Back to the Talks?

The North Koreans have reportedly agreed to return this month. If you’re looking for misty expressions of hope, there’s always Dog Stew. To me, the question is whether there will be progress at those talks, and whether North Korea will ever agree to anything verifiable. Again, that means that North Korea will have to compromise substantially on transparency, something I doubt they’re prepared to do.

What seems more likely is that recent hints and Bush’s executive order freezing the assets of some North Korean companies sent a chill through Pyongyang, which realized that stringing along this administration required it to blunt growing U.S. hostility and give its enablers something to work with.

More, courtesy of the NY Times. The Times has also noticed that Bush is preparing his options if the talks fail.

American officials say North Korea’s economic situation has continued to deteriorate, and they hope to use that as leverage in the coming talks. To increase the pressure, the Bush administration has put in place plans for a series of coercive actions – crackdowns on North Korean shipments of drugs, counterfeit currency and arms – that would probably be accelerated if the negotiations made no progress.

“We’ve made it clear they can’t just come back and lecture us, like the last sessions,” a senior administration official in Washington said. “Either they get on the path to disarmament, or we move to Plan B.”

Then, more evidence for the fact that reporters who know nothing about military matters ought not report on them, on peril of getting in over their heads:

But President Bush’s options are also limited, officials acknowledge. China has been unwilling to participate in any economic embargos. Military action to halt North Korea’s declared efforts to build its nuclear arsenal has been ruled out as too risky, and virtually impossible while American forces are tied up in Iraq.

I share the reservations about China, although I’m not sure that North Korea can survive on its China trade alone. However, no serious observer is suggesting a U.S. invasion of North Korea, and the United States certainly need not stick around to defend South Korea with American ground forces if the North invades. The point is, U.S. “military action” would be almost certainly and exclusively done with air and naval forces, or ideally, by taking nonviolent actions to destabilize the regime internally. I don’t understand how the Times could fail to figure this out. Perhaps the chance for a dig on Iraq was just too much to resist.

Meanwhile, Mr. Bush has been resisting pressure from China and South Korea to improve an offer to the North Koreans he made in June 2004. To avoid failure at the talks, he may have to decide whether to make explicit concessions, including the promise of eventual normalization of relations with a nation that just two months ago he said was run by a “tyrant” who puts dissidents in “concentration camps.”

Yes. Our softened rhetoric induced North Korea back to the talks. The Times gets credit for reporting the facts in context. Of all news outlets you’d think wouldn’t buy into the rhetoric hogwash, Fox News (on my TV) attributed this “breakthrough” to softened U.S. rhetoric. Of course, the rhetoric has actually hardened in very fundamental ways, as Kang Chol-Hwan’s White House visit (where all present taunted Kim Jong-Il) and Paula Dobriansky’s obviously deliberate comments underline. The North Koreans, being intensely realistic about separating the tangible and intangible components of diplomacy, acted according to their interests, not their feelings.

Being nice to the North Koreans is like whispering sweet nothings to a cheap hooker: it’s unlikely to gratify either you or the hooker, and she may even charge you extra for it. And calling this a breakthrough is premature in the extreme. Let’s see if they’ll come clean on the uranium program. We don’t have unlimited time to get to the truth.