WASHINGTON: While heartened by Thursday’s announcement of talks between North Korea, the United States and China in Beijing next week, specialists here are worried that Washington may be unwilling to make concessions necessary to sustain a longer negotiation process that would defuse tensions on the Korean Peninsula.

Boosted by its convincing military victory in Iraq, the administration of President George W. Bush may stick to its longstanding demand that North Korea dismantle its nuclear programmes as a precondition for US assurances that it will not attack the communist state, according to the analysts.

“I see no indications that the US is ready for any quid pro quos,” says Korea expert Selig Harrison, who headed a blue-ribbon task force that called in late February for Washington to urgently engage Pyongyang on dismantling its nuclear programme in return for such assurances. “I think the administration sees (the talks) as a way of putting more pressure on North Korea.”

The administration remains badly divided over what its negotiation position should be, with hawks, based primarily in the Pentagon and Vice President Dick Cheney’s office, arguing against concessions, and the State Department favouring flexibility.

“There are still conflicts within the administration about what to give the North Koreans,” says Donald Gregg, a former US ambassador to South Korea who also served as George H.W. Bush’s national security adviser when Bush was vice president. The best- case scenario for next week’s meeting, added Gregg, would be “an amicable agreement to keep talking”.

Pyongyang’s decision to drop its insistence on holding strictly bilateral talks with the United States is being interpreted by some administration officials here as vindicating their hard line and as a sign that the regime, one third of Bush’s “axis of evil”, is ready to give in to Washington’s demands in light of its military victory in Iraq.

While most analysts believe that the US victory over Baghdad played a role in North Korea’s policy change, they also insist that other factors, particularly pressure from China, and to a lesser extent Russia, may have been more decisive in getting Pyongyang to soften its conditions.

“The people we have to thank for this are largely the Chinese, because they engineered this by persuading the North Koreans to back off a little,” said Don Oberdofer, a Korea specialist at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, who visited Pyongyang in November.

While Washington insisted it would not invade North Korea and was willing to meet in the context of multilateral regional security talks, senior officials also hinted at possible military strikes against Yongbyon or an interdiction operation if they became convinced that the North was on the verge of producing or exporting nuclear bombs. The Pentagon even deployed long-range bombers to positions where they could strike North Korean targets at any moment.

In this context, the announcement of next week’s meeting is seen as a potential breakthrough for which the US has also made concessions.

“The Korean position dropped its previous insistence to sit down only with the US, but I would argue that the US position has changed, too, at least with regard to its definition of multilateral by which it originally meant a larger group,” including South Korea, Japan, and Russia, says Alan Romberg a retired State Department expert on Northeast Asia currently with the Henry L. Stimson Center.

But that the two sides have agreed to a framework for talks hardly means that progress is certain, particular if Washington insists that Pyongyang dismantle its nuclear programmes as a precondition for further talks or Pyongyang insists that it will do so only if it receives security assurances from Washington.

China’s role is key, according to analysts. “This is the first really substantive joint venture between the Bush administration and the fourth-generation leadership in China. They have totally changed their policies from saying they don’t have much influence over North Korea,” Romberg said, noting that Beijing is “taking responsibility in ways it never did before”.

Oberdorfer also highlighted China’s role, insisting that Beijing sees as its central objective “not to have a crisis in the Korean Peninsula”. Just as it has put pressure on Pyongyang to agree to a modified bilateral framework, he noted, it also prevented the US from having the United Nations Security Council condemn North Korea for withdrawing from the NPT last week.

“My hope is made greater by the fact that the Chinese are the interlocutors,” Oberdorfer added.—Dawn/The InterPress News Service.