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Contributing Writer
NEW YORK _ Leading U.S. presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is offering her foreign policy perspective in this month's issue of the journal Foreign Affairs.
To learn more about how a potential Hillary Clinton White House would deal with Pyongyang, The Korea Times spoke with Lee Feinstein, her national security director and foreign policy advisor. He is a former deputy in President Bill Clinton's State Department and also worked as director at Council on Foreign Relations.
Hillary Clinton, currently a Democratic senator from New York, is a strong proponent of direct dialogue and negotiations with North Korea and she would use both carrots and sticks, rewards as well as penalties when dealing with North Korea's denuclearization issue, according to Feinstein.
He added that Senator Clinton had been frustrated with President George W. Bush's policy toward North Korea during the first five years of the Bush presidency.
``Senator Clinton thinks that the first five years of the Bush administration was unsuccessful, that more nuclear materials are available to North Koreans and that there was a nuclear test. She feels that all this probably could have been avoided if the Bush administration stuck to, or pursued, the policy that they were handed [from the Bill Clinton administration],'' Feinstein said.
``Senator Hillary Clinton has been a proponent for sometime of negotiations with North Korea. She's been critical of the Bush administration's delay in beginning negotiations in earnest with the North. She is supportive of the current process, which she believes is the return to the policies of the 1990s. She's hopeful that a return to diplomacy in the present Bush administration can bear fruit. Senator Clinton is encouraged by the steps that the Bush administration is belatedly taking and she hopes that they bear fruit.''
Speaking about the current six-party talks, Feinstein explained that Senator Clinton, while supporting the talks, was initially concerned that they would be seen as somehow replacing bilateral negotiations.
``But it's now clear that six-party talks are reinforcing bilateral negotiations, and she's therefore supportive of that. And she's talked about the six-party talks as perhaps a model for a Northeast Asia security mechanism of some kind.''
But at the same time, Senator Clinton also feels that the deal that is currently available ``isn't quite as good as the deal that was available seven years ago.''
``And so she thinks it's a shame. But she is, and wants to be, supportive of the current process and is hopeful that America's chief North Korea negotiator Christopher Hill, on behalf of U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, can achieve the dismantlement that everybody wants,'' Feinstein said.
Non-proliferation is an important issue that Senator Clinton would focus on during her possible presidency and she would try to cut down America's own nuclear arsenal. ``Senator Clinton has said she's very concerned about trends in non-proliferation,'' Feinstein noted. ``She believes it's important for the United States to regain its standing as a country that believes in non-proliferation and acts on that belief.''
``Therefore she has said that while she doesn't believe countries like North Korea or Iran will make their decisions about their own nuclear weapons program on the basis of what the United States chooses to do with its nuclear program, she nonetheless believes it's important to take steps like ratifying the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT), like entering into deeper negotiations with Russia on our respective nuclear holdings and taking other steps that would make it clear that the Unites States is interested in non-proliferation. This would be in order to build the kind of international support you need to deal with the hard problems.''
Senator Clinton would be favoring using both carrots and sticks, rewards as well as penalties when dealing with North Korea's denuclearization issue. ``She's a very, very strong proponent of negotiations with our adversaries including North Korea because she believes that negotiations plus other tools--diplomacy as well as, when necessary, economic pressure in coordination with our allies--are how you achieve results,'' Feinstein said.
When asked under what specific conditions Senator Clinton would be willing to sign a peace treaty and normalize diplomatic ties with North Korea, Feinstein said Senator Clinton wouldn't want to address this question yet since this would just be a hypothetical situation for her at the moment. ``She's hoping that chief North Korea negotiator Christopher Hill and the current talks will be successful and that she can build on those. We are going to have to see what the circumstances bring in the next 14 months. She needs to see what the situation is at the time when she becomes the president. She will just have to see what the situation brings.''
According to recent U.S. polls, Senator Clinton is leading the Democratic presidential field by a big margin. Polls also find Hillary Clinton running ahead or neck-and-neck with leading Republican presidential candidate, Rudolph Giuliani. The U.S. presidential election will be held in November next year.
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