Quickly now: Which nation in East Asia receives the largest amount of U.S. aid? Is it our impoverished, long-time ally, the Philippines? Wartorn Cambodia? Is there an emergency relief package in the works to help East Timor create a viable, independent democracy?
The correct answer: none of the above. The largest recipient of American aid in East Asia is a nation fanatically hostile to the United States, North Korea.
Over the past five years, the Clinton administration has buttressed the world's last pure Stalinist dictatorship with some $ 645 million in aid, supplying half of North Korea's heavy fuel oil needs, provisioning it with nuclear reactors, and feeding a third of its population. All this according to a report issued by the congressional North Korea Advisory Group, which was set up by House speaker Dennis Hastert to review U.S. policy toward North Korea.
The aid money, not to put too fine a point on it, is a bribe to get the North Koreans to halt their nuclear weapons program. It might even be cheap at the price if the policy were achieving that end. But as representative Ben Gilman, advisory group chairman, points out, North Korea can easily use the plutonium produced by the nuclear reactors supplied by the West as fissile material for nuclear warheads. And thanks to the agreement negotiated by the administration in 1994, the North Koreans will be able to produce enough plutonium to make 100 weapons per year when these reactors come on line. North Korea, lest we forget, is also developing ballistic missiles capable of reaching much of the continental United States.
The Clinton administration interprets such developments as a call for increasing the payoffs. Based on current trends, the advisory group reports, aid to North Korea could top $ 1 billion next year. The administration wants to lift economic sanctions on North Korea, too. "We think our policy is leading in the right direction," says State Department spokesman James Rubin. Huh? Is the unsuccessful propitiation of a despotic and dangerous regime the "right direction" for American foreign policy? No doubt raising such a question makes THE SCRAPBOOK a knuckle-dragging isolationist.