N. Korea Agrees to Return to Six-Party Talks

[Update:   According to this Korean language link, the South Koreans were the last of the six parties to know that the talks would begin again.  You’d think that after getting seven billion dollars from South Korean taxpayers, they’d have enough left over to afford a phone call.  I guess they spent it somewhere else.]
News coming off the wires claims that the North Koreans have agreed to return to six-party talks.

Chinese, U.S. and North Korean envoys to the negotiations held a day of unpublicized talks in Beijing during which North Korea agreed to return to the larger six-nation talks on its nuclear programs, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said.

“The three parties agreed to resume the six-party talks at the earliest convenient time,” the Chinese statement said.

President Bush welcomed the agreement. “I am pleased and I want to thank the Chinese,” the president told reporters in the Oval Office.

Although it should be obvious by now that the North Koreans will never agree to complete and verifiable disarmament, you can already detect a hint of triumphalism from the State Department.

“It’s clear the North Koreans got the message from the Chinese and everybody else,” said State Department spokesman Tom Casey.

That sounds pretty optimistic to me, even a week before a mid-term election. It’s not even clear whether the North Koreans have dropped preconditions to their appearance at the talks, and a North Korean promise is no guarantee that they’ll actually show up. If they do show up — sometime in November or December, we’re told — expect them to be as obstinate and unreasonable as ever. Also unclear is whether they will still demand a light-water reactor as a precondition to disarming, and with a partially successful nuke test behind them, they may feel that they can demand more. But talks have great cosmetic value, and calls by many Democrats and some Republicans for bilateral talks have lost all traction. That’s why this quote from Ambassador Chris Hill is more realistic:

“We are a long way from our goal still,” he said. “I have not broken out the cigars and champagne quite yet.”

While I don’t see a mere agreement to talk as any cause for celebration, either, there may — or may not — be something to State’s claims that pressure played some role (in what, we’ll know later). Just yesterday, the New York Times reported that China had cut off Kim Jong Il’s fuel supplies entirely. Meanwhile, Yonhap was describing intensifying U.S. pressure on China, via the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission. In a report to Congress, the Commission accused China of failing to put effective pressure on the North. It might be that the North Koreans are trying to take some of the momentum out of U.S.-led efforts to implement U.N.S.C.R. 1718, which might just happen, especially in the case of South Korea. China “denied that an apparent drop in China’s oil exports to the isolated fortress state signalled a shift in policy.”

One interesting point is that North Korea’s own illicit activities and the U.S. response to them will be the agenda at the next round of talks. That cuts both ways. On one hand, it means that North Korea will have partially succeeded in isolating the United States as the bad guy; on the other hand, they’ve picked an issue where no nation could reasonably be expected to yield. And the compromise solution is just too obvious.

The truth will be revealed by whether the North negotiates in good faith.