Posted on: Wednesday, September 3, 2003

EDITORIAL
Bush must pursue peace in Korea talks

You don't have to be a constant student of North Korean affairs to realize that this regime is hardly a model of stability or rationality.

The latest indication is Pyongyang's new position on whether it will continue to negotiate on its nuclear program. Its team of diplomats left last week's multilateral talks in Beijing committed to a new round of dialogue, but by the time they got to the airport, they had decided new talks were useless. They were "no longer interested."

Now, Pyongyang said yesterday, the regime's "fixed will to peacefully settle the nuclear issue ... through dialogue remains unchanged."

No one should wish a negotiating partner like this on anybody. But as former President Jimmy Carter makes clear in a column on the other side of this page, we have no choice but to do a much better job of playing the hand we've been dealt.

Although there are those in the Bush administration who think otherwise, the alternative to a peacefully negotiated settlement of the current dispute with the North Koreans most likely will be catastrophic in the extreme. In 1994, the U.S. military commander in South Korea estimated that a war with the North would result in 1 million deaths (including tens of thousands of Americans) and cost the United States at least $100 billion.

That means that before we point fingers at the North Koreans, we'd better make sure our own house is in order.

And it is not. According to the Chinese, who deserve most of the credit for getting the six-party talks to Beijing, negotiations will ultimately collapse unless the Bush administration "adopts a more nuanced bargaining strategy that provides a road map for dismantling North Korea's nuclear facilities while simultaneously addressing the country's security concerns," according to a report in The New York Times.

"There is a widespread sense that the U.S. is the problem," Chu Shulong, a foreign affairs expert at Tsinghua University, told the Times. "China wants everyone to be prepared to take steps at the same time, and doesn't understand why this is not reasonable."

Chu refers to the U.S. demand that North Korea surrender its one and only bargaining chip, its nuclear program, before discussions begin on any benefits it might receive in return.

At last week's negotiations, North Korea proposed a phased program in which it offered to dismantle its nuclear facilities and submit to inspections, but only after the United States signed a nonaggression treaty.

The hard-liners in the Bush administration see a breakdown in negotiations as a needed step in a policy ultimately intended to isolate the North in the hope of forcing the collapse of Kim Jong Il's regime. Among the many weaknesses of this approach is that it is opposed and feared by the other participants in the talks — Russia, China, South Korea and Japan — who fully understand the regional implications of induced chaos on the Korean Peninsula.

Another weakness of this approach is, as President Carter makes clear, that it may plunge us into war.