Talks Grafs
It’s all too obvious for the need for much analysis. From the Joongang Ilbo:
South Korea’s chief negotiator, Song Min-soon, is normally loquacious and brimming with metaphors, but his comments to reporters before he began a round of bilateral meetings were uncharacteristically short. After a lunch meeting with the U.S. team, he said only, “I don’t have any reason to be pessimistic but we still have to build some ground to be optimistic.” Mr. Hill, standing near Mr. Song, said civilian nuclear programs and reactors were topics for a later date. “What is important is to stick to the fourth draft,” he said.
Brimming with metaphors. Lovely. Here’s the New York Times, under the headline, “North Korea’s New Reactor Demand Complicates Talks“:
“I must say it was a meeting in which we did not make a lot of progress,” the top American negotiator, Christopher Hill, said. “Neither the United States nor any other participant is prepared to fund a light-water reactor.”
. . . .
“There are not too many other ways I know how to say no,” he said after the United States had a one-on-one session with the North Koreans this afternoon
The Chosun Ilbo thinks the North is being intentionally obtuse, and suggests that the fuze is short:
Pyongyang on Wednesday reportedly went beyond demanding the right to have the
reactors to asking the other parties to build them for it, as was agreed a
decade ago.. . . .
Observers suggest North Korea insistence on impossible demands is an avoidance strategy. “With North Korea backed into a situation where it has effectively no choice but to completely dismantle its nuclear program, it’s a means of trying to avoid this,” Prof. Kim Tae-hyo of Sungkyunkwan University said. “It seems North Korea still has no intention to dismantle its nuclear programs completely.” Another expert at a policy research institute said Pyongyang was looking to continue with its nuclear program while getting the benefits of dismantling it to ensure its own survival. He said the outlook for the talks was dim if the North continues to insist on light-water reactors.
There is already talk in Beijing of adjourning the talks again since North Korea’s position appears to have hardened. A source close to the talks said China on Wednesday asked for negotiations to end before the Chinese Thanksgiving holiday on Sunday, the 15th day of the eighth lunar month. With the exception of South Korea, none of the other participants expressed particular opposition to this, the source said. The talks also involve Japan and Russia.
The Korea Herald spins, but reports that the U.S. is standing firm on complete denuclearization:
The six countries involved – China, Japan, Russia, the United States and the two Koreas – have agreed to pick up where they left off and continue discussions of that draft statement [the Herald fails to mention that five out of six nations agreed on that draft. –OFK].
. . . .
Contacts between U.S. and North Korean diplomats in New York over the past month failed to make any progress, Hill said Tuesday. But he said the North’s position “does seem to be evolving a little,” without elaborating.North Korea has insisted on its right to a peaceful nuclear power program even if it gives up its bomb programs – an issue that has divided the other countries at the talks. China, Russia and South Korea have all backed the North’s right in principle to a civilian atomic program if it follows international norms, but Japan agrees with the United States’ view that the North’s history of deceit means it can’t be trusted.
Trying to keep the issue from sidetracking the talks, Hill emphasized Wednesday the main focus was the elimination of nuclear weapons. “I want to make sure that on the fundamental issues that confront us in this draft, namely the denuclearization and ridding the Korean Peninsula of these terrible weapons … that we can achieve agreement on that,” he said. “When we do that we can look at some of these other questions.”
. . . .
In New York, the U.S. National Security Council’s senior director for Asia, Mike Green, reiterated Washington’s stance that North Korea must give up all nuclear programs, peaceful or otherwise. “North Korea needs to get out, completely out, of the nuclear business,” Green said.
The L.A. Times suggests that the fuze is long:
“We are not even cautiously optimistic. We are just cautious,” one [U.S.] official said Monday on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the situation. “But I do think what happened during the recess is something we all anticipated. Because you are no longer at the negotiating table, you are communicating through public statements that reflect hard-line, fundamental views, and there is no opportunity to close the gap.”
The diplomats have set the bar relatively low for this round of talks. Their immediate goal is to elicit agreement on a joint statement of principles, a sticking point during the last round, which ended Aug. 7 after 13 days. “
The agreement will be very general,” said Zhang Liangui, a professor at the Central Party School in Beijing. “The tough job will be at the next round, when they have to start grappling with concrete problems.
I’m not sure why the North Koreans feel so cocky, but this can’t be sending a terribly clear signal, and has even threatened to spill over and further muddle the nuclear talks. Whoever agreed to hold ministerial and disarmament talks at the same time should have predicted this.
Why are the people who’ve been the most insistent on finding a diplomatic solution often those who’ve done the most to sabotage any chance that they might succeed?