Nowhere Fast

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I suppose Day One is a bit hasty to declare a deadlock, but this isn’t very promising:

North Korea took a tough stand Wednesday during talks with the United States, reportedly insisting Washington normalize relations and remove all atomic threats before it would give up nuclear weapons. For its part, the United States stood by an aid-for-disarmament offer the North rejects as unfair.
. . . .
North Korea said the United States must abandon plans to topple its communist regime and instead establish mechanisms for peaceful coexistence, South Korea’s Yonhap news agency said, citing a source close to the meetings in the Chinese capital.
. . . .
Washington has said it recognizes North Korea’s sovereignty and has no intention of attacking the country. But the North accused Washington of hostility after Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in January called North Korea one of the world’s “outposts of tyranny.”

The North also raised the issue of what it claims is an alleged U.S. nuclear arsenal that could be used against the North, a senior American official said. Both Washington and Seoul deny any U.S. nuclear weapons are in the South, and South Korea earlier raised the possibility of opening South Korean and U.S. bases for some form of verification by the North.

Here is a short list of unbridgeable subjects we haven’t even started discussing: uranium, verification, human rights. Thus far, the U.S. position is that it won’t fully normalize relations with North Korea without substantial progress on human rights.

It’s interesting how little we’ve learned from the North Koreans. If we had any sense, we’d move a massive nuclear arsenal to Camp Casey and then demand new concessions in exchange for moving them to Osan.

Update 7/29:

What does “denuclearization” even mean? For North Korea, it means no U.S. nukes in Korea, but holding onto the right to “peaceful” uses of nuclear energy that got us to this point in the first place:

North Korea says it will retain the right to use nuclear energy peacefully, while the United States says that since North might switch its peaceful nuclear facilities into military-use ones at any time, it wants a complete dismantlement of nuclear facilities in North Korea.

The WaPo reports that North Korea has finally gotten around to rejecting the offer we tabled in June ’04. Equally unsurprising is the fact that the “V” word–verification–appears to be at the heart of it:

As described by U.S. officials, the proposal first made in June 2004 would provide aid and security assurances to North Korea if it agreed to a schedule that would do away with its nuclear weapons program.

North Korean diplomats complained, the senior U.S. official said, that the proposal was front-loaded with demands that the Pyongyang government agree to dismantle its nuclear program and allow inspections by outsiders before receiving the security assurances and economic aid it has demanded in return.

The WaPo shares my concern that we haven’t even reached some of the tougher issues:

Other particularly sensitive points of discord likely left for resolution later include a U.S. assertion that North Korea has a uranium enrichment program in addition to the plutonium-based weapons program it has acknowledged.

. . . although the New York Times says we have, with the expected results.

North Korea’s vice foreign minister and chief negotiator, Kim Kye Gwan, said his country would not dismantle its nuclear program unless Washington gave North Korea political recognition and security guarantees, and he proposed a gradual approach to possible disarmament.

“It is necessary that the U.S. should promise to end its hostility and ensure a peaceful coexistence with our country,” Mr. Kim said, according to Yonhap. “Any promises to be agreed upon should be carried out step by step, starting with the easiest one to be implemented first,” Mr. Kim also said.

American negotiators on Wednesday raised the issue of highly enriched uranium, a point of major concern because of their fears that North Korea is developing enough fuel to rapidly build nuclear weapons. “We did not achieve an agreement with them on that,” the American official said, “But we did agree to keep talking.”

The Americans continue to insist that this is a discussion about North Korean nuclear weapons. North Korea, always seeking an advantage in exchange for something it had already agreed to do, wants to expand the discussion to U.S. nuclear weapons. I’m not opposed to expanding the debate to that issue over the long term (say, after the removal of North Korea’s DMZ artillery and progress on human rights), but I sense a premeditated effort to complicate the talks and make the U.S. look like the bad guy, something that’s never hard to do in South Korea in particular. Amateurs that they are, the South Koreans are pretty much staking out the squishy middle ground in public, something that anathema to effective diplomacy but which might be good politics:

South Korea on Wednesday proposed a plan of nearly simultaneous concessions in exchange for North Korean steps to disarm, a South Korean official, later told reporters.

Song Min Soon, the chief South Korean negotiator, in a speech at the conference, said, “The concerned parties should act simultaneously or in parallel in implementing word-for-word or action-for-action promises they’d make,” the Yonhap news agency of South Korea reported. Mr. Song also suggested that the participants in the current talks needed to produce a joint declaration that codified their points of agreement, the New China News Agency reported.

OK. So is this a brand-spanking-new proposal the South Koreans are tabling on Day Two of the talks, as the graf suggests? Not exactly. Reading all of the various reports and putting them together, it looks like the South Koreans are proposing the same things they propsed to the Americans, and which the latter rejected. The Marmot, btw, sees things the other way around, which might be a matter of which reporter talked to which official, or might be a question of how you read this:

[A] high-ranking government official expressed dissatisfaction with what he called “changes in the U.S. position.” In negotiations prior to the six-party talks, South Korea, the U.S. and Japan provisionally agreed a more progressive draft proposal, which Seoul feels the U.S. has now reneged on. The official said the draft agreement worked out between the three chief negotiators in Seoul on July 14 lost its luster when U.S. delegation head Christopher Hill fine-tuned it with officials back in Washington.

I simply don’t read that as Robert reads it. It sounds like a lower-level U.S. diplo agreed at the working level but said, “let me talk to my boss,” who was understood as being the final approval authority. The boss didn’t like it, and we conveyed that to the South Koreans before the start of the talks. The disgruntled South Koreans then proceeded to make their disgruntlement public to everyone, including the North Koreans, and may even have tabled a new proposal based on their position anyway.

The South Koreans have two main complaints, one of which is, well, us–namely, the “hard-liners” who are pushing for human rights issues to be made part of the talks. For South Korea to complain about this and suggest that “conservatives got to” the U.S. negotiating team is patently baseless. Since last October, there has been a U.S. statute on the books, the North Korean Human Rights Act, that requires this. There is no reason to feign astonishment that U.S. negotiators are complying with the functionally unanimous will of the U.S. Congress, as expressed through statute. This has been on the books for a long time.

Either way, it hardly suggests coordinated diplomacy, and adds to my confusion about why having six parties at these talks adds to their effectiveness. No wonder the North Koreans keep holding out for better offers. Chung Dong-Young is a bottomless pit of them.

Well, the news isn’t all bad. The New York Times reports:

“There was no yelling at each other,” the Japanese official said, adding that sometimes the delegates even managed to smile.

Then again, if that’s the best news we can take from this, maybe it is that bad.

And they will start to talk about inspections today. This is where we need to be very, very uncompromising.