hankyoreh

South Korean special envoys

The dialogue phase on the Korean Peninsula that was launched by the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics is shifting into high gear with an inter-Korean summit coming up in April, following by a North Korea-US summit in May. The next question is what give and take there will be on the US’s goal of denuclearization and North Korea’s goal of regime security and how the two sides will find a mutually satisfactory solution.

Current dialogue between North Korea and the US is proceeding in quite a different manner from the past. Both the 1994 agreement in Geneva and the Six-Party Talks in 2000 represented the “bottom-up” approach, in which working-level negotiations gradually build up the scope of the agreement, but the current scenario reflects the “top-down” approach, in which decisions made by the leaders of North Korea and the US are passed down to lower-level officials to deliberate.

It is widely expected that North Korea and the US’s haggling over their respective interests around the May summit will be groundbreaking in both method and process. During a meeting with reporters on Mar. 12, a senior Blue House official remained noncommittal when asked whether talks between North Korea and the US would move simultaneously toward denuclearization and the normalization of diplomatic relations or whether they would start with denuclearization and move forward in stages.

“This could be different from the previous method of one-for-one give and take, of trading words for words and actions for actions. This is a completely different game [from the past]. The situation has changed. Since no one has played this game before, we won’t know until progress is made on North Korea-US dialogue,” the official said.

The official’s remark about “words for words and actions for actions” refers to the method used during the Six-Party Talks, by which North Korea and the US implement measures such as denuclearization and regime security simultaneously instead of in turns. But the current situation, in which North Korea and the US are jumping straight into summit-level talks, suggests that a new and unexpected method will be employed.

Even so, it would be practically impossible to put forward a plan for denuclearization and regime security that would satisfy both sides in time for the May summit. In terms of North Korea’s nuclear program, freezing and dismantling the reprocessing facilities and the 5MW reactor at the Yongbyon nuclear complex require a rather complicated process of negotiations between North Korea and the US for inspections, monitoring and verification – and that’s just for the plutonium program.

The uranium enrichment program is not something that can be dealt with simply by sending inspectors to the enrichment facilities at the Yongbyon nuclear complex. Since uranium facilities are much easier to hide than plutonium facilities, it would also be necessary to verify that there were no more secret uranium facilities.

Guaranteeing the security of the North Korean regime would also require heated debate. If the armistice agreement is replaced by a peace treaty, North Korea could take issue with the status of the UN Command, which is a party to the armistice agreement, and call for the dismantlement of the UN Command and the withdrawal of US troops from the Korean Peninsula. When National Intelligence Service Director Lim Dong-won visited North Korea prior to the inter-Korean summit in June 2000, North Korean leader Kim Jong-il told Lim that North Korea could tolerate US troops “being stationed as an army keeping the peace on the Korean Peninsula” if their “status and role” were changed, but after that, the North began calling for the withdrawal of US forces once more.

“The things that North Korea and the US want from each other are too big to be resolved on the technical level. Rather than a gradual approach, therefore, taking the big step of untying the knot first and moving on to technical matters after that could work,” said Kim Yeon-cheol, professor at Inje University. “For example, North Korea and the US could first normalize relations and then resolve the North Korean nuclear issue. The US established diplomatic relations with Myanmar before it started lifting sanctions.”

“One approach would be for the two sides to make sweeping promises to shut down North Korea’s nuclear program and establish diplomatic relations during the May summit and then to work on denuclearization, drafting a peace treaty and establishing diplomatic relations during a three- to four-year timeframe,” said Cho Sung-ryul, senior research fellow at the Institute for National Security Strategy.

By Park Byong-su, senior staff writer and Kim Ji-eun and Kim Bo-hyeop, staff reporters

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