AP Photo/Wong Maye-E
Kim Jong Un in Pyongyang on April 13, 2017.
- US National Security Adviser John Bolton said he favors a "Libya model" when dealing with North Korean denuclearization.
- Libya's leader, Muammar Gaddafi, gave up weapons of mass destruction, but fell from power when the US and others backed an uprising against him.
- Gaddafi was violently and sexually assaulted before his death in the wake of the uprising.
- At the time North Korea said Gaddafi's fate showed why Pyongyang should keep its own weapons.
- Bolton could have picked other analogies to talk about denuclearizing North Korea, but seems to have selected Libya on purpose, knowing the implications.
President Donald Trump's National Security Adviser, John Bolton, has said that the US will use Libya as a model for denuclearizing North Korea - but it may have been a dark, even threatening message to Kim Jong Un.
North Korea's Kim has performed an about-face since last year - when he and Trump traded nuclear threats across the Pacific - to pursuing peace and diplomacy broadly and willingly. Accompanying Kim's peace push have been a number of promises from the North Korean leader, though as yet there has been little follow-through.
So far, Kim has agreed to denuclearize and seek a peace treaty with the South, but has yet to actually take steps to disarm. Although North Korea announced it would invite the US and South Korea to watch its nuclear test site dismantled, it has taken similar steps before only to back out of deals later.
Other steps Kim has taken, like switching back the country's special time zone, have been unilateral and unsubstantial, but enough to warrant positive press coverage.
The horror of Gaddafi's fate, and how Kim could meet the same
Associated Press
Muammar Gaddafi at a military parade in Tripoli, Libya, in 2009.
Bolton, a noted North Korea hawk who vocally pushed for war with the country, made an unsavory comparison that Kim is sure to have picked up on in an interview with CBS's "Face the Nation".
"I think we're looking at the Libya model of 2003, 2004," for denuclearizing North Korea, Bolton said.
"In the case of Libya for example and it's a different situation in some respects... one thing that Libya did that led us to overcome our skepticism was that they allowed American and British observers into all their nuclear-related sites."
Just after the US invaded Iraq and deposed Saddam Hussein, another leader who had pursued weapons of mass destruction, Libya's Muammar Gaddafi, agreed to have international inspectors visit his country for the purpose of certifying that his nuclear and chemical weapons programs had halted.
In 2011, a popular uprising in Libya got US and some NATO backing, and a salvo of cruise missile strikes pummeled Gaddafi's regime. Within months of the US action, Gaddafi was filmed being dragged out into the streets by rebels, who defiled his body with a bayonet while killing him.
Fred Hof, former US ambassador to Syria and Atlantic Council expert, told Business Insider: "That the Libyan people rose up against Gaddafi had its roots in his brutality, corruption and incompetence: Not the fact that he had come to agreement years earlier with Washington, or that the US had somehow double-crossed him."
"The same could hold true for a denuclearized North Korea."
Kim knows what Libya means
Goran Tomasevic/Reuters
Libyan soldiers from the government which succeeded Gaddafi fighting against ISIS in 2016.
Disarmament bought Gaddafi a few years in the world's good graces, as well as increased trade and investment. In 2009 Gaddafi gave a broad speech at the UN for on his ideas for how the world should work, a remarkable comeback from being an international pariah years earlier.
But the images of Gaddafi's brutal death have no doubt reached North Korea. In 2011, after Gaddafi's death and just months after Kim took power, North Korea said it was a mistake for Libya to disarm, and that the arms control deal with the West was "an invasion tactic to disarm the country."
Bolton, during the CBS interview, admitted that Libya is much different than North Korea. In fact, the two countries, leaders, and situations are so different that Bolton didn't have to bring up Libya at all if he didn't want to.
Bolton does not trust Kim and is sensitive to the US wasting time in unproductive diplomacy.
But Bolton knowingly invoked Libya, almost certainly knowing the historical linkages with North Korea, and Gaddafi's potential linkage with Kim.
Kim will almost certainly pick up on the talk of Libya, where he witnessed a once-powerful dictator killed and sexually assaulted in the street after giving up his nuclear and chemical weapons to the US.