North Korea should negotiate with the U.S.: No Rodong Sinmun op-ed, ever

This was supposed to be a big week for talk-to-North-Korea crowd, a constituency that’s well-represented in certain academic circles and op-ed pages … and pretty much nowhere else. Track 1.5 talks between current North Korean diplomats and former U.S. diplomats were supposed to begin tomorrow — in Washington, no less. This aroused certain Nobel Peace Prize aspirants and their megaphones in the New York Times and the AP about the prospect that Donald Trump want to might cut a deal with North Korea.

Personally, I’m not privy to the discussions inside the White House. I don’t know if the President wants to cut a deal or not, what kind of deal he’d cut, or who he’d cut it with. I don’t know if the administration asked anyone to convey any messages or what those messages might have been. Officially, Track 1.5 and Track 2 talks aren’t official, but Yun Byung-se, Seoul’s indispensable man, saw that possibility as significant enough to ask Secretary of State Rex Tillerson not to cut a freeze deal and stick to C.V.I.D.

By now, it has occurred to the wisest ones among you that our own arguments and negotiations about talks are an exercise in masturbatory diplomacy if the North Koreans aren’t even showing us any leg. After all, they’ve said over and over and over and over again that they aren’t going to denuclearize, period. Two weeks ago, the Rodong Sinmun specifically rejected Jeffrey Lewis’s bizarre proposal to offer North Korea help with its “satellite” program (which would violate U.N. Security Council resolutions currently in force) in exchange for a freeze on its missile programs. And in the week leading up to the scheduled talks, Pyongyang said this:

There is a heated argument among the political circles in the U.S. about whether the goal of denuclearizing north Korea” is possible or not. Minju Joson Tuesday observes in a commentary in this regard: It is nonsensical to argue about this matter and an attempt to realize the above-said scenario is as foolish as trying to turn back the clock of history.  [KCNA, Feb. 21, 2017]

And, lest anyone suspect that these were the words of a rogue North Korean editor, this:

The DPRK is a nuclear power possessed of even H-bomb which the world calls “absolute weaponry”. The increased nuclear threat to the DPRK will put the security of the U.S. mainland in a greater peril.

The Trump administration has to bear in mind that it may lead the U.S. to its final ruin should it follows in the footsteps of the Obama group which faced only denunciation and derision by the world people, being branded as a defeater for its pipe dream of leading the DPRK to “change” and “collapse” during its tenure of office.

Neither high-intensity nuclear threat and blackmail nor economic sanctions will work on the DPRK.

The U.S. has to face up to the reality and get awakened from pipe dream. The present U.S. administration has to make a bold decision of policy switchover, not trying to repeat its totally bankrupt anti-DPRK policy. [Rodong Sinmun, Feb. 21, 2017]

In the end, the White House decided that it might have sent the wrong message to grant the North Koreans visas and welcome them to Washington just two weeks after eight of their countrymen — including one of their diplomats! — committed an act of international terrorism with a weapon of mass destruction in a crowded airport terminal, in a peaceful and friendly country. After all, unless I’m overlooking something, this was the world’s first state-sponsored terrorist attack with a weapon of mass destruction.

Invariably, the usual suspects will use the denial of the visas to blame Trump for the fact that the talks didn’t happen. But given the inflexible position the North Koreans took going in, the better question is why we should have bothered at all. If North Korea’s nukes aren’t on the table, what conceivable benefit can we derive from negotiations? I suppose there’s value in sending certain messages to the North Koreans — putting them on notice that tougher sanctions are coming, and warning them of the consequences of attacking civilian targets. But there are other times and places to send those messages without committing the grave symbolic and diplomatic error of welcoming Pyongyang’s diplomats to Washington at such an inappropriate time.

But those are conversations, not negotiations, which is what the North Korea doves want, and which is also what the U.S. has tried to start again, and again, and again, even after North Korea reneged on the agreements it did make, again and again and again. Maybe, then, the North Korea doves should stop submitting all of those op-eds to The New York Times and The Washington Post and The Atlantic. Maybe they should start sending them to the editors of The Rodong Sinmun and KCNA and The Minju Choson instead. Let me know if you ever see one published.