In 2008, the United States and South Korea faced highly sensitive problems on North Korea, trade and military relationships. Negotiations were protracted, tortuous and often bitterly controversial on topics ranging from North Korea's nuclear weapons program to a U.S.-Korea free trade agreement to the U.S.-Korean military alliance. Despite progress toward final resolution of critical issues, chances for a breakdown in talks, a reversal in the process, were high.
Although North Korea's abandonment of its nuclear program might appear more important than two-way U.S.-Korean trade, the issue of U.S. trading relations with South Korea was far more visible on the streets of Seoul. The reason was that President Lee Myung Bak, before going to the United States in April to meet President George W. Bush at Camp David, the presidential retreat north of Washington, told his agriculture minister to sign an agreement opening South Korea to U.S. beef imports for the first time since they were banned in December 2003.
It was then that South Korean authorities decided the discovery of Mad Cow disease in a single cow in the state of Washington raised the danger of Mad Cow disease spreading to South Korea through American beef imports. The ban had been partially lifted when several shipments of supposedly boneless U.S. beef arrived in South Korea, but inspectors blocked their distribution to markets after x-rays revealed bone chips. The U.S. demanded and got a deal that called for admitting all U.S. beef, including ribs and T-bones, provided the beef was stripped clean of "strategic risk materials," vertebrae and other parts seen as potential conveyers of Mad Cow disease.
Much to the shock of both the U.S. and South Korean governments, nightly protests broke out in central Seoul and other major cities on May 2. The protests built up in intensity to the point at which approximately 100,000 people swarmed over the capital on June 10 holding paper cups with candles burning inside, denouncing the beef deal. President Lee apologised before the nation on two television addresses, promising modifications in the agreement with the U.S. The result was a new agreement reached in Washington and announced in Seoul on June 21 by South Korea's trade minister, Kim Jong Hoon, that called for restrictions on the export to Korea of beef from cattle more than 30 months old.
South Korea, however, had to move gingerly on reopening to U.S. beef imports while protesters promised to keep up their crusade for a ban on all U.S. beef - and called for the ouster not just of members of President Lee's government but of Lee himself. The movement against him seriously slowed down other programs to which his critics also objected, including moves to privatize major government companies and give more freedom to the chaebol or conglomerates that have long dominated the economy.

The controversy over U.S. beef threatened ratification by the U.S. Congress and South Korea's National Assembly of the free trade agreement (FTA) laboriously worked out in nearly one and a half years of often strained negotiations between U.S. and South Korean teams. Although beef was not specifically included in the agreement, U.S. politicians and officials warned that the American Congress would never pass it if U.S. beef were still denied entry into South Korea, the third largest market for American beef exports before the ban.
The FTA, pushed by both governments, with the unreserved support of the American Chamber of Commerce in Korea, had serious detractors. South Korean leftists and Ford Motor Company executives, as well as American workers losing jobs in an economy on the verge of recession, loudly opposed it. Senator Barack Obama, the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party, said it was "badly flawed." Activists in South Korea spoke on behalf of farmers worried about losing out to American competition even though rice, the most sensitive of all products, was excluded.
In the midst of the protests against U.S. beef and concern about approval of the FTA, the U.S. and Democratic People's Republic of Korea, the DPRK, moved closer to an understanding on the next step in the arduous process of getting the North to give up its nuclear weapons.
That would be the DPRK's declaration, as promised by the end of 2007, of everything in its nuclear inventory. North Korea had delayed providing the list, calling for "action for action" in the form of an infusion of more shipments of heavy fuel in addition to the initial 50,000 tons that it had already received, plus fulfilment of two critical demands, removal from the State Department's list of nations sponsoring terrorism and lifting of U.S. economic sanctions. For North Korea these conditions were crucial since they provided potential trading partners and investors everywhere with ample reason not to do business with Pyongyang.
Before the end of 2007, North Korea began to dismantle its complex at Yongbyon, shutting down the five-megawatt reactor needed in the process of producing plutonium for nuclear warheads, but progress toward the next level of fulfilment of the six-nation agreement reached in Beijing on February 13 of that year appeared to have stalled. The critical issue was the North's refusal to acknowledge anything to do with developing warheads with enriched uranium. The United States downgraded the program from "highly enriched uranium" to "enriched uranium," but U.S. analysts were convinced North Korea had obtained centrifuges and expertise from A.Q. Khan, the disgraced Pakistani physicist, and also had assisted in a mysterious nuclear project in Syria that was bombed by Israeli warplanes in September 2007.

In May 2008, North Korea provided a team led by Sung Kim, director of the State Department's Korea desk, with 18,000 pages of documents on its nuclear activities in a gesture of compliance with the U.S. demand for full disclosure. That gesture, however, backfired when research revealed traces of uranium on some of the papers. Nonetheless, after multiple conversations between the chief U.S. nuclear negotiator, Christopher Hill, and his North Korean counterpart, Kim Kye Gwan, the DPRK by June 2008 was ready to provide the long-awaited declaration - though one that still would not go all the way to acknowledging the uranium program or the North's role in the Syrian complex.
A North Korean emissary submitted the long-awaited document to the Chinese Foreign Ministry in Beijing on June 26. The next day, for the benefit of one television network from each of the five other participants in the six-party talks, China, as host, the US, Russia, Japan and South Korea, the cooling tower at the Yongbyon complex was blown up. The explosion symbolized the end of plutonium production at Yongbyon, but the document failed to mention three other critical issues, the separate uranium enrichment program, the proliferation of nuclear materials and expertise of other countries and the size and scope of the DPRK's arsenal of nuclear warheads, estimated at six to a dozen.
Nonetheless, despite reservations, President Bush appeared before the media in Washington to announce the beginning of the 45-day process of removing the DPRK from the State Department's list of nations sponsoring terrorism and also lifting sanctions on trade. These measures would give North Korea the legitimacy needed to do business with countries and firms that had refrained from trade and investment as long as terror listing and sanctions were in place.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, stopping off in Seoul on June 29, stressed the need for North Korea to provide answers on uranium and proliferation, saying "we have to have the abandonment of all programs, weapons and materials." She may have been shocked to discover, meanwhile, that on the streets of the capital all anyone cared about was resumption of US beef imports. Several thousand demonstrators challenged thousands of policemen manning barricades of police buses. While Rice met President Lee, demonstrators shouted demands for his resignation and a total ban on US beef. Rice, while in Seoul again said US beef is "safe" and assured Korean officials that Bush was working hard to persuade the US Congress to ratify the Free Trade Agreement.
By 2008, US diplomacy vis-à-vis North Korea had shifted substantially from the hard-line policy pursued by Bush in his early years as president. Historians will not forget one of the most famous quotations Bush ever uttered when, in January 2002, he included North Korea in an "axis of evil" extending to Iraq and Iran. It was later that year, in October 2002, that the process of reconciliation plunged to its lowest levels since the summer of 1994 when the Pentagon seriously feared an outbreak of the second Korean War.
The issue in October 2002 was much the same as in 1994 - but with a significant difference. The U.S. assistant secretary of state for East Asia and the Pacific, James Kelly, led a mission to Pyongyang that month to talk about fulfilment of the "framework agreement" reached eight years earlier in Geneva in October 1994, under which the DPRK had agreed to shut down its five-megawatt reactor under the eyes of inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency in return for construction of twin light-water nuclear energy reactors.
Kelly carried with him to Pyongyang what purported to be documentary evidence that the DPRK had begun work on building nuclear warheads with highly enriched uranium. The evidence showed that North Korea had obtained centrifuges along with technological know-how from A.Q. Khan's network. Back in Washington, the news emerged that the DPRK's vice foreign minister, Kang Sok Ju, had acknowledged the claim. Versions of what was said vary. It is certain that Kang proclaimed the DPRK's right to do what was necessary for self-defence but unlikely that he affirmed, in effect, you are correct, we are developing nuclear warheads with enriched uranium.
Regardless of what Kang "admitted" or "acknowledged," the U.S. stopped shipping heavy oil, per the terms of the 1994 agreement. The DPRK responded by expelling the IAEA inspectors by the end of the year, withdrawing from the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, restarting its reactor at Yongbyon and resuming fabrication of warheads with plutonium at their core. The breakdown of the 1994 Geneva agreement came two and a half years after South Korea's President Kim Dae Jung, pursuing a "sunshine" policy of reconciliation, had met North Korea's Kim Jong Il in Pyongyang for the first inter-Korean summit at which they had signed an historic joint communiqué on June 15, 2000.
Gradually, however, U.S. policy shifted toward a position that would be acceptable to Kim Dae Jung's successor, Roh Moo Hyun. Bush avoided remarks calculated not only to infuriate Kim Jong Il but also to ruffle feathers in Seoul. Condoleezza Rice, who had been Bush's national security adviser, led the transition after her appointment as secretary of state at the outset of Bush's second term in 2005. Hill persuaded her to accept a "joint statement" on September 19, 2005, in which all six parties, including the two Koreas, the U.S., Russia, Japan and host China, agreed that North Korea would give up its nuclear weapons in return for "action for action" by the other signatories, who would help the North fulfil its energy needs.
The statement avoided any mention of uranium, but Hill's optimism never seemed to falter even when North Korea stonewalled on more talks after the Treasury Department blacklisted an obscure bank in Macao for serving as a conduit for money counterfeited in North Korea and for holding accounts through which North Korea sold arms and narcotics. BDA - Banco Delta Asia - froze accounts holding $25 million in North Korean funds while banks around the world refused to deal with North Korea as long as the Treasury Department banned any institution doing business with the DPRK from doing business in the U.S. or with a U.S. institution overseas.
The blacklist blockaded North Korea from commerce with just about any other country other than China, its Korean War ally and source of aid and trade, and South Korea, expanding commerce and supporting the tourist zone at Mount Kumkang, looming over the east coast, and the special economic zone at Kaesong, 40 miles north of Seoul. While staying away from talks, the DPRK fired off a volley of missiles in early July 2006, including the long-range Taepodong II, capable of travelling as far as the U.S. west coast though this one fizzled into nearby waters.
Then, on October 9, 2006, the DPRK raised the stakes, conducting its first underground nuclear test. Like the firing of Taepodong II, the nuclear test was weak and may have been a partial failure. The fact that the DPRK could explode a nuclear device, however, added urgency to demands for resolution of the nuclear issue - and gave Hill the support he needed to resolve the BDA issue. In the end, he came up with a formula for transferring North Korea's funds from the BDA through Russia to a North Korean account while the Treasury Department pulled the DPRK from its blacklist.
Hill pressed on for the "denuclearization action plan," signed by all six parties in Beijing on February 13, 2007. The word "uranium" was banned, as far as the DPRK was concerned, from any documents, and the issue of "human rights" was never raised on the assumption that North Korea would immediately cut off negotiations, but Hill when asked often stated that North Korea eventually had to come clean on uranium too.
President Roh, in Pyongyang for the second inter-Korean summit in October 2007, agreed with Kim Jong Il to advance economic cooperation, create a special zone of peace in disputed waters in the West or Yellow Sea and develop a "peace regime" for the Korean peninsula. The mood in South Korea appeared to be shifting when Lee Myung Bak, former mayor of Seoul and, 30 years earlier, chairman of Hyundai Engineering and Construction, achieved a landslide victory as the conservative Grand National Party candidate in the presidential election in December.
Clearly voters preferred Lee's seeming firmness toward North Korea, which he said had to show "reciprocity" in the form of the release of hundreds of fishermen whose boats had strayed into North Korean waters over the years as well as the release of several hundred South Korean soldiers captured during the Korean War and held ever since in North Korea. Uneasiness was fuelled by contemplation of the liberal leadership that might replace the conservative George W. Bush after the U.S. presidential election in November 2008.
Barack Obama seemed willing to yield to North Korean demands when he spoke of the need to negotiate with leaders of nations with which there were severe disagreements. No one had forgotten that Bill Clinton, in the waning months of his presidency, had sent his secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, to Pyongyang in October 2000 shortly before the U.S. presidential election the next month. Albright then committed one of the great blunders of diplomatic history, permitting "Dear Leader" Kim Jong Il to lead her into May First stadium where side-by-side they watched a gigantic display of rhetoric and propaganda.
Condoleezza Rice avoided the same trap when the New York Philharmonic Orchestra performed in Pyongyang. Kim Jong Il had timed the concert for the day after Lee's inauguration in February in order to give Rice the chance to fly from Seoul to Pyongyang for the great event. Rice called on Lee for a lengthy conversation after the inaugural and then flew to Beijing to meet her Chinese counterpart. Had Rice gone to Pyongyang, Kim Jong Il would no doubt have delighted in leading her into to the concert hall, just as he had misled Albright into May First Stadium.

The U.S. and South Korea had concerns other than the North's nuclear program and the free trade agreement. South Koreans were uneasy about plans, initiated while Donald Rumsfeld was defence secretary, for rewriting the details of the military relationship between the two countries. OPCON, for transfer of operational control of allied forces in the event of war, called for a South Korean commander to take full charge in case of war by 2012. The U.S. had wanted to push through the machinery needed to make the switch by 2009. South Korea's defence ministry, fearful of loss of U.S. interest in defending the country in a showdown, held out for the later date.
Lack of confidence in the U.S. military commitment was also evident in the reduction of U.S. forces, which had gone down from 37,000 in 2004 to 28,500 in 2008 on the way to 25,000 or lower by the end of the decade. Yet another cause for concern was the scheme for pulling all U.S. forces south of the Han River, moving most of them into a newly built base at Pyongtaek, near Osan, headquarters of the U.S. Seventh Air Force, 40 miles south of Seoul. The U.S. Second Infantry Division, on the invasion route down which North Korean troops had poured on the way to Seoul in June 1950, was going to pull up stakes at Camp Casey and nearby bases and retreat to Pyongtaek along with the U.S. military headquarters at Yongsan in central Seoul.
What would become of the "tripwire" afforded by U.S. troops? Were the South Korean forces strong enough, well equipped enough, to staunch a new invasion? These were burning issues to those with memories of the Korean War. For the benefit of television, however, North Korea preferred to show off the explosion of the cooling tower at the Yongbyon nuclear complex. The event was of largely symbolic significance but conveyed the message that North Korea was cooperating - provided the U.S. and others responded by "action for action" on the way to denuclearization.

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