Significant advancements were made recently toward preparing U.S.-North Korean talks that Washington hopes would draw Pyongyang back to multilateral denuclearization negotiations, Foreign Policy magazine reported Monday (see GSN, Nov. 3).
(Nov. 4) -
U.S. State Department official Sung Kim, shown last year, was reported to last month have discussed terms for talks with North Korea during meetings with an envoy from Pyongyang (Nicholas Kamm/Getty Images).
Previous reports have indicated that little progress was made late last month during meetings between North Korean deputy nuclear envoy Ri Gun and U.S. diplomat Sung Kim.
However, one Obama administration official told the magazine's blog, The Cable, that during informal meetings in New York and in San Diego, Pyongyang's representative agreed with two of the three demands set by the Obama administration as preconditions to bilateral talks.
The first condition is that there be only two formal direct meetings between the United States and North Korea before Pyongyang returns to the halted six-nation talks that also involve China, Japan, Russia and South Korea.
The second requirement, the official said, is that U.S. senior diplomat Stephen Bosworth meet with North Korean First Vice Foreign Minister Kang Sok Ju when he travels to Pyongyang. This condition is important because only the senior-most officials in North Korea's government have any true negotiating power. Meeting with Kang increases the likelihood of a successful visit for Bosworth.
It was the third condition that Pyongyang reportedly had trouble with: that North Korea agree to honor its earlier promises, specifically the Sept. 19, 2005 agreement in which it pledged "to abandoning all nuclear weapons and existing nuclear programs and returning, at an early date, to the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons and to [International Atomic Energy Agency] safeguards."
North Korea did not agree to the condition because Pyongyang is believed to want renewed negotiations to take place around the premise of the "denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula," the official said.
One expert said that specific language "broadens the scope of what we are talking about to include more than just North Korea. That may sound silly since we all know there are no nuclear weapons anymore in South Korea, but the North sees this as a political issue of balance."
By not agreeing to North Korea's denuclearization premise, an Obama administration official said Washington might be endeavoring to set boundaries on what renewed negotiations would cover in their beginning stages.
"Of course, we want to reframe to address (denuclearization) at some point, though I thought we really just wanted reaffirmation of the Sept. 5 declaration, rather than fighting the bigger fight right now," the official said.
The North Korean expert posited a less optimistic view of the diplomatic impasse:
"If the administration is sticking, it may be because it doesn't see any immediate political benefit to beginning talks since there is bound to be domestic criticism and there is no guarantee of achieving quick results" (Josh Rogin, Foreign Policy, Nov. 2).
During the recent talks between Kim and Ri, the U.S. envoy was reported to have called on Pyongyang again to permit IAEA inspectors access to the country's nuclear sites, a source familiar with the six-nation talks told Kyodo News reported.
Inspectors who were scrutinizing the country's main nuclear complex under the terms of a 2007 nuclear deal were ejected from North Korea after the U.N. Security Council criticized the regime's April rocket launch.
The Obama administration is also believed to have asked the North to send some of its high-level officials, including Kang, to the United States for meetings with Bosworth.
Yesterday, Washington said the North was in violation of U.N. Security Council resolutions and had broken its own earlier nuclear pledges by reprocessing approximately 8,000 spent nuclear fuel rods into weapon-grade plutonium.
"Reprocessing plutonium is contrary to North Korea's own commitments," said State Department spokesman Ian Kelly. "It certainly runs counter to the commitment that they made in 2005, and it violates U.N. Security Council resolutions."
Kelly didn't go further in his critical remarks of the North. Rather, he said that the Obama administration was committed to seeing resumption of the full six-nation talks, which last occurred in December 2008.
"What we're focused on with North Korea is getting to the point where we can relaunch the six-party talks, which will get us to our ultimate goal, which is the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula," he said (Kyodo News I/Breitbart.com, Nov. 3).
Washington is likely in short order to decide whether and at what time to carry out one-on-one negotiations with North Korea, Kyodo reported.
"It has been a long time since North Korea has invited the U.S. (for bilateral talks)," South Korean head nuclear envoy Wi Sung-lac said today, according to the Yonhap News Agency. "It is time for the U.S. to set its position."
He added: "What I was told most recently is that the U.S. will soon make a decision, but I don't know about the results yet" (Kyodo News II/Breitbart.com, Nov. 3).
It is South Korea's intention to see North Korea stripped of its nuclear operations no later than 2012, Yonhap reported.
"We (the international community) have spent 16 years in dealing with North Korea ... but have failed to approach the core issue," said senior South Korean presidential secretary Kim Tae-hyo. "We must set a target time frame."
The North has set 2012 as the deadline for establishing itself as a "great, prosperous, and powerful" country.
"The year 2012 should mark the abolishment of the North Korea's nuclear program, not the completion of the country's goal to become strong and prosperous," according to the South Korean official.
South Korean President Lee Myung-bak has proposed a "grand bargain" for dealing with the North that would swap peace agreements and large amounts of foreign aid in exchange for the country's permanent nuclear disarmament (Tony Chang, Yonhap News Agency, Nov. 2).