Left Flank

Weekly Standard's Michael Goldfarb argues that "nothing possibly could be any worse" in DPRK? I think this is the first bloggingheads TV diavlog that so well captures the humdrum Washington debate between Clintonians and Neo-cons on the DPRK issue right now. Just as in Iraq, no one can think beyond the fall of the government, or to consider the non-proliferation regime as a whole, and Neo-Cons assume that there's a nascent government waiting to stop an even more tragic catastrophe from ensuing.

Actually, Foreign Policy's Blake Hounshell, Goldfarb's interlocutor, is still just too optimistic about the disablement of the Yongbyon plutonium reactor, and both fail to mention the HEU (highly-enriched uranium) issue. The Syrian connection is a red herring, most probably more of the Israel-Bush administration echo chamber seeking to stir up a controversy to derail the Six-Party process.

In the end (and in "What happens if the Kim regime collapses?"), this is at best a much more civil, yet equally as arid and boilerplate a discussion, as the Korean blogosphere produces on a daily basis.

Blame it on Roh Moo-hyun!

Obviously, Pyongyang believes it deserves more for what little it has done to comply with its December 31, 2007 promises.

Under the terms of that agreement, Pyongyang was supposed to have detailed its nuclear programmes – both a known plutonium programme and a suspected uranium one – by the end of 2007 in return for energy aid. But the deadline passed this week without any such declaration or any explanation from North Korea as to why it had not complied.

Pyongyang has co-operated on other aspects of the agreement, shutting down its main Yongbyon reactor and allowing nuclear inspectors to start disabling it. However, the uranium issue is a sensitive one for North Korea as it has always denied having an enrichment programme.

The latest problems stem from North Korea's continuing mistrust of the US administration, according to a South Korean official who has recently been involved in direct talks with counterparts from the North.

Pyongyang doubted that Washington would keep its promises to normalise relations and provide meaningful economic and energy aid, including light-water reactors, the South Korean official said.

Washington had offered to submit to Congress the paperwork needed to remove North Korea from a US list of state sponsors of terrorism if the nuclear declaration had been provided by the end of December.

North Korean state media also said on Friday that Pyongyang had slowed the pace of disablement of the Yongbyon reactor because it did not think the other parties had fulfilled pledges to supply energy aid in a timely manner.

The energy-impoverished nation has so far received 200,000 tonnes of the 1m tonnes of heavy fuel oil it is set to receive under the deal.

But, I seriously doubt there's any number between zero and 1 million either the US or DPRK could agree as a reward for what Pyongyang has done. I assume that agreement will most likely occur in early 2009. The South Korean concept of trading Pyongyang's compliance with other parties' carrots simultaneously is the stumbling block, and one that should be eliminated in 2009.

Meanwhile, dealing with Pyongyang for a year will be tough. Gabriel Scoenfeld advocates "going Chinese":

In Korean culture, showing respect is critical. Obviously, the State Department should have been more deferential.

To revive the talks, which have been generating so many valuable broken promises, the United States should now reverse course, publicly declare that the word «unfortunate» was unfortunate, and join the Chinese in calling the North Korean delay «natural.»

Next, DPRK Studies counsels a certain sense of humor:

Of all the excuses, saying they'd already sent it (did it get lost in the mail?) is a good one and earns North Korea some originality points. Perhaps they'll decide to have talks to define the meaning of «full,» or something equally as useful.

Again, on deadlines, think like Beijing:

MR. ROSE: Did they have any objections about what we are saying and what we were doing? I'm sure they didn't love the idea of making them one of the three worst regimes in the world, which the President said in his State of the Union.

ASSISTANT SECRETARY HILL: Well, I must say with the Chinese there is also this dynamic where they ask for more patience from us, and we ask for less patience from them. So the Chinese do operate on kind of different time horizons.

The Economist is a little less patient:

For now it will not sound the alarm. After all, an earlier part of the deal, the closure of the Soviet-era nuclear reactor at Yongbyon in July, came three months later than promised. Since then American inspectors have moved into Yongbyon to see that it is disabled and eventually dismantled. December 31st was also meant to be the deadline for Yongbyon's disablement, which was missed as well. But this week America was at pains to stress North Korean technical co-operation. If anything, it said, the delay was because of its own insistence that due care be taken in removing the thousands of fuel rods from the ageing reactor.

A few weeks' delay in the declaration of North Korea's nuclear programmes would be tolerable. Any longer and the six-party process would be in trouble. For the nuclear programmes are the crux of the matter. Declaring them was never going to come easily to Kim Jong Il, North Korea's «Dear Leader». His nuclear weapons, however few and feeble, provide his only leverage against the world. Yet America is unlikely to stand for any bluff—not least because of suspicions that a Syrian site bombed by Israel in September was a nuclear facility that had North Korean help.

The questions now are not only how much plutonium North Korea has extracted and how many warheads it has made. The Bush administration also wants to know the scale of the programme to enrich uranium to which North Korea admitted in 2002. Earlier claims by America about its scale seem exaggerated; still, it has evidence that Pakistan's nuclear racketeer, Abdul Qadeer Khan (see article), sold the North uranium-enriching gear.

It's going to be a long year.

We're back to this golden North Korean oldie!

"(We) will further strengthen our war deterrent capabilities in response to U.S. attempts to initiate nuclear war," the prickly state's communist party newspaper Rodong Sinmun said in a commentary.

The North, with one of the world's largest standing armies, usually threatens to bolster its deterrent, often taken to be a reference to its nuclear arsenal, when it feels international powers are not treating it properly.

North Korea has been cooperating on another part of the deal with China, Japan, Russia, South Korea and the United States by starting to take apart its ageing nuclear facility that produces arms-grade plutonium, government officials have said.

In a separate report in its official media on Friday, North Korea said it has slowed the pace of disablement because it does not feel that other parties have supplied aid in a timely manner.

I can imagine it's very cold right now in Pyongyang!

It seems Beijing has abandoned any pretense of cooperating with Washington to "discipline" Pyongyang.

Ever since the late 1940s, "natural" is hardly the word I would use to describe dealing with DPRK. The pulling of perfectly good teeth is more like it. But, if Beijing, who after all have more influence than the US - especially post Treasury fiasco, or when Washington is not opposed by anyone, which is never - says it's "natural" for delays to occur, then it has to be the truth.

"The pace is faster in some areas and slower in some areas. This is natural," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu told a news conference, urging all sides to fulfill their respective pledges.

"We believe the comprehensive implementation of actions will open broader prospects for the six-party talks."

Yeah, so sit down and don't get emotional! Beijing is taking over.

It's process:

«Negotiations for a peace regime should start when the disablement process is under way and its plutonium is disclosed,» Foreign Minister Song Min-soon told parliament.

(...)

«The start of the talks must be in parallel with the disablement process,» Song said.

...vs. results:

Do I go into this thing saying, Well, you know, gosh, the process is more important than the results? I don't. What matters most, you know, to me ? or whether or not we can achieve the results that I've said we're hoping to achieve.

And, if not, there will be consequences to the North Koreans.

And this, after Beijing weighed in on the results side? Seoul again does its best to scuttle another deal by allowing Pyongyang a chance to stonewall and split the parties in the Six-Party process. Victor Cha points this out (and tries to find a silver lining for South Korean conservatives to exploit):

The inter-Korean declaration offered no surprises. It represents a good statement of Korean aspirations, not unlike the tone expressed in the July 1972 and June 2000 inter-Korean declarations. Two things however are noteworthy.

First, the document absolves South Korea from intervening in the North's internal affairs. This statement runs completely counter to the 2005 Bush-Roh Joint Declaration at Gyeongju where the Roh government expressed for the first time its concern for the well-being of the people of North Korea. This was a major statement by Seoul that I personally took painstaking hours to negotiate. How can Seoul have two inconsistent positions on North Korea human rights abuses in arguably the two most important joint declarations the Roh presidency has overseen?

Second, South Korean officials de-briefed in Washington the week after the summit, and made a clear push to get the American president to agree to a three- or four-way summit to end the Korean war. Not surprisingly, this request is being met by strong resistance by both Republicans and Democrats because they all follow the same logic: A peace treaty signed by a U.S. president before North Korean denuclearization will ensure that North Korea will never denuclearize.

The key driver of any peace treaty process has and will remain the full denuclearization of the North. Until all the nuclear weapons are removed from North Korea, there will be no end to the Cold War in Asia. The estimated US$11 billion in South Korean economic assistance that will go north as a result of the joint declaration should have given Seoul the leverage to negotiate better language to take into account Seoul's equities with the U.S. and other partners.

But the bottom line is that this is a document negotiated by Roh, but implemented by his successor, who is likely to be a conservative. A future South Korean government will still seek engagement with the North but will seek to coordinate any inter-Korean aid with progress in six-party talks. If the next South Korean president does this, then the carrots offered by Roh Moo-hyun will become very powerful bargaining chips in the final phase of the six-party negotiations to achieve nuclear rollback in North Korea next year. That is a finish line worth crossing.

It's the Roh administration's failure to press its advantage in Pyongyang, not the failure of the Bush administration's diplomatic approach, that keeps Northeast Asia a dangerous place.