MOBILE DEVICES
Free Headline Alerts     
Worldwide Web WorldTribune.com

  breaking... 


Friday, December 11, 2009     GET REAL

North Korean nuke warheads and missiles aside, it's diplomatic deja vu all over again

By Donald Kirk

SEOUL — Whatever happened to the two agreements reached at six-party talks on North Korea's nuclear program in 2007, at which North Korea agreed on quite specific steps for disabling and then dismantling its entire nuclear program?   

U.S. envoy Stephen Bosworth, left, arrives at South Korea's foreign ministry in Seoul on Dec. 10, after his visit to Pyongyang.      Reuters/Lee Jae-Won
For the benefit of those who seem to have forgotten, notably the United States envoy on Korea, Stephen Bosworth, and his North Korean interlocutors, those hard-wrought deals promised North Korea just about all Dear Leader Kim Jong-Il wanted by way of aid, energy, oil, you name it. If only ...

... If only North Korea would make good on its promises not only to shut down all his nuclear facilities but also tear them apart, destroy them, so North Korea would have to start all over again if it ever had any notion of recovering its ranking as the world's ninth nuclear power.


Also In This Edition

The second agreement, in October 2007, had editors, producers and journalists who should have known better reporting that the North had conclusively agreed to give up its nukes. It's a sign of the shambles of those deals that they were forgotten during Bosworth's visit to Pyongyang this week.

When Bosworth got to Seoul on Thursday afternoon, after 48 hours in Pyongyang, he neglected to breathe a word about them.

Instead, Bosworth harked back to the piece of paper signed on September 19, 2005, at six-party talks in Beijing, at which the parties signed off on a vaguely stated wish list. The "joint statement", as it was called, was larded with words like "the goal" of North Korea's giving up its nukes "at an early date", and the commitment of all to the United Nations charter. It also committed North Korea to giving up its nuclear program in return for such enticements as a "peace regime", not to mention massive, unspecified quantities of aid.

Have the U.S. and North Korea agreed to tear up, to renounce, the agreements of 2007, reached after North Korea had conducted its first underground nuclear explosion in October 2006? Or are they supposed to embark on another endless round of negotiations to get back to where they were at the end of 2007?

Bosworth's remarks were all too brief to get around to considering these questions. In fact, judging from North Korea's response on Friday, they may be taboo, not to be raised again, while the North leads the U.S. ever more bilateral talks.

Remarkably, North Korea's ever-anonymous foreign ministry spokesman, as quoted by Pyongyang's Korean Central News Agency, adopted much the same language as Bosworth. Both sides, said the North's spokesman, "had a long, exhaustive and candid discussion on wide-ranging issues" concluding in "common understanding on the need to resume the six-party talks". Like Bosworth, the spokesman cited "the importance" of the 2005 joint statement.

In fact, Bosworth's remarks were so similar to those of the North Korean spokesman as to suggest that they had both agreed on what they would say — and might as well have signed off on their own bilateral statement. Or so it seemed as Bosworth talked of "common understanding" and "the essential importance" of the statement of September 2005 and characterized his conversations with North Korea's First Vice Minister Kang Sok-ju and next vice minister Kim Gye-hwan as "candid" — the same adjective used the next day by the North Korean spokesman.

There were, however, clear differences in emphasis. While Bosworth "conveyed President [Barack] Obama's view" of the need for "complete denuclearization" and saw delays in returning to six-party talks as "an obstacle to progress", the North preferred to dwell on the need for a peace treaty in place of the Korean War armistice and opening of diplomatic relations with Washington.

Bosworth did not deny touching on those aims as "elements" of the 2005 joint statement, but the sense was that North Korea will press the U.S. for a commitment to a peace treaty and diplomatic relations before returning to the table. That problem alone suggests how hard it will be to pick up the pieces of the process.

The sharpest indication of the frustration in getting North Korea to return to the table was Bosworth's one-word response when asked if he and the North Korean negotiators had agreed on more talks or set a date. "No," Bosworth responded, ending his brief appearance at the foreign ministry in Seoul after conveying the results of his talks in Pyongyang to South Korea's chief nuclear negotiator, Wi Sung-lac.

The difficulties of Bosworth's long-awaited first mission to Pyongyang came as neither a surprise nor a disappointment to South Korean officials. He had assured them beforehand that he would stick to the topic of six-party talks — and not digress to a peace treaty or U.S.-North Korean diplomatic relations other than in the context of the 2005 joint statement.

The fact that Bosworth stopped off here before flying straight to Pyongyang on Tuesday on a U.S. Air Force plane, and then flew back here on the same plane after his talks were done, symbolized U.S. concern about South Korean sensitivities.

The route ordinarily would have been to transit in Beijing, the normal way station in and out of Pyongyang, but Bosworth instead flew to Beijing after briefing the South Koreans. He will have also briefed the Japanese and Russians, the other parties in the six-party talks, before returning to Washington.

Overall, however, the attempt at bringing North Korea back to negotiations leaves analysts here deeply divided on whether bilateral dialogue between the U.S. and the North is worth the effort.

"You may need a second or a third round of talks," Lim Dong-won, architect of the "Sunshine" policy of reconciliation with North Korea during the presidency of the the late Kim Dae-jung, told Asia Times Online during a seminar on unification. "You cannot solve anything in the first round." Lim, who accompanied the late president to Pyongyang to meet Kim Jong-il for the first inter-Korean summit, still expects U.S. and North Korean negotiators to be able to discuss "the modality" of six-part talks "as well as the agenda" but not "in the first attempt".

Park Yong-ok, former arms control officer for South Korea's defense ministry, offered quite a different view. "No matter how many agreements they [the North Koreans] sign, they will be useless," he remarked. "We have to make sure they change their ways." Citing the nuclear tests conducted by North Korea in October 2006 and again last May, he stated flatly, "Any agreement made by North Korea holds no significance."

Larry Niksch, senior analyst with the Congressional Research Service, predicted the U.S. "will call it a success if they get a commitment for six-party talks" but doubted if North Korea under any circumstances would give up its nuclear program despite economic difficulties exacerbated by UN sanctions. "What worries me most is if in the next two or three years they develop a nuclear warhead for their missiles or an intercontinental ballistic missile that can reach U.S. territory," he said.

Those two issues get to the heart of the debate among analysts about the significance of North Korea's nuclear and missile programs to date. U.S. negotiators "will have to develop a different nuclear strategy," said Niksch, if the North's nuclear and missile programs reach the point at which they pose a direct threat to the U.S. At that stage, he warned, "We will have to go back to the drawing board."

So far North Korea is not believed capable of delivering a nuclear warhead to a target. North Korea's long-range Taepdong-2 missile landed in the western Pacific when test-fired last April — far short of Hawaii or Alaska, though it's believed an advanced Taepodong-2 could eventually go that far.

Such worries, though, did not seem to have permeated Bosworth's meetings in Pyongyang. Instead, the State Department was awaiting the call from Pyongyang, or the North's UN mission, on "the next step" — whether assent to six-party talks or another bilateral meeting — though where the yakking would go, and why, or whether it mattered, was not clear.



About Us     l    Contact Us     l    Geostrategy-Direct.com     l    East-Asia-Intel.com
Copyright © 2009    East West Services, Inc.    All rights reserved.