POLITICS-U.S.: Uncertainties Surround Talks with North Korea

By Jim Lobe Reprint | | Print |

Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Apr 16 2003 (IPS) - While heartened by Thursday’s announcement of talks between North Korea, the United States and China in Beijing next week, specialists here are worried that Washington may be unwilling to make concessions necessary to sustain a longer negotiation process that would defuse tensions on the Korean Peninsula.

Boosted by its convincing military victory in Iraq, the administration of President George W. Bush may stick to its longstanding demand that North Korea dismantle its nuclear programmes as a precondition for U.S. assurances that it will not attack the communist state, according to the analysts.

”I see no indications that the U.S. is ready for any quid pro quos,” says Korea expert Selig Harrison, who headed a blue-ribbon task force that called in late February for Washington to urgently engage Pyongyang on dismantling its nuclear programme in return for such assurances.

”I think the administration sees (the talks) as a way of putting more pressure on North Korea.”

The administration remains badly divided over what its negotiation position should be, with hawks, based primarily in the Pentagon and Vice President Dick Cheney’s office, arguing against concessions, and the State Department favouring flexibility.

”There are still conflicts within the administration about what to give the North Koreans,” says Donald Gregg, a former U.S. ambassador to South Korea who also served as George H.W. Bush’s national security adviser when Bush was vice president. The best-case scenario for next week’s meeting, added Gregg, would be ”an amicable agreement to keep talking”.

Pyongyang’s decision to drop its insistence on holding strictly bilateral talks with the United States is being interpreted by some administration officials here as vindicating their hard line and as a sign that the regime, one third of Bush’s ”axis of evil”, is ready to give in to Washington’s demands in light of its military victory in Iraq.

”I think that people have got to know that we are serious about stopping the spread of weapons of mass destruction,” Bush himself said Sunday when asked whether North Korea’s announcement was motivated by Washington’s military success.

While most analysts believe that the U.S. victory over Baghdad played a role in North Korea’s policy change, they also insist that other factors, particularly pressure from China, and to a lesser extent Russia, may have been more decisive in getting Pyongyang to soften its conditions.

”The people we have to thank for this are largely the Chinese, because they engineered this by persuading the North Koreans to back off a little,” said Don Oberdofer, a Korea specialist at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, who visited Pyongyang in November.

”I think the Chinese said to the North Koreans (even before the Iraq war) that things were getting out hand and ‘won’t be in your national interest or ours to have a deepening crisis on the Korean Peninsula with the Americans’.”

”Cutting off the oil was a very powerful signal,” Gregg told IPS referring to a three-day interruption of oil deliveries from China to North Korea in late February, which Beijing officially blamed on technical problems.

Next week’s talks are designed to defuse a six-month-old crisis that began last October when, in the first high-level negotiation between North Korea and the Bush administration, Assistant Secretary of State for Asia James Kelly went to Pyongyang to demand that it immediately and verifiably dismantle a secret highly enriched uranium (HEU) programme to develop nuclear weapons.

In Washington’s view, the programme violated a number of international agreements, including the 1994 Framework Agreement with the United States that required North Korea to freeze its Yongbyon plutonium plant in exchange for deliveries of heating oil and the construction of two light-water nuclear reactors by Japan and South Korea.

The administration said it would not engage in any further bilateral talks with Pyongyang on its demands for security guarantees or any other subject until all of its nuclear programmes were dismantled.

But North Korea escalated the crisis, first by expelling inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) who monitored the Yongbyon plant, then by announcing its withdrawal from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), and finally by restarting the Yongbyon plant.

It also threatened to begin reprocessing the 8,000 spent fuel rods that were stored at the plant and to end a unilateral moratorium on testing of its long-range missiles. Earlier this year, it tried to force down a U.S. spy plane.

While Washington insisted it would not invade North Korea and was willing to meet in the context of multilateral regional security talks, senior officials also hinted at possible military strikes against Yongbyon or an interdiction operation if they became convinced that the North was on the verge of producing or exporting nuclear bombs. The Pentagon even deployed long-range bombers to positions where they could strike North Korean targets at any moment.

In this context, the announcement of next week’s meeting is seen as a potential breakthrough for which the U.S. has also made concessions.

”The Korean position dropped its previous insistence to sit down only with the U.S., but I would argue that the U.S. position has changed, too, at least with regard to its definition of multilateral by which it originally meant a larger group,” including South Korea, Japan, and Russia, says Alan Romberg a retired State Department expert on Northeast Asia currently with the Henry L. Stimson Center.

But that the two sides have agreed to a framework for talks hardly means that progress is certain, particular if Washington insists that Pyongyang dismantle its nuclear programmes as a precondition for further talks or Pyongyang insists that it will do so only if it receives security assurances from Washington.

”If Kelly says the same thing all over again, then we’d be in worse shape than we were before,” said Harrison, who added that he thinks recent back-channel exchanges between the parties make it unlikely that the October meeting will be repeated.

”This is going to be a very difficult process,” said Romberg, who noted that just arranging verification measures for dismantling North Korea’s HEU programme, whose location Washington has not even identified, promises to be a major challenge.

China’s role is key, according to analysts. ”This is the first really substantive joint venture between the Bush administration and the fourth-generation leadership in China. They have totally changed their policies from saying they don’t have much influence over North Korea,” Gregg said, noting that Beijing is ”taking responsibility in ways it never did before”.

Oberdorfer also highlighted China’s role, insisting that Beijing sees as its central objective ”not to have a crisis in the Korean Peninsula”. Just as it has put pressure on Pyongyang to agree to a modified bilateral framework, he noted, it also prevented the U.S. from having the United Nations Security Council condemn North Korea for withdrawing from the NPT last week.

”My hope (for progress) is made greater by the fact that the Chinese are the interlocutors,” Oberdorfer added. ”They are very sophisticated in terms of such negotiations, and they don’t want to sponsor a train wreck.”