Both the Americans and the South Koreans acknowledge, however, that the whole process remains stuck on North Korea's insistence on conditions that have no immediate chance of acceptance. These include the demand for a Korean War peace treaty — a deal the North couples with the withdrawal of the remaining 28,500 U.S. troops from the South — and an end to United Nations sanctions imposed after its long-range missile test and then its nuclear test last April and May.
Just in case anyone doubted the North's position, the North Korean military came out with an appropriately tough statement warning of the consequences of joint U.S.-South Korea war games scheduled for next month. It was one thing to vow to "mercilessly destroy the bulwark of aggression", as the Korean People's Army warned, but another to promise "all offensive and defensive means, including nuclear deterrent".
Nobody expects North Korea to drop any atomic bombs from its decrepit fleet of MiG fighters or attach a nuclear device to one of its vaunted missiles. In fact, it's quite uncertain whether North Korean engineers and scientists have actually figured out how to deliver a warhead. Nonetheless, the statement would seem to leave one clear point: North Korea intends to remain a nuclear power.
Wang Jisi, delivering a paper at a forum in Seoul on North Korea's nuclear problem, expanded on his realistic outlook — one that is difficult to dispute unless you're either a U.S. or South Korean negotiator or an academic equally prone to wishful thinking.
Wang did not have to refer specifically to Bosworth's mission to Pyongyang in December to get across the futility of it all. From all that has gone before, he said, "It is hard to imagine any genuine progress on denuclearization — even if North Korea-U.S. contacts were upgraded or the six-party talks were to be resumed soon."
Wang did not claim any real inside knowledge of what North Korean leader Kim Jong-il talks about in meetings with the generals he commands from his pinnacle as chairman of the National Defense Commission, the center of power in Pyongyang. For that matter, he did not let us know if Kim talks to his generals at all. For all anyone knows, maybe he just tells them what to do and think, they bow in assent, and that's it.
"It is almost impossible for outsiders to know whether there were any debates within the North Korean leadership about the pros and cons of going nuclear," he said. Why bother, was the rhetorical implication. "Even if there had been any doubts and hesitations," he said, clearly "the perseverance to attain nuclear weapons is serving the leaders' interests very well".
The logic was simple, from Wang's perspective. "Achievement of nuclear arms should help consolidate their position at home and increase diplomatic leverage," he said. "They feel little increased military pressure while they know how to take one step forward in nuclearization and then pause to show an ostensible readiness to negotiate over de-nuclearization."
All the while, as Wang noted, humanitarian aid and economic assistance continue to flow into the North.
The degree to which Wang reflects the outlook of Wu Dawei and others in Beijing is not exactly clear, but it seems more than likely that he gets to lecture at home and abroad as both analyst and a messenger of high-level thinking. Looked at that way, Wang's pessimism about North Korea giving up its nukes comes across as a sign of what Beijing sees as a higher priority, that is, propping up the North Korean regime against the danger of collapse and chaos. Wang got that point across too with a candor that's not readily apparent in narrow official pronouncements from Beijing.
"Unlike other partners," he said, in a jibe at the Americans and possibly the South Koreans, "Beijing would look at a possible political implosion in North Korea in most negative terms." For that reason his government "would never try to destabilize that country or join others" in attempting "to do so".
Indeed, he added for good measure, it was "a consensus among many observers in China that the Pyongyang government, with the social order it maintains, may survive for a long time to come" in view of "traditional friendship" between Beijing and Pyongyang, a not-too-subtle allusion to Beijing's rescue of North Korea in the Korean War, as well as "shared interests".
Not that China is supporting whatever North Korea does. Reports persist that China is anxious somehow to tamp down North Korea's nuclear ambitions, to discourage the North from another nuclear test that many observers here are predicting will happen this year — and to engage in serious, effective economic reform.
Japan's influential national daily, Asahi Shimbun, for instance, this week cited diplomatic sources in Beijing as saying that China had responded with "an unexpectedly harsh reaction" to the North's nuclear test of May 25.
"The Communist Party of China told North Korea to reform and open up its economy, end its hereditary succession of political power and abandon its nuclear development programs," said Asahi, attributing those sweeping demands to party sources. It was against this background, said the article, that Kim Jong-il's third son, Kim Jong-un, visited Beijing while his father eased up on disastrous economic reforms.
Wang's remarks, however, may not have convinced influential North Korea-watchers in Japan and the U.S. The differences were apparent at the same forum, held at the Asan Institute for Policy Studies, a think-tank financed in large measure by Hyundai money and led by Han Sung-joo, a former foreign minister noted for his moderately conservative views.
Evans Revere, president of the Korea Society in New York and a former diplomat with a long background in Korea, Japan and China, warned that "China could be forced to make hard choices between traditional support for its ally/partner and a new approach".
Nor did Revere seem all that happy about the outlook of South Korea's government. He did not seem impressed by President Lee Myung-bak's repeated declarations that North Korea must give up its nuclear program as a precondition for the aid the North was accustomed to receiving in the decade of the "Sunshine" policy of reconciliation initiated by the late president Kim Dae-jung in 1998.
The South "will need to decide whether it must now get tougher", said Revere, while the North "must ask itself whether intransigence risks sowing the seeds of even further isolation".
