ML-Implode News - Diplomacy With North Korea Has Worked Before, and Can Work Again

Most histories of the Agreed Framework overlook a critical fact: one month after it was signed, the GOP captured Congress for the first time in four decades. "No sooner had the agreement been concluded than the Republicans took control of the House and Senate, putting it in jeopardy," Sigal wrote in his history. Even before the ink was dry, Newt Gingrich and other party leaders, notably Senator John McCain, were attacking the framework as a sellout that would essentially bribe North Korea to follow international law on nuclear proliferation and put the United States at further risk. "We're going back to the days of President Carter, of appeasement," McCain told The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour in October 1994.
Over the course of the agreement, the GOP delayed critical funding for KEDO and the fuel oil, forcing the Clinton administration to seek funds elsewhere and significantly delaying shipments--"in some cases for years," says Chinoy. That created difficulties for the US diplomats who were directly involved with the North Koreans in implementing its terms, recalls Pierce, who spent many days in Pyongyang working with North Korean officials to monitor where the fuel oil was flowing after it reached the North. "We scraped [the funds] together, because we knew we weren't going to get any more money from Congress," he says. "But we had to deliver on our side."

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Diplomacy With North Korea Has Worked Before, and Can Work Again