One-man diplomacy

Parag Khanna, a senior research fellow at the New America Foundation, recently argued that globalization and the worldwide financial crisis have revealed a fragmented international landscape in which certain individuals can wield more influence in shaping foreign relations and political campaigns than countries or government agencies themselves.

The world seemingly caught a glimpse of a similar phenomenon earlier this week, when former President Bill Clinton traveled to the North Korean capital of Pyongyang and successfully negotiated the release of two American journalists who were arrested and held in the country since March.

Although White House officials, according to those with close knowledge of the negotiations, were orchestrating North Korea’s pardon of the journalists for months in advance, the White House publicly maintained that Clinton’s trip was strictly an independent venture.

Currently, they insist that Clinton had pursued the journalists’ release on a private, purely humanitarian basis. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has also tried to separate her husband’s trip to North Korea from intensifying U.S.-North Korean diplomatic tension sparked by the latter’s intransigence in pursuing nuclear armament.

By denying the government’s extensive role in crafting a deal with North Korea, the White House has cleverly used Clinton as a high-profile mechanism of obeisance while simultaneously perpetuating its feigned disinterest in the significance of his visit.

In other words, the more that President Obama, Secretary Clinton and Press Secretary Robert Gibbs can shift responsibility for the journalists’ release from the U.S. government to Bill Clinton himself, the less it appears that the United States has made any substantive concession to the North Korean government that could revive nuclear talks between the two countries.

Make no mistake though, sending a former president to one of the most erratic, unstable, undemocratic and belligerent nations on Earth is an enormous concession. It’s precisely the type of attention for which an ailing dictator and his dilapidated government have been starving.  

Although not one senior official in the U.S. government has publicly acknowledged it yet, Bill Clinton’s trip to North Korea, like former President Jimmy Carter’s similar trip to the country in 1994, symbolizes the potential for a resuscitation of diplomatic relations between the two countries.  

But sending an emissary of Bill Clinton’s stature to a place like North Korea looks an awful lot like negotiating with terrorists, a hallmark no-no of American foreign policy.
On the other hand, if Bill Clinton flew to North Korea, met with Kim Jong Il, and used his diplomatic suasion to personally secure the release of two American journalists completely by himself, without the U.S. government’s official coordination – as the ideal White House narrative would go – then the United States has opened the door for diplomacy without conceding an ounce of legitimacy to North Korea.

Of course, Kim Jong Il hardly cares what Robert Gibbs tells the American public. As long as former presidents are swinging by to plead on behalf of innocent journalists, the North Korean government will keep grabbing headlines and the attention of the international community. And as the U.S. government should know by now, that’s pretty much all North Korea is after.