The imperialism at the heart of the emerging global system is nicely expressed by Zbigniew Brzezinski’s formula, which was evidently taken to heart by the Bush administration:
… the three grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together.
The presidential statement to Congress in September 2002 referred to only two ‘rogue states’, meaning ‘barbarian’ states that brutalise their own people, ignore international law, strive to acquire weapons of mass destruction, sponsor terrorism, ‘reject basic human values and hate the United States and everything for which it stands’. They were Iraq and North Korea, and both constituted ‘a looming threat to all nations’. As I write, war with the first is imminent; with the second, it seems to be approaching rapidly.
In October 2002, North Korea admitted to possession of uranium enrichment centrifuge technology, in December it disconnected the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) monitor cameras and then sent home the inspectors from its mothballed graphite nuclear plant, and in January it withdrew from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Although it insisted that ‘at present’ it was merely starting up again (for energy purposes) the reactors mothballed as part of the 1994 ‘Agreed Framework’ deal with the US, neighbouring states were understandably nervous at the prospect of unregulated plutonium production, while the enrichment technology (of which it admitted possession but not use) has no known use other than for the production of Hiroshima-type weapons. Around the world, it was reported that an ‘outlaw’ regime was defying the world and threatening regional and global order.
On 13 February, the International Atomic Energy Agency referred North Korea to the UN Security Council. Director-General Mohammad El Baradei declared it to have been ‘in chronic non-compliance with its safeguards agreement since 1993.’ The question now is whether North Korea will persist in rejection of the nuclear non-proliferation regime, with the Security Council moving gradually from appeal to pressure to sanctions, or whether a satisfactory formula can be found to permit of its return. Sanctions, according to Pyongyang, would be tantamount to ‘a declaration of war’.
The demands, presented to Pyongyang by presidential envoy James Kelly in October 2002, were of the kind that only regime change could satisfy. After the Kelly mission, Washington continued to insist that North Korea back down unconditionally, but in January 2003 a bold