AUG 6 — When he was running for the White House in 1992, candidate Bill Clinton famously said that he and his capable wife would give US voters “two for the price of one”.
That tagline has since stuck, as a compliment at times and as ammunition for their political enemies on other occasions.
Now that the former president has pulled off a surprise mission to free two US journalists jailed in North Korea while his wife Hillary Clinton is serving as the Secretary of State, tongues are wagging once again.
Is the country getting two superstar diplomats for the price of one? And what does this mean for the powerful couple and the Obama administration?
Perhaps “Mr Clinton would be packing his bags again for another act of obeisance” in Iran to free three recently captured American hikers, former US ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton wrote with thinly-veiled sarcasm in the Washington Post on Tuesday.
Added Bruce Klingner of the conservative Heritage Foundation: “Mr Clinton may be tempted to freelance US diplomacy, negotiating his own vision of a nuclear agreement with North Korea, as former President Jimmy Carter disastrously did in 1994.”
Mrs Clinton, who embarked on a seven-nation tour of Africa just as her husband's secret mission got under way, initially declined to comment.
The White House also tried its best to dance around the barrage of questions surrounding the trip, and said it would not comment on the “solely private mission” for fear of jeopardising the fate of the journalists.
There is no denying, however, that Mr Clinton's unannounced trip to Pyongyang on Tuesday raised major policy and diplomatic questions.
Tensions have been running high between the two countries in recent months after the White House marshalled support for UN sanctions against the North for its testing of a nuclear device and the launch of several ballistic missiles.
But has Washington somehow changed its mind, and is it now prepared to take a softer stance on Pyongyang's nuclear ambition? What did North Korea demand or get in return for freeing the journalists?
Dr Jae Ku, director of the US-Korea Institute at the Johns Hopkins University, said in an interview that this could signal the beginning of a new round of negotiations between the two sides.
He added: “Despite all the denials that this is a private mission, I suspect there will be a follow-up with some form of senior dialogue with North Korea.”
However, security analyst Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution said it was too early to tell if reclusive North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, who met Mr Clinton briefly, got more than a rare photo-opportunity.
“Whether Kim will just pocket this little bit of high drama and diplomacy with one of the world's most famous people and then revert to more typical behaviour is also an open question,” he said.
Bolton said the visit was a bad idea, even if all the details about it were not immediately known.
“It comes perilously close to negotiating with terrorists,” he told Agence France-Presse. “I think this is a very bad signal because it does exactly what we always try and avoid doing with terrorists, or with rogue states in general, and that's encouraging their bad behaviour.” Mr Clinton, he argued, has undermined the public stand taken by his own wife.
The chattering classes here are also gossiping about the other big question in this episode: Is “Billary” Clinton, the nickname some have slapped on the powerful political couple, back in action?
After all, it was only recently that Mrs Clinton compared North Korea's behaviour to that of petulant children who crave constant attention. “Don't give it to them. They don't deserve it. They are acting out in a way to send a message that is not a message we're interested in receiving,” the top US diplomat said of Pyongyang in a TV interview on July 20.
Two weeks later, her husband travelled to Pyongyang and turned those words on their head. So was it all just a good-cop-bad-cop routine?
Mrs Clinton told reporters in Nairobi that she was happy and relieved at the outcome. She added that there was no connection between the effort to free the two journalists and the thorny nuclear issue. “We have always considered that a totally separate issue,” she said. “The future of our relationships with the North Koreans is really up to them,” she added.
Mr Clinton's star turn in Pyongyang, some believe, could well be a one-off appearance rather than a sign of greater involvement to come. Noted O'Hanlon of Brookings: “(Unless) this leads to a resumption of serious negotiations with the North on key strategic matters and those talks are then successful, this is today's news and won't have that much lasting impact of any kind.” — The Straits Times
Show/Hide comments
Show/Hide comment form
