SINGAPORE: One thing is certain ahead of next week’s six-way talks in Beijing with North Korea — no other participant wants the reclusive communist state to declare itself a nuclear power.
Beyond that, things become complicated.
“There’s no reason for anyone to go in with a great deal of optimism,” said Ralph Cossa, head of the Pacific Forum CSIS think tank in Hawaii.
“But the sky is not about to fall, because no one believes the military option will serve their interests.”
The three days of talks, which begin on Wednesday, will bring together the world’s only superpower, its largest communist nation, its number two economy and a hermit state whose economy is barely the size of a single county in California.
The challenge for the United States is how to persuade Pyongyang that openly declaring itself a nuclear power will compromise its own security — and how to sweeten the pill without seeming to reward bad behaviour.
Washington wants China, Japan and the other two parties to the talks, Russia and South Korea, to present a united front in the face of Pyongyang’s increasingly insistent claims that it has, or is on the brink of possessing, nuclear arms.
The North’s approach, a formula honed during decades of confrontation with the West, is likely to be to drive wedges among others at the table.
In agreeing to go to Beijing, it snubbed old friend China by using Russia to announce that, after months of prevarication, it was ready for multilateral talks.
At the top of its shopping list are security guarantees from Washington.
“The problem is that at least a couple of parties — Russia and China — are sympathetic to that,” said Cossa. “The consensus breaks down very quickly on the US position on that North Korean demand — which is to reject it.”
Pyongyang is portraying what it calls its “nuclear deterrent force” as a question of survival.
Just last year, US President George W. Bush bracketed it with Iraq and Iran in an “axis of evil” and then implemented regime change in Iraq after deeming weapons inspections had failed.
Andrei Lankov of the Australian National University in Canberra says Pyongyong will turn up in Beijing, and listen. “North Korea wants to show it’s willing to negotiate and to create a good impression,” he added.
But he and other North Korea watchers speculate that it is planning to use its 55th birthday on September 9 to declare itself a member of the nuclear club, a move that would upset the balance of power in Northeast Asia.
“The only way for North Korea to consider dismantling its nuclear programme is if it believes its security is threatened by having it,” said Cossa.
“If the other five can convince them of that, then we stand a chance of moving in that direction,” he added. “If they don’t believe that this is detrimental, then all they will do is go in to the talks to buy time.”
QUESTION MARKS: The stakes have been high since October when the United States said North Korea had admitted to a nuclear programme.
Since then, it has thrown out UN nuclear inspectors, become the first country to pull out of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and taken its Yongbyon nuclear plant out of mothballs.
A question mark hovers over whether it already has one or more nuclear bombs, as Washington says it has.
Whatever the truth, its talk of a nuclear deterrent is enough to disturb not only Japan and South Korea, who are within firing range, but China and Russia, who are among its few friends — and its main sources of life-saving economic assistance.
The issue of aid may prove less thorny than the nuclear issue.
Washington does not want to put aid on the agenda lest it lead Pyongyang to assume nuclear blackmail brings rewards. Any assistance would come from South Korea, which regularly sends food over the border, and Japan.
The impoverished North’s attendance at the talks is an indication of just how few options its reclusive leader, Kim Jong-il, has.
“North Korea’s truculence exaggerates the real options faced by that brutal and isolated regime,” former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger wrote this week.
But just what it want from the talks is far from clear. “It is hard to say what the North Koreans want first, ultimately they want everything,” said Cossa.
The role of host China, the North’s traditional ally, could be key, but, even in China, no-one is predicting an early breakthrough.
“Three days is in no way adequate to address and resolve the problems, but I believe it will provide a platform for the participants to continue talking in the future,” said Shi Yinhong, director for the Centre for International Studies at the People’s University in Beijing.—Reuters
