Calling the Shots in Korea

...But as the North's richpoor gap steadily widens, Kim Jong II may eventually recognize—or be forced by others in Pyongyang to recognize— that his clever diplomacy is not the path to survival in an increasingly hostile atmosphere at home and abroad...

...The talks, in short, have largely been another round of a rather absurd charade begun 52 years ago, with the marathon negotiations that halted the Korean War at what is now known as the "truce village" of Panmunjom...

...Given the alternative to letting Dear Leader back down behind a smoke screen of rhetorical flourishes, one can hardly imagine a better best-case scenario than another round of talks—as Hill said at the outset would be necessary—and then another, and another, and another...

...Russia and France would probably do the same, or at least abstain...

...Chung reported Kim's being amused that Bush had referred to "Mr...

...limited its attack to the Yongbyon nuclear facility...

...Pyongyang rigidly insisted on massive aid, written security guarantees, and diplomatic recognition by the United States, including an exchange of liaison offices in each other's capitals, prior to doing anything itself to redress its violating the Agreed Framework shutting down the plutonium-producing facility at Yongbyon and accepting International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspection...

...All Washington has to do, Kim told his guests without elaborating, is "recognize us as a partner and treat us with respect...

...negotiator, Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Christopher R. Hill...

...Thus Hill comported himself as the epitome of reasonableness and calmness...

...That answer is all too clear: maintaining an overwhelming trade balance with the United States, which might just be reluctant to crack down on China for mass theft of intellectual property rights, unfair trading and all the rest if Hu is the one who can keep the multilateral talks going...

...Since they are tied down in Iraq and Afghanistan, the reality is that the President would have to persuade Congress to reinstitute the draft in order to physically tame North Korea, and that is highly unlikely...

...The euphoria of the summit lives on as well in the policies of Kim Dae Jung's successor...

...The leaders of these countries have recently appeared tongue-tied when it comes to telling Kim what they truly think of him...

...If Kim Jong II is extremely clever at playing off the powers with the most influence over the Korean Peninsula, he has been utterly inept at feeding his citizens...

...shares their goal of reconciliation with the North...

...Whether there will be a meaningful return to the hexagonal table following the recess is an open question...

...The main sticking point at Beijing— after everyone else, including a wavering Russia, accepted China's fourth statement of principles draft—was North Korea 's insisting (a ala Iran) that "every country" has a right to develop nuclear technology for peaceful purposes...

...Furthermore, Chung announced, Kim will send some 200 trusted people to Seoul for a joint August 15 remembrance of the 60th anniversary of Japan's surrender in World War II and the end to 35 years of Japanese colonial rule on the Peninsula...

...was not about to allow that capability after the North's violation of the 1994 Geneva Agreed Framework setting nuclear policy for the Korean Peninsula...

...policy in Iraq, would be hard pressed to go along with a move that had no chance of success...

...But no such language was heard among American policy makers in the run-up to the Beijing talks...

...Presumably she was fully aware that the North would not give South Korea the power to turn the switch on and off—and that it wanted to retain the twin light water nuclear energy reactors that were under construction on the east coast of North Korea before suspension of the 1994 agreement...

...He also said he might be willing to countenance a resumption of negotiations between generals at Panmunjom, plus the first reunion in over a year of a few hundred more of the millions of families divided by the Korean War...

...Consequently, Bush has little choice but to stick to his rhetorical guns and reject the North's demands...

...The problem was that not even the drafts carefully drawn up by the Chinese could resolve anything so long as the United States and North Korea were diametrically opposed on the issue of what Hill artfully called "sequencing...

...But Chinese academics and officials say China has almost as much difficulty dealing with North Korea as anyone else...

...Although there was no chance of this happening, Beijing represented an advance over the previous three rounds, if only because it lasted 13 days while each earlier meeting quit after three days with nothing at all accomplished...

...Kim Jong II" during Roh's June 10 White House visit...

...South Korea's chief delegate, Song Min Soon, who had gotten to know Hill when they were both ambassadors to Poland, spoke beforehand of another "framework" coming from the talks...

...Of course, Kim assured Chung that he would gladly give up most of his longrange and intermediate missiles, keeping only as many as are needed for "a normal state...

...not only says it has incontrovertible evidence that North Korea had begun developing nuclear warheads, but that Pyongyang acknowledged the uranium project to a mission led by Hill's predecessor, James A. Kelly, in October 2002...

...North Korea, for its part, sought to please China, which wrestled it into coming to Beijing...

...and other countries would resume sending in heavy fuel oil—which the United States stopped supplying in late 2002, following the breakdown of the Agreed Framework...

...The five-hour affair was the high point of an extended propaganda show occasioned by the fifth anniversary of the first and only inter-Korean summit, when Kim received the South's then President Kim Dae Jung in a flurry of statements, hugs and handshakes...

...Kim's Nuclear Gambit Calling the Shots in Korea By Donald Kirk Seoul Even before the six-nation talks in Beijing broke for a "recess" on August 7, it was apparent that nothing China, Russia, Japan, or South Korea were prepared to say could bring the United States and North Korea to terms...

...And it wanted to impress South Korea by putting on a show of advocating peace, reconciliation and a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula—if only the Americans would not be so obstructive...

...The joint declaration they signed endures as a document committing them firmly to peace and reconciliation...

...Amid the happy news, though, there were disquieting omissions...

...Nor did he raise the delicate question of North Korea's program for building nuclear warheads with uranium at their core...

...The quick answer is that he could turn to the UN Security Council and demand sanctions that would pinch North Korea ever more tightly at a time when the World Food Program is issuing dire warnings of a famine there as serious as the one that killed approximately 2 million people in the mid and late 1990s...

...President Roh Moo Hyun, whose ministers and advisers have convinced him that Washington's "hard line" is the sole obstacle to the North and South uniting...

...It seemed fitting therefore that China, besides serving as the venue for the talks, produced the drafts of the joint "statement of principles" put on the table...

...Nevertheless, he was fairly specific about the U.S.position: "The way [for North Korea] to join the community of nations," said Bush, was to listen to the proposal made by China, Japan, Russia, South Korea, and the United States at the June 2004 six-party talks that called on Pyongyang to "fully disclose its nuclear activities," "submit to inspections" and "pledge to begin eliminating nuclear weapons...

...They drove up the cost of food and other commodities, while workers were paid only at those few factories that were profitable...

...The question, then, is what else can Bush do...

...Pyongyang's denials notwithstanding, the U.S...

...They did, however, raise the question of why major powers like China, Russia, Japan, and the United States let North Korean President Kim Jong II—who runs one of the crudest, poorest, most disease-ridden dictatorships on earth— manipulate them with the ease of a puppeteer in a grand international circus...

...Instead, Rice's State Department, at the outset of the haggling over a "statement of principles," issued comments on how reasonably the North Koreans were behaving...

...The whole network would take three years to complete, and during that period the U.S...

...Prime Minister Tony Blair, under heavy fire from many of his own people for his staunch support of U.S...

...Apparently, too, nothing would please Kim Jone II more than a visit from China's President Hu Jintao...

...Though relatively quiescent at the moment, young South Koreans would pour into the streets by the tens of thousands even if the U.S...

...President George W. Bush, in his 2002 State of the Union address, labeled North Korea part of the "axis of evil," along with Iraq and Iran...

...The World Food Program's regional director for Asia, Anthony Banbury, reports that Kim's highly touted economic reforms two years ago "have led to a better life for a small number of people but have led to a much more difficult life for many millions...

...He made a show of chatting almost every day in private with his North Korean opposite number, Kim Kye Gwan...

...Meantime, he notes, the government has cut the allotment of rice for each person from 300 to 250 grams a day, "a starvation ration...

...THE waiting game may not be as hopeless as it seems...

...Later he said he hoped the talks would lay a "foundation," but they really did nothing of the sort...

...forces can jump off from bases elsewhere in the region to defend South Korea...

...Nor can the U.S...

...That admission, in fact, is what ignited the whole sequence of events—from the expulsion of the IAEA inspectors to the revival of plutonium production—that the talks were supposed to reverse...

...But might the rewards be too much for Kim to resist...

...He and the South Koreans fervently hoped a statement of principles would save enough face for everyone to be able to go home and say, "Look, progress...

...At the present juncture, that is all the more reason for the Bush Administration to play a waiting game...

...Chung was not so impolite as to repeat that formula to Kim, whose chief negotiator rejected it out of hand in the opening sessions of this year's talks...

...They crafted one "joint statement of principles" after another for the diplomats to chew on, knowing that any compromise acceptable to all sides would hardly be worth the exquisite paper it was printed on...

...Later that year, in a closed-door Republican meeting, he termed Kim a "pygmy...

...When the six participants convened on July 26, the general expectation was that China would mediate, if not force, a resolution of the issue too long at hand...

...Kim Jong II sang the same song to his visitors from Seoul, who returned home full of praise for the "Dear Leader," as the dictator's subjects are required to call him...

...What's in it for him...

...Hill arrived at the talks saying he would stay on as long as needed...

...For example, no mention was made of precisely what Kim Jong II hoped to achieve at the multilateral talks North Korea would surely have to return to...

...At the same time he again endorsed the 1992 joint North-South declaration on denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula...

...Nobody in Beijing—or Seoul, for that matter—is saying that North Korea first has to drop its nuclear program...

...Condoleezza Rice, before she became secretary of state, accurately included North Korea on a short list of "outposts of tyranny...

...Or of a seemingly repentant Bush falling all over himself to appear respectful when he and Roh spoke to reporters after their White House summit...

...Bush's military options are not good either...

...An incendiary issue such as the uranium program might upset the mood of the man South Korean leaders respectfully call "Chairman Kim"—a reference to his chairmanship of the National Defense Commission, the North's real center of power...

...It is enough that Hu can point to initiating another round of talks...

...But no one has played the game better than the current chief U.S...

...Should I then call him, 'His excellency, President Bush,'" he was said to have responded with a laugh...

...Pyongyang was not about to give up its beloved nuclear weapons program, and the U.S...

...The great difference is that China remains North Korea's only source of oil and other vital supplies, and North Korea's elite count on a lively cross-border trade to enrich their own coffers...

...No amount of diplomatic arm-twisting by any of the other five sitting at the six-sided table had a prayer of persuading North Korea to alter its posture...

...As for the Chinese, they could bask in the glow of their dual role as host and honest broker...

...It also contains an as yet unfulfilled promise that Kim Jong II will pay a visit to Seoul...

...Washington was now cowed by the North Koreans ' shrill denunciations and the South Koreans' bemoaning Bush, Rice and others for undiplomatic language...

...But China would certainly veto any resolution advocating sanctions...

...The key impact of the reforms," says Banbury, "is much higher food prices and less ability for poor people to get food...

...The United States is pulling troops out of South Korea as part of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's "flexible response" strategy, which holds that U.S...

...THE pattern, hardly new, has resulted in repeated standoffs, with Kim calling the shots...

...Back in Seoul, two weeks before the Beijing talks got under way, Chung announced an extraordinary aid plan that would have the South's power plants provide half the North's energy needs...

...His shrewdness was especially obvious on June 17—just weeks prior to the Beijing talks—as he genially entertained a South Korean delegation headed by Unification Minister Chung Dong Young...

...Rice, who had arrived on a fencemending mission, called the plan "very creative...

...After numerous exchanges between emissaries of the two countries, Hu has confirmed he will make the trip...

...To boot, polls have shown a significant percentage of South Koreans believe the United States presents a worse military threat than North Korea...

...count on the backing of the fifth permanent Security Council member, Great Britain...

...Donald Kirk, who began writing on Asian affairs for the NL in 1966, is the author most recently of Korean Crisis...

...The main American reason for attending the talks, the first in over a year, was to demonstrate to the South Koreans that the U.S...