Despite long-running diplomatic efforts by the U.S., North Korea has developed a sizable nuclear arsenal, allowing it to bully its neighbors and shake down the international community. Some, arguing that the failure to restrain North Korea’s nuclear program was due to U.S. intransigence, conclude that negotiations with Iran will succeed only if America is more generous this time. These analysts, write Sue Mi Terry and Max Boot, have it backwards:
It takes a willful denial of reality to claim . . . that the United States was at fault for the breakdown in U.S.-North Korean negotiations. A dispassionate reading of the evidence suggests that North Korea was never serious about giving up a nuclear program into which it had invested decades—not to mention billions of dollars—and that it saw as vital to regime protection and internal legitimacy. If North Korea has not developed as many nuclear weapons as U.S. intelligence agencies once feared, that is most likely a side effect of the regime’s dysfunction rather than any lack of desire to acquire more weapons.
The parallels with Iran are not comforting. If Iran is anything like North Korea, it will seek to gain the benefits of a deal—notably, the lifting of sanctions—without truly ending its nuclear program. Keeping Iran in check will require verification procedures more strict than those imposed on North Korea. But there was little sign of such procedures in the framework agreement [with Tehran] negotiated in Lausanne. In fact, shortly after the deal was announced, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, said that Iran would never accept unfettered inspection of its military facilities. And even if Iran does eventually accept stricter oversight, the United States will have to commit to holding the country to account instead of simply offering extra concessions in a futile bid to get it to live up to its original promises, as it did with North Korea. Only then will the lessons of the Agreed Framework truly have been learned.
Read more on Max Boot: http://www.maxboot.net/articles/188-the-wrong-lessons-from-north-korea.html