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North Korea talks: A dark
tunnel
By Stephen Blank
The
announcement of North Korea's acceptance of a
multilateral negotiating forum to discuss its nuclear
program is cause for modified rapture. While a
possibility for negotiating an end to this crisis, and
perhaps to Pyongyang's nuclearization, is now a real
option, there is no guarantee that this option will
survive or that the negotiations will go anywhere. The
fundamental asymmetries that have impeded progress
toward a peace settlement of the Korean War and of
inter-Korean relations remain intact. And possibly, in
order to get to this moderately hopeful point, more
complications have had to be added to the mix.
Among these asymmetries is the fact that there
is as yet no method short of war that can compel North
Korea to terminate its nuclear program and submit to
strict and verifiable inspections without paying for it.
While this does not sit at all well with at least some
members of the administration of US President George W
Bush, nobody anywhere has been able to find a way around
this conundrum. Thus in some way, either financially or
politically, or both, North Korea will be able to extort
some sort of tangible reward for extraordinarily bad
behavior, thereby driving a rather large vehicle through
the efforts to sustain non-proliferation of nuclear
weapons.
However, there is no guarantee that
such a strict verification and inspection regime will
come out of these talks, for the history of such
regimes, dating back to the interwar restrictions on
German rearmament, shows that they have inevitably
proved to be ineffectual, porous, and often unsupported
by the powers that drafted them. Indeed, the only
arms-inspection and verification regimes that have
worked have generally involved some form of occupation,
and that certainly is unlikely in this situation. And to
look at this contingency is to assume to some degree
that North Korea will willingly accept the most
intrusive violation of its sovereignty imaginable, or at
any rate imaginable to it, again a most improbable
expectation.
Conversely, what does North Korea
hope to gain from possibly acceding to an inspection and
verification regime along these lines? Obviously it
wants a non-aggression pact or declaration from the
United States, which is very unlikely as well under the
circumstances. Likewise it wants enormous amounts of aid
and truly guaranteed sources of energy because it feels
cheated by the dilatory US implementation of the Agreed
Framework. Again it is difficult to see it obtaining
such aid and guarantees without ending its
nuclear-program lock.
At the same time the
presence of the other powers around the table besides
the US and North Korea - namely South Korea, Japan,
China and Russia - introduces some real wild cards into
the game. While it is unlikely anyone wants North Korea
to have nuclear weapons and everyone is scared of this
possibility, with Russia going so far as to take
emergency precautionary measures in neighboring zones,
what will they pay to get rid of those weapons, and will
that payment affect their overall policies toward the
issues connected with Korean unification? In some cases,
again including Russia's, it is difficult to see what
these governments' objectives are once they have
achieved their goal of being recognized as states who
must be consulted in any part of the Korean "peace
process".
In this respect China and Russia are
the big winners, because Washington has had to accept
them as equal interlocutors and solicit their help to
deal with North Korea, yet they paid no price for doing
so. This outcome certainly conforms with their
long-stated intentions. In China's case, its elites have
repeatedly informed their US interlocutors that under no
circumstances would China let itself be excluded from
the final disposition of the Korean Peninsula. And
Russia has endlessly called for just such a six-power
conference. Yet now that they are there, what will they
do with the prize they have finally achieved?
At
the same time, Washington has won as well, in that it
forced North Korea to accept its definition of the shape
of the solution, ie a six-power conference. Yet in doing
so it has surrendered what has been the major trump card
in the US position all along, namely that North Korea
wants to deal with it alone and that its alliance with
South Korea and Japan made it the key player in any
Korean peace process. Now we find South Korean officials
increasingly stating that China is not just a key player
but the key player in moving the Korean Peninsula
toward peace. These statements are already a harbinger
of what could become a trend that would have the most
profound and unforeseeable repercussions in Northeast
Asia, and not only on the Korean Peninsula.
These are only some of the issues that will be
at stake when the negotiations open, because the agenda
has not been publicized. Although that agenda obviously
will revolve around North Korea's nuclear program, we
cannot say for sure what else will be discussed and
under what conditions or modalities. If the
negotiations do indeed turn serious, then there is a
chance, although nothing more than that, that a solution
can be found to the threat of nuclear weapons on the
Korean Peninsula. But if the discussions bog down or
become deadlocked, we can be certain that North Korea
will proceed to full nuclearization and to the
continuing export of its technologies, thus frustrating
everyone and emboldening the hawks in Washington or
elsewhere.
But as Washington has clearly stated
that it will accept no solution leaving North Korea with
the capability to make nuclear weapons, and other states
seem opposed to that outcome as well, are they willing
to pay for the privilege of getting their way, or do
they think this crisis can somehow be ended by some
other, more direct way of confronting this issue?
Likewise we must ask whether the structure of intrastate
relationships in Northeast Asia that have grown up
around this unresolved war will survive or evolve into a
new status quo that commends itself to all the
interested players.
It is a measure of the
hideous complexities of the issues surrounding the
Korean Peninsula that negotiations of the most
consequential issues in the region's security are about
to begin without any sign of even a clear answer to any
of these questions. While all of the six players in this
drama are about to enter a very long tunnel, it is a
very moot point whether any of them can truly see light
anywhere in it or at the end of it. Indeed, it is
debatable whether anyone can even see the end of this
particular tunnel.
Stephen Blank is an
analyst of international security affairs residing in
Harrisburg, PA.
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times
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