Left Flank

With the recent disclosures about DPRK-Syria cooperation at al-Kibar, context is a rare commodity, and The Economist delivers.

Judging by its past behaviour, North Korea would do pretty much anything for cash; there are suspicions that it helped the Khan network supply nuclear material to Libya. That said, providing engineers and designs for Syria's reactor may chiefly have been meant to tweak America's nose, says Michael Green, a former Bush administration official now at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, a think-tank in Washington, DC.

The Bush administration and North Korea fell out badly in 2002 over charges that Kim Jong Il's regime had secretly been trying to enrich uranium (also a potential bomb ingredient) while plutonium production was frozen by a previous agreement. The following year North Korea privately threatened to expand its «deterrent», test it (which it later did) and even sell it. With little to export beyond counterfeit currency, drugs and crises, says Mr Green, North Korea used Syria to up the ante—and the expected compensation for later agreeing to desist.

Now America and Mr Kim are negotiating again as part of a six-party deal (also including South Korea, Japan, China and Russia) to tempt him to give up his bombs. Senior American officials last week acknowledged that they had debated whether to try a combination of diplomacy and threats to end the Syrian project. For Israel, however, the Syrian reactor was an existential threat-in-the-making. There was no green light from the United States, the officials said: «none was asked for, none was given.»

Hoping to avoid retaliation, and to head off the risk of a wider Middle East war, Israel wanted the intelligence that led to the bombing kept secret. Worried that wider disclosure would sink the six-party effort too, America briefed only a score of senior members of Congress at the time.

But now the administration needs Congress's support for a controversial deal that could fall significantly short of the prize that the six-party negotiations were supposed to deliver: that, in return for oodles of energy aid and a lifting of some key sanctions, North Korea would first provide a full and accurate accounting of its nuclear past and later dismantle all its nuclear programmes. Instead it has merely declared a rather modest stockpile of plutonium and dug its heels in. Trying to move talks forward, American diplomats have struck a tentative deal that would allow North Korea to «acknowledge» American «concerns» about uranium and proliferation activities, in return for better verification of Yongbyon's plutonium haul. But the backtracking led Congress to demand the facts on Syria first.

George Bush said this week that by going public, America wanted to press North Korea's (notoriously impervious) Kim Jong Il into fuller disclosure, and send a message to proliferators everywhere. But the Syrian pictures may just as easily lead Congress to demand that America adopt a tougher stance in the six-party talks.

Another casualty could be the NPT itself. The IAEA's boss, Mohamed ElBaradei, says inspectors should have been given information about the Syrian reactor sooner by America and Israel. Yet Syria, had it not chosen to deny all, could have claimed that technically it was doing nothing wrong. Building a nuclear reactor is not against NPT rules, unless done with weapons intent—and that is hard, if not impossible, for inspectors to prove, says Henry Sokolski of the Non-proliferation Policy Education Centre in Washington. However, under a 1992 rule accepted by Syria, it should have alerted the IAEA to its reactor plans before construction started. North Korea, Iran and now Syria. The NPT seems there for the breaking.

Firstly, comes NPT reform and a proper way to share intelligence. And then, the US can deal with its armistice with the DPRK. In that order!