Transcript for July 9

MR. BURNS: Oh, I don’t think it was coincidental. You know, it’s a, it’s a very unreliable and unpredictable regime. The last thing we want to do is react to every wild statement that they make, but they certainly chose that to get our attention, and that of the international community. But what they’ve got to realize is there is no magic bullet here. They can’t just think that they can sit down with the United States alone. That doesn’t work for Japan, it doesn’t work with South Korea, and frankly it doesn’t work with the Chinese. So I said before that one of the most interesting developments here is this Chinese delegation going to Pyongyang. Chris Hill, our ambassador, was in China a few days ago. He made the point, and Secretary Rice made the point yesterday to the Chinese foreign minister, we want to see China use its influence. We want to see China push forward and ask the North Koreans to meet these commitments that they’ve made to all of us.

MR. RUSSERT: Speaker Newt Gingrich, the former speaker, Republican, weighed in on this debate in this way. He offered this: “The time to replace the State Department’s failed North Korea strategy of ‘talk forever - act never’ has come. ... For 13 years the United States has talked loudly about a North Korean nuclear weapons and ballistic-missile threat. For 13 years the North Korean dictatorship has lied and hunkered down and continued to build nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles. The strategy of talking has failed. ... America’s actions must be decisive. We are faced with a brutal, totalitarian dictatorship about which we know little. It is acting in defiance of all of its own international commitments. The time for talk is over. Either they dismantle the missile or we the United States should dismantle it.”

MR. BURNS: Well, with all due respect to Speaker Gingrich, we are on a course which has a reasonable chance for success. And you never want to disavow a diplomatic track, a negotiating track, if you think you can resolve the problem in that fashion. And as I said before, we are not alone in this endeavor. We have countries with us, united with us, who can apply the same type of pressure. I will say this, what the North Koreans have done over the past week is going to give a lot of strength to our efforts to develop a missile defense system. You’ve seen very strong statements by the Japanese government wanting to work with us in that realm. So obviously, we’re going to pursue a very tough, very decisive policy over the coming weeks designed to focus the North Koreans on their obligations, to pressure them to come back to the talks, but also, certainly, to provide for our own defense and the defense of our treaty allies in Asia. And I think you’ll see us move, move ahead smartly in that direction as well.

MR. RUSSERT: Mr. Ambassador, many critics will say the six years that George Bush has been president, North Korea’s program has developed rather dramatically, that the policy first of isolation and then the six-party talks just hasn’t worked. Here’s the latest study from the Institute for Science and International Security. They “estimated in a report that North Korea has enough separated plutonium to develop” now “an arsenal of four to 13 nuclear weapons, compared with estimates of” just “one or two weapons in 2000” when George Bush became president. “The group says that by 2008, North Korea could have enough plutonium for eight to 17 nuclear weapons. ... The group’s assessment was based on an analysis of satellite imagery, media reports and statements by North Korean officials.”

Which led Nick Eberstadt, a conservative critic from the American Enterprise Institute—these are not Democrats. He offered this, “Although the Bush administration’s rhetoric about Kim Jong Il and his regime has sometimes been ferocious, ... North Korea’s leaders seem to have concluded that the Bush North Korea policy consists mainly of empty words - and that oft-repeated warnings need not be taken terribly seriously. By more than one criterion, indeed, Pyongyang’s strategic successes on the Bush watch outshine those from its brinkmanship during the Clinton years.” Would you acknowledge a significant increase in the nuclear capability by North Korea on the watch of President Bush?

MR. BURNS: Tim, obviously, we profoundly disagree with, with some of the statements that we’ve just heard. You know, we’ve got a very strong military force and deterrent force at work in Asia and particularly on the Korean peninsula, and that military can handle any contingency that should arise. We also have a very tough policy and I think forward-looking policy to develop missile defense to handle those contingencies. But you’ve got to combine military measures with diplomacy to be effective in a situation like this.

The fact is that a lot of this criticism seems to direct the United States back to a test of wills bilaterally between North Korea and the United States. What we want to do is we want to ask countries that do have a great deal of influence on Chi—on North Korea—certainly more than we have—to use that influence. We, we can do that by channeling those efforts through the six-party framework. And you know, diplomacy sometimes can’t succeed in a day or two, or a week or two. Sometimes it takes many months, or even years to succeed. But if you have the right policy in place. If you know what you’re trying to accomplish and if you’re very tough-minded about applying that policy, we can be successful. So we have not given up hope that we can engineer a policy that will effectively put the North Koreans back in the box, take away their nuclear programs and take away their ability to inflict threats and damage on their neighbors.

We have got to be single-minded about this. We certainly understand the gravity of the challenge posed by North Korea. But frankly, I don’t think these critics have offered any alternative that would have a reasonable prospect of success or lead us to unintended consequences if you went down the road as some of them are suggesting. And we think we’ve got the right policy in place and I can assure you we’re going to drive it forward with a great deal of energy and determination.

MR. RUSSERT: But you do not deny that North Korea’s nuclear capability has increased during the presidency of George Bush?

MR. BURNS: Well, North Korea says that it has a nuclear weapons capability and we believe it, that it has produced that over the last several years. And that’s why we put in place this policy, designed to take it away from them. And if we can have the September 19, 2005, agreement implemented, it will do just that. It will effectively denuclearize North Korea. And so that is a good bet for the United States. It’s obviously the goal that I think all these critics that you cite would share, but we think we’ve got a much more realistic in-the-real-world strategy put in place to deal with that problem.

MR. RUSSERT: But there has been a profound change in the rhetoric, certainly of the president, on this subject. Here’s the president Friday at his news conference in Chicago about North Korea.

(Videotape, Friday):

PRES. GEORGE W. BUSH: It takes a while for a problem to fester and grow and then it take a while to solve them diplomatically. It’s just the nature of diplomacy. I wish we could solve them overnight.

(End videotape)

Mr. RUSSERT: Let me go back to January of 2002 in the president’s “axis of evil” speech before Congress. Let’s watch.

(Videotape, January 29, 2002):

PRES. BUSH: North Korea is a regime arming with missiles and weapons of mass destruction while starving its citizens.

States like these and their terrorist allies constitute an “axis of evil,” arming to threaten the peace of the world. By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger.

We’ll be deliberate, yet time is not on our side. I will not wait on events while dangers gather. I will not stand by as peril draws closer and closer. The United States of America will not permit the world’s most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world’s most destructive weapons.

(End videotape)

MR. RUSSERT: Since the president uttered those words, Mr. Ambassador, every estimate is that North Korea has doubled its capacity to develop nuclear weapons.

MR. BURNS: And yet we’ve driven forward with this policy designed to respond to all the things that the president talked about back in 2002. And he has been very consistent since then in putting forward the proposition that we have to oppose the human rights abuses of the government, we have to try to draw a net around the fact that North Korea is the leading exporter of ballistic, ballistic missile technology in the world, the proliferator of it. We’ve done, we’ve done a lot to develop missile defense and we’ve created and driven forward this diplomatic coalition designed to bring us to a victory in denying North Korea the nuclear weaponry that you talk about.

So we have been very activist. We have followed this policy for a number of years. The president is right, and as I said before, diplomacy can’t be measured in a snapshot. You can’t just say on a Sunday morning in July that somehow because we haven’t come to the end of the negotiations these negotiations are bound to fail. You’ve got to be very purposeful and directed in what you’re trying to do, and apply the weight of your country and that of others to the test, and that’s what we’re doing. We have not given up on, on, on this quest to come to the end of these negotiations and put the North Koreans back into a place where they can no longer be a threat to their neighbors or to the United States.

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