Category: Diplomacy

At what point will we admit that the North Koreans have repeatedly repudiated any intention of disarming? North Korea threatened Tuesday to bolster its “nuclear armed force,” saying the United States was not yet ready to drop its “hostile policy” towards the communist country.  Washington and Pyongyang face “a grave political challenge” on denuclearizing the Korean peninsula and end their decades-long hostility, the North’s state newspaper Minju Joson said in a commentary. “What is crucial here is that the U.S....

The North Koreans must have concluded that our Secretary of State’s failure to register their renunciations of any intent to denuclearize originates in some  lapse of clarity on their part.  North Korea cannot unilaterally give up its nuclear weapons when it is technically at war with the United States, a pro-North Korean newspaper published in Japan said Saturday. The Chosun Sinbo said Pyongyang cannot easily surrender its nuclear deterrent because it would be tantamount to lowering its guard while facing...

Updates:   According to this AP report, we’ve now presented  the North Koreans with a proposed verification protocol and invited North Korea to stall for two more months and gut it  offer comments.   South Korean negotiator Kim Sook  says, “The ball is actually in the North Korean court ….”  True to form, State is withholding all details about what the protocol would consist of.  And as if in response for my rant below  about the lack of media skepticism, Reuters’s...

James Rosen of Fox News has written the single most detailed and  best-written criticism of  Chris Hill’s  Disagreed Framework I have yet read, and that certainly includes anything I’ve written.   Rosen’s narration of Hill’s many public reassurances that  he would accept  nothing less than a “complete and correct” North Korean declaration is devastating.  I had wished for the time to write something like it myself, and that is now done for me.  And yet that is not even the best...

[Updated below: Today, President Bush embarks on the process of throwing away most of our diplomatic leverage against North Korea in exchange for a declaration that’s incomplete, incorrect, and unverified. Those who rightly criticized President Clinton for appeasing North Korea after the 1994 Agreed Framework should be honest enough to admit that Bush’s eleventh-hour grasp at a diplomatic legacy is probably even more dangerous.] [Original Post, 24 Jun 08] In a speech at the Heritage Foundation last week, Secretary of...