Jamie M. Fly's blog

By Jamie Fly 

In 1947, after George Kennan, writing under the pseudonym "X," published his famous article on "The Sources of Soviet Conduct" in Foreign Affairs, he quickly found that his concept of "containment" was distorted in the public discussion about his article that ensued. In his new book, The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War, Nicholas Thompson writes that Kennan went so far as to draft a letter to columnist Walter Lippman arguing that "containment meant propaganda and aid, not pistols and tanks." He ended up not sending the letter because Secretary of State Marshall requested his silence.

The Obama administration now appears to be faced with a dilemma similar to that confronting George Kennan in 1947. Containment is a nice term to throw around, but what does it actually mean in practice? In this case, the country to be contained is North Korea.

North Korea was supposed to be one issue where the Obama administration promised to be tougher than their predecessors. After the North disrupted the president's April 5 disarmament speech by firing a Taepodong-2 missile and followed that with a nuclear test on May 25, David Sanger of The New York Times wrote an article quoting a senior Obama advisor who said that the administration intended to "break the cycle" of provocative actions by Pyongyang, leading to payoffs and an agreement that later falls apart, only to lead to more crises and more payoffs.

Sanger described the new policy as "containment," although he noted that many in the administration were reluctant to use the term. As Stephen Hayes points out on The Weekly Standard's blog, the administration's rhetoric after North Korea's provocations in the first half of the year were much stronger than the follow-through.

This Obama version of containment was to rely on the newly passed United Nations Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1874, and supposed U.S. efforts to interdict illicit North Korean shipments. They indicated their seriousness about this task through a series of leaks to the press about the U.S. Navy's following of one specific ship headed to Burma, which supposedly turned around and returned to North Korea. The administration also followed up the new UNSCR with several designations of additional North Korean entities involved in proliferation, but they stopped short of implementing more extensive Section 311 actions against Asian financial institutions doing business with the North, the very measure that brought North Korea to the negotiating table in the past after the U.S. Treasury Department froze the assets of Banco Delta Asia.

Unfortunately, this tough talk and new sanctions have now given way to the traditional focus on negotiations which have repeatedly failed to bear fruit.  President Obama announced on Wednesday that he is sending U.S. Special Representative Stephen Bosworth to Pyongyang next month in an attempt to lure the North back to the Six Party framework.

While U.S. efforts behind the scenes to interdict illicit North Korean shipments undoubtedly continue, the president's announcement about Bosworth's trip effectively means that any effort to contain the proliferation problem posed by North Korea is now going to be put on the back burner because of concerns that provocative U.S. actions will destroy any chance that the North Koreans will be willing to talk.

Despite the White House listing North Korea as one of the key issues to be discussed at just about every stop of Obama's Asian trip, he seems to have  made little progress. We should not expect much assistance from China -- they are happy to maintain the status quo as long as Kim Jong Il does not act out too frequently. The president's stops in Japan and South Korea, however, appear to have been lost opportunities, as he could have used his discussions in both countries to strengthen defense cooperation between the United States and Japan and South Korea and to discuss increased cooperation on missile defense and nuclear planning. Such an effort would make clear to the Chinese the cost of their inaction on the issue.

Some may argue that the reason the Obama administration can return to the failed policies of its predecessors on North Korea is that while troubling, we have bigger challenges to face in the region and the world.  North Korea is a problem to be managed, not resolved.  Such an argument overlooks North Korea's role in the construction of Syria's secret nuclear reactor at Al Kibar, built while the North was supposedly negotiating in good faith with the successive U.S. administrations, as well as its ongoing assistance to the missile programs of rogue regimes such as Iran and Burma. North Korea may appear to be manageable only until the next case of nuclear technology transfer from the North is discovered, but the next time it may be too late.

As George Kennan found out, talking about "containment" is easy, but defining and implementing it is the difficult part. 

Photo: KNS/AFP/Getty Images

By Jamie M. Fly

The Obama administration's Iran policy should rightly be criticized for a variety of reasons. The administration wasted their first five months in office, doing little more than sending a backchannel message to Ayatollah Khamenei while failing to make a serious effort to build leverage by turning the President's popularity in Europe into support for sanctions.  
 
During the post-election tumult in June, President Obama dithered, first refusing to criticize the very regime with which he hoped to negotiate and expressing concern about the situation only after worldwide horror as regime-backed militias slaughtered protesters in the street.  
 
Then, in September, when Iran offered its standard non-response to a renewed offer by the P5+1, the administration jumped at the offer to negotiate, culminating in an Oct. 1 meeting in Geneva between the P5+1 and Iran, including Under Secretary of State William Burns.
 
The Obama administration has thus pursued engagement at all costs and not built up the leverage that will be required if Tehran is to be persuaded to reconsider its march toward a nuclear weapon.  
 
This is a record worthy of criticism, but in the wake of the Geneva talks, some critics have taken their skepticism about the Obama administration's approach too far.
 
At the talks, Iran reportedly agreed to let international inspectors into its newly revealed uranium enrichment facility at Qom and to transfer a significant amount of its stockpile of low enriched uranium (LEU) at Natanz to Russia and France for further processing in order to turn it into fuel for its medical research reactor in Tehran. In the days following the talks, the Iranians have cast doubts on what was actually agreed, making the upcoming Oct. 19 meeting in Vienna to discuss implementation of the arrangement an important sign of how serious the Iranians are.
 
Some conservative critics have criticized the Geneva talks and these supposed agreements, arguing that they are just Iranian ploys to buy more time and that talking to Tehran at all legitimizes a repressive regime. It is valid to question whether in the post-June 12th political environment, the United States should be negotiating with discredited leaders rather than trying to undermine them, but given the Obama administration's insistence on engaging Tehran, the proposed LEU transfer deal concocted by the administration is an intriguing confidence building measure that, if implemented, will reduce the short-term threat posed by Iran's nuclear program.
 
Despite the ongoing debate in the press about the status of Iran's work on weaponization of a nuclear device, the key wild card right now is the production of the fissile material required for a nuclear weapon. Although most analysts believe that Iran would attempt to produce the highly enriched uranium (HEU) required for a weapon at a covert site like the recently revealed facility at Qom, the growing stockpile at Natanz is currently the greatest known threat posed by Iran's program. Although any Iranian attempts to reconfigure Natanz to produce HEU or to transfer the LEU to another site would likely be discovered by the international community, Iran could use the stockpile as a bargaining chip in negotiations, much as North Korea has used its Yongbyon reactor to extract concessions during the Six Party process.

If Iran is not provided the fuel for the Tehran Research Reactor, it will strengthen the regime's argument that Iran is being denied the use of nuclear technology for peaceful purposes. It could also result in Iran reconfiguring its centrifuges at Natanz or Qom to enrich uranium to higher levels.

Instead of hastening such a scenario, if implemented, the Geneva plan would get the bulk of Iran's declared stockpile out of the country for up to a year. Critics point out that given Iran's mastery of centrifuge technology and expanding number of centrifuges, Iran could recoup the transferred fuel in a matter of months. That may be true, but if Iran follows up such an agreement with no additional concessions, it is difficult to imagine that the Obama administration will be able to ignore domestic and Israeli pressure to pursue sanctions.

In today's Washington Post, David Ignatius speculates that Iran's stockpile of low enriched uranium may not be as dangerous as once thought.  He describes the view of one expert that because of certain impurities in the LEU, Iran may be unable to further process the LEU into fuel for their research reactor or HEU for a weapon without advanced technology which they do not have. Ignatius speculates that perhaps this is why Iran is willing to look to Russia and France for assistance. Unfortunately, there is little evidence to back up this argument and regardless, the goal of the United States should be to keep Iran from even trying to produce HEU, not assuming that if they try they will be unsuccessful.

Others argue that, by assisting Iran with the conversion of its LEU produced in contravention of multiple United Nations Security Council Resolutions, the administration and its partners have accepted Iran's right to enrich uranium. However, the Security Council resolutions remain in force, the P5+1 continues to demand that Iran freeze enrichment, and the administration has repeatedly stated that it will not accept a nuclear Iran.

There are plenty of questions that should be raised about the administration's Iran strategy. But given that the administration has decided to engage, the LEU transfer is a worthwhile first step. The question is whether Iran has actually agreed or whether Geneva was a feint to buy time. We'll know more after next week's meeting in Vienna.  
 
Criticism of this administration is often warranted, but Republicans should give them credit for out of the box thinking when warranted as well.

JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images