Six-party talks unlikely to bring results
By Richard Halloran Greg Baker | Associated Press
Buried in a New York Times dispatch a few days ago was the disclosure of a new U.S. strategy in the renewed negotiations intended to persuade North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons and the facilities producing them.
"We're determined to make sure it's different this time," a senior administration official told a Times reporter. "We want to force the North Koreans to make a choice: either to show that they are serious, or to make clear to everyone else that they are fundamentally not prepared to give up their weapons."
At last, a modicum of common sense seems to have been injected into dealings with the regime in Pyongyang whose international relations have been filled with attempted assassinations, abductions, terrorist bombings, broken agreements, subversion, illicit drug-smuggling, blackmail, brinkmanship, and outrageous propaganda.
After a year's pause, what are known as the six-party talks resumed last week in Beijing among delegations from the U.S., South Korea, Japan, China, Russia, and North Korea. The early sessions yielded mostly restatements of known positions. That, in turn, has generated two schools of thought about where the talks might lead.
The optimists are reflected by Brent Choi, who covers North Korea for the newspaper JoongAng Ilbo in Seoul and says the forecast for settling the crisis is "mostly sunny with some clouds." He sees a new U.S. attitude toward North Korea, more flexibility in the U.S. negotiating position, and South Korea's offer to furnish electricity to North Korea as soon as an agreement has been signed.
A skeptic is Brad Glosserman, research director of the Pacific Forum, a think tank here in Ho-nolulu, who argues that "Pyongyang will do everything possible to preserve some nuclear weapons capability." He asserts that neither China, South Korea nor Russia will insist on the "strict verification" demanded by the U.S. to ensure that North Korea has shed its nuclear weapons.
The skeptics, including this writer, doubt that the U.S. will agree to the price that North Korea will demand in return for dismantling its nuclear program. Pieced together from Pyongyang's pronouncements and stripped of diplomatic code words, the North Koreans want:
Perhaps the most difficult of those demands to effect, even if the U.S. was willing to meet it, would be verifying that the U.S. had withdrawn the nuclear umbrella. That umbrella seeks to deter a nuclear attack on South Korea by asserting that the U.S. would respond to such an attack with its own nuclear arms.
U.S. nuclear-tipped missiles based on land in the upper Middle West or deep in the Pacific Ocean in submarines may be aimed at harmless holes in the sea today. They could be shifted to North Korean targets, however, in the few minutes it would take to type new coordinates into computers controlling the launch of the missiles.
Therefore, the North Koreans would have only the word of the U.S. that their nation was no longer a target for U.S. nuclear missiles, a promise the North Koreans are not likely to accept.
The North Koreans may have another demand that they have not yet surfaced, which is that the U.S. withdraw its military forces from Japan, abrogate the security treaty with Japan, and largely retire from the Western Pacific.
In U.S. military terms, South Korea and Japan are an indivisible area of operations, with U.S. forces in one supporting U.S. forces in the other. Indeed, the American armed forces in Japan, notably on Okinawa, pose an even greater peril to North Korea than do those in South Korea.
North Korean logic dictates that if the Dear Leader in Pyongyang, Kim Jong-il, wants to eliminate what he sees as a military danger from the U.S., he would seek to drive the Americans out of both South Korea and Japan.
Since neither the Japanese nor the Americans will agree to this, Kim Jong-il will not give up his nuclear arms and the six-party talks will founder sooner or later.
Richard Halloran is a Honolulu-based journalist and former New York Times correspondent in Asia.
U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill, center, speaks to journalists before leaving his hotel for a meeting with North Korean delegation leaders in Beijing last week. Hill, the top U.S. envoy, was set to meet for the fourth time in a week with the North Koreans amid six-nation talks aimed at convincing Pyongyang to abandon its nuclear weapons. Despite resuming talks, signs of progress remained scant.
