hankyoreh

A US participant at a two-day 1.5 track meeting in London between US and North Korean representatives talked about having observed “a possible consensus that the North Korean nuclear issue can be resolved through dialogue.” Also on Oct. 2, a US research institute revealed further evidence that North Korea has brought its graphite-moderated reactor at Yongbyon back on line. The signs are clear: earnest efforts to resolve the nuclear issue need to be made as soon as possible.

Leon Sigal, director of the Northeast Asia Cooperative Security Project at the Social Science Research Council in New York, said after attending the London meeting that North Korea showed a clear willingness to go back to the six-party talks framework. This would seem to suggest that Pyongyang’s recent continued demands to resume the talks aren’t just rhetoric. Sigal also reported seeing that North Korea is not interested in being recognized as a nuclear power, and said he “got the sense” that it would be possible to return to the spirit of the Sept. 19 2005 Joint Statement.

This paints quite a different picture from the one coming from Seoul and Washington, who are claiming to see no signs of North Korea abandoning its two-track course of nuclear and economic development. Indeed, the North Korean side reportedly showed a lot of interest, sending its senior and deputy representatives from the six-party talks (Vice Foreign Minister Ri Yong-ho and foreign ministry deputy general director Choi Son-hui) to the meeting in London.

Washington’s position at the moment is that North Korea can’t be trusted, and that dialogue can only come once it has taken “meaningful and irreversible steps” toward denuclearization. This is the wrong approach, since it forecloses the possibility even for dialogue between authorized negotiators to find out just what Pyongyang wants. If it really wants to solve the nuclear issue, the right approach would be meet North Korea, communicate its demands, and set the mood for a resumption of the six-party talks. North Korea has a history of bringing Yongbyon back on line as a way of giving itself a bargaining chip. It’s unlikely to shut it down unless some kind of dialogue takes place.

It certainly does appear to be the case that North Korea has fallen on Washington’s priority list. But negligence of the sort it’s adopting now is sure to make the nuclear problem worse over time. We could find ourselves in a place where the only choice is to sit and hope for the North Korean regime to collapse. Sigal put it aptly when he said that dialogue was the only one realistic way of resolving North Korean issue, and that any number of methods were available. We need use dialogue to find those methods.

The fact that Seoul appears more reluctant than Washington to resume the six-party talks is a big problem. Past experiences show that the momentum of international efforts like those talks hinges on how South Korea behaves. As it happens, October 4 marks the sixth anniversary of the 2007 inter-Korean summit declaration. Hopefully, we can look forward to a more active stance on both inter-Korean relations and nuclear dialogue.

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]