NYT on the USFK and Talks Delay

The New York Times has two articles of interest. The first is a detailed report on how U.S. force structure in Korea will change. It relies heavily on an interview with Gen. Leon LaPorte, the USFK Commanding General.

The other discusses the North Korean decision not to return to the talks next week. Interestingly, North Korea uses the more transparent excuse of the annual US-ROK military exercises rather than focusing on Jay Lefkowitz’s appointment as Special Envoy for Human Rights. In fact, the Times article says that North Korea didn’t specifically cite the Lefkowitz appointment in its statement, although there’s little question it miffed them. You have to wonder just what Lefkowitz can really say to the North Koreans when our diplomatic team isn’t really saying anything:

Several organizations say they have evidence of vast prison camps and suppression of dissent in North Korea, but Mr. Hill said last week that although the rights issue was not part of the current talks, North Korea would have to improve its record in order to end its isolation from the international community.

I actually have some sympathy with the position that any slender hope of a successful negotiation (or failing that, the appearance that we sincerely tried) requires you to start with basic fundamental principles on which you can agree. Otherwise, the North could well blame the human rights issue rather than say, its refusal to admit to its uranium program, as the reason for the breakdown. If the talks break down over North Korea’s dishonest denials or its intransigent refusal to disarm–which still looks more likely than any other option–there’s no harm done.

A basic negotiation principle is that you start with the broader issues, and if an agreement then seems realistically possible, you progressively reach the narrower ones. But these talks aren’t going to go far before they touch the issue of verification, and that means transparency, which means inspections. Unless the U.S. unwisely agrees to limiting inspections to narrow areas pre-approved by North Korea, weapons inspections and human rights issues will intersect rapidly on such issues as the testing of WMD on humans, or the use of forced labor to build and staff WMD facilties. The same applies to diplomatic normalization, where the U.S. position is that human rights improvements–meaning some measure of openness–will have to come first.

In the short term, there’s probably little harm in keeping the human rights issue out of harm’s direct way, but in the medium term, the human rights issue is barreling toward the metaphorical intersection where it will collide with the issues of verification and normalization.