  The US had hoped that Turkey would be offered a clear timetable for admission, which did not occur.  The decision of the European Commission only heightens the friction between the EU and the US, seen in heated disagreements over steel tariffs, agriculture and tax breaks for US exporters.  The US considered Turkey’s membership critical for its policies in the Middle East.

• Third, this past Sunday, Ireland voted to approve the Treaty of Nice and begin the process of joining the EU.  This is a critical result and one that will insure the growth of the EU.  Most analysts agreed that had Ireland rejected the treaty again, as it had done in 2001, it would have doomed the Nice Treaty. 

In short, the EU continues its growth and its integration.  It is becoming a huge monolith with integrated economies, an integrated currency and the potential for political integration through its European Parliament and its European Court of Justice.  Where this will all lead no one exactly knows.  But the EU is one of the major power centers in both economic and world affairs.

See The Wall Street Journal (18 October 2002) and New York Times (20 October 2002).

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THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH AND ITS CRISIS OF AUTHORITY

Since the Vatican II Council in the early 1960s, the Roman Catholic church has witnessed a clear erosion of its authority, both in the lives of typical Catholics as well as within its hierarchy.  The recent rejection by the Vatican of the American bishops’ zero tolerance policy on child sexual abuse further demonstrates this point.  Several comments:

• First, on the surface, the Vatican officials who reviewed the American bishops’ zero tolerance policy feared that priests were being denied the legal safeguards that other people received and that the policy made no distinction between serious crime and stupid error.  In short, they argued, innocent priests might be sacrificed to runaway public suspicion.

• Second, there is a far more important reason for their disapproval of the American bishops’ policy.  In the words of Frank Bruni, “It was the way those bishops had, in the eyes of some Vatican officials, ceded their authority and discretion, replacing individual judgment with exacting prescriptions and opening the Roman Catholic Church to scrutiny, and censure, from lay people outside its hierarchy.”  By the bishops’ idea of oversight groups filled with lay people, the bishops challenged the church’s view of itself as an institution not temporal but eternal, answering less to exigent circumstances than to longstanding tradition.  To many in the Vatican this action of the American bishops represented an astonishing departure from church custom and theology and a disturbing precedent.  It made the church bishops subject to lay Catholics.  As one Vatican official and professor argued, “Theologically, lay people supervising bishops in exercising their hierarchical authority is entirely absent from church tradition.”

• Third, in formally rejecting the zero-tolerance policy, the Vatican called for a commission of American bishops, working in concert with Vatican officials, to rewrite several of the provisions.  As written, the bishops’ policy undercut the church’s image of itself as an institution that gives guidance, rather than beseeching it, and as a source of moral authority, not an instantly flexible instrument responding to public pressure.  In short, there is a clash of cultures between the American bishops and the Vatican.  As Bruni argues, “. . . the American bishops proposed sweeping, fundamental departures from established church law for a single country and an urgent situation.  But the Vatican sees itself as the guardian of a universal institution with established practices that transcend a given set of circumstances.”  The concern for the universal church always prevails from the Vatican view of things.

• Finally, what we see here is not a church insensitive to child abuse.  That would be unfair.  Like all, Vatican officials deplore it.  What is at stake here is how to view the church.  For Rome, the church is institutionalized, with a hierarchy and with established regulations and procedures.  To violate those is to challenge the guardian of truth and tradition - the institutionalized church in Rome.  What happens in America is important, but American bishops do not run the institutionalized church.  They are a mere part of it.  As stated, this decision by the Vatican manifests the enormous clash of church culture - the Vatican, where truth and tradition are sacred, and the American church, where democratic tradition and accountability to lay people is a given.  The Vatican - the institutionalized church at Rome - has emerged victorious in this clash.

See Bruni’s brilliant article in The New York Times (20 October 2002).

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