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The US and China are reportedly at work drawing a road map for preliminary steps by North Korea and practical developments in its denuclearization process ahead of a reopening of the six-party talks on Pyongyang’s nuclear program. It’s a step forward for Washington and Beijing, which have had their differences over the past few months on resuming the talks. We expect that their efforts will lead to a speedy resumption.

The origins of the idea to draw a “road map” go back to a Sept. 19 meeting between US Secretary of State John Kerry and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi. The day before, Wang had met in Beijing with Kim Kye-gwan, North Korea’s first vice Foreign Minister, to talk about ideas for resuming the talks. Based on these discussions, China went to the US and asked for its support in restarting the talks. Washington countered with a demand that Beijing come up with some ideas on how the talks might be made more effective. Just after the meeting, Wang said he was “confident that we and the US can work out a new and important agreement on how to resume the six-party talks and steer the denuclearization process more effectively.”

The US is still showing a limited attitude, as it is insisting on leaving China to handle things that it really should be talking directly to North Korea about. It hasn’t budged from its position that the talks cannot be resumed until North Korea has taken “credible preliminary steps” toward denuclearization. But as far as the nuclear issue is concerned, what concerns Pyongyang is Washington’s real intentions, not Beijing’s. China’s efforts are unlikely to bear much fruit until the US takes a more proactive stance. China may be the host country for the six-party talks, but the ones who can really resolve the nuclear issue are still North Korea, the US, and South Korea.

Kim Jang-soo, the national security chief at the Blue House, made a visit to Washington D.C. last week and met with a number of top US officials, including Kerry, National Security Advisor Susan Rice, and Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel. But there doesn’t seem to have been anything new said about the North Korean nuclear issue, apart from the emphasis on China’s role.

As long as the US remains this passive about things, it is unlikely that there will be enough momentum build for any real steps forward with the six-party talks. Washington and Seoul need to stop depending so much on China to do things. One first step in getting over this dependency is for the US to meet directly with North Korean officials. South Korea, for its part, should work on improving ties with Pyongyang with an eye to the future.

The six-party talks were last held in December 2008, nearly five years ago. Since then, North Korea has had two nuclear tests. Rather than taking a leading role in getting the talks going again, Seoul has been focusing on using the worsening nuclear situation as an excuse for delaying the transfer of wartime operational control. In other words, it’s getting the whole thing backwards. Past experience shows that efforts to resolve the nuclear issue - the six-party talks included - only pay off when South Korea commits itself to taking action.

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