News analysis: Offer of Korea talks masks firm U.S. line
Don Kirk/IHT International Herald Tribune January 08, 2003
Behind a diplomatic screen of carefully chosen words, the United States has not changed its basic position on North Korea by expressing its willingness to talk to the North about its obligations to the international community.
.
The joint declaration issued Tuesday by U.S., South Korean and Japanese diplomats in Washington on dialogue appeared more a concession to South Korean sensitivities than a step toward resolution of the impasse over the North’s nuclear projects.
.
‘‘Obviously, where we are is waiting to make diplomacy work,’’ a Western diplomat remarked recently in Seoul. ‘‘There are no carrots that Washington is prepared to offer. You have a North Korean regime that is using nuclear blackmail.’’
.
Renewal of dialogue with North Korea would perpetuate a process of negotiations that has engaged diplomats and analysts since the Clinton administration convinced Korean leaders nearly eight years ago of the advantages of four-party talks involving both Koreas, China and the United States.
.
The talks, endorsed in April 1995 by Bill Clinton and Kim Young Sam, then South Korea’s president, are part of the long history of failed attempts at finding a real basis for permanent peace on the Korean Peninsula.
.
In agreeing with South Korea and Japan to still more negotiation, Washington has managed to avoid any commitment to bilateral talks with Pyongyang that might lead to the nonaggression treaty the North is demanding.
.
‘‘Nobody’s talking about bombing anything,’’ the Western diplomat said.
.
Analysts noted that Washington historically has avoided nonaggression pacts, seen as reminders of the monumental failure of the agreement between Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union before World War II.
.
‘‘The focus of Washington is to avoid bilateralizing the issue,’’ said the diplomat, suggesting that the United States was open to a deal that would bring several parties to the table. For that reason, the diplomat went on, ‘‘the focus is on the International Atomic Energy Agency and to using all available channels, including the New York channel of North Koreas mission to the United Nations.’’
.
The International Atomic Energy Agency has delayed what might have been a confrontation by putting off any move for punishing North Korea for the expulsion on New Year’s Eve of its inspectors from the North’s nuclear complex at Yongbyon.
.
The agency is giving the North a chance to readmit the inspectors before asking the UN Security Council to adopt sanctions that would further isolate and impoverish the country. The threat remains very much alive as long as the North remains poised to restart the Yongbyon reactor after loading it with fuel rods needed to produce weapons-grade plutonium.
.
In pursuing a multilateral approach, Washington counts on some measure of support from the two great powers that fought for the North during the Korean War. China, whose volunteers drove U.S. forces back to the South from the Yalu River frontier, and Russia, which supplied the weapons for the North Korean Army, clearly would like the crisis to evaporate in face-saving negotiations.
.
Diplomats believe China and Russia are more likely to help than they were in the early ’90s after the North said it would not abide by the terms of the 1992 nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which it signed.of which it was a signatory. In that crisis atmosphere, the United States negotiated the 1994 Geneva Framework Agreement in Geneva under which a consortium was to build twin light-water reactors to meet the North’s energy needs while North Korea shut down its Yongbyon reactor.
.
‘‘We’re in a different position than a decade ago,’’ a Western diplomat said. ‘‘There’s a lot more unity in the international situation. The problem in 1994 was the reluctance of the Chinese. What’s different are some clear statements from China and Russia and the European Union. We hope that’s the message that Pyongyang is getting.’’
.
The downside, though, is that the United States and South Korea are now in severe disagreement despite the show of unity that emerged from the talks this week in Washington.
.
South Koreans, riding an unprecedented wave of prosperity, share little of Washington’s fears about the implications of a North Korean nuclear threat, which extends from the Yongbyon reac tor to an entirely separate uranium enrichment program. There is a deep-seated suspicion in Seoul that James Kelly, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, somehow misinterpreted what North Korean officials were telling him when they acknowledged the existence of the uranium program during his visit to Pyongyang in early October. Officials at the Unification Ministry, which is responsible for relations with the North, have suggested that the program is mainly theoretical and that North Korean officials were exaggerating for effect when they said that the 1994 agreement had been ‘‘nullified.’’
.
A series of statements by President Kim Dae Jung and President-elect Roh Moo Hyun has only deepened these suspicions, while South Korean activists keep up daily protests outside the U.S. Embassy against the presence of American troops in the country.
.
‘‘The South is in a difficult position,’’ the Western diplomat said. ‘‘You have an incumbent and a new government, both committed to an engagement policy with the North.’’ Yet, he said, the approach of the North has undermined engagement with the South.
.
Under the circumstances, diplomats believe, the best that anyone can expect is an intensified war of words that puts off armed confrontation while the Bush administration focuses on Iraq, holding down the western end of the ‘‘axis of evil,’’ of which North Korea, more than ever, remains a charter member.
iht.com |
