NEW YORK - The most extraordinary aspect
of the US mid-term elections and their immediate
aftermath from the viewpoint of anyone with an
interest in the North Korean nuclear standoff was
that the entire topic was overlooked, if not
forgotten.
North Korea might just as well
have never tested a nuclear device a month ago or
test-fired a bunch of missiles in early July, at least
to
judge from the remarks of President George W Bush
as he acknowledged the success of the Democratic
Party and got rid of his longtime defense
secretary, Donald Rumsfeld.
The reason for
the upheaval in the Pentagon was Iraq, not North
Korea, even though Rumsfeld has been a prime mover
behind a controversial US scheme for pulling back
US troops from positions between Seoul and the
Demilitarized Zone between the two Koreas and
consolidating US forces in an expanded base still
in dispute about 80 kilometers south of Seoul.
If North Korean leader Kim Jong-il went to
all the trouble of firing up a nuke and seven
missiles to get Washington's attention, he
appeared to have failed as far as American
politicians were concerned.
The only
public sign of US fears about North Korea's nukes
and missiles was a trip to Northeast Asia by two
State Department under secretaries, Nicholas Burns
and Robert Joseph, but their mission went unnoted
in the US media, beyond wire reports that few if
any papers used, much less by any of the posturing
politicos.
The Burns-Joseph mission was
vital, though, as an attempt to form a unified
front against North Korea, assuming that country
will soon make good on its promise to return to
six-party talks in Beijing.
Together, in a
kind of good-cop, bad-cop routine, in meetings in
Beijing and Seoul, the duo sought to drum up
reaffirmation of the need to enforce sanctions
against North Korea as adopted by the UN Security
Council after the nuclear test. At the same time,
they pressed for enthusiastic support of the
Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI), a pet
project of the Bush administration under which
scores of countries have agreed to cooperate on
stopping North Korea exporting or importing
weapons of mass destruction.
Joseph, as
under secretary for disarmament, played the
tough-guy role, hoping to put reluctant South
Korean leaders in the position of having to sign
on to PSI, which they have assiduously avoided for
fear of antagonizing the North. South Koreans and
Chinese totally abhor the notion of interdicting
North Korean vessels, a scenario envisaged in a
showdown, though South Korea would like to give an
impression of cooperating with the US in the name
of the wobbly US-Korean alliance.
If the
North Korean nuclear issue did not resonate loudly
enough for Bush to mention after the mid-term
elections, the transfer of power in the US
Congress from Republican to Democratic Party
control is sure to have an impact on US policy.
Bush needs to avoid any possible flare-up
on the Korean Peninsula while attempting to allay
demands to alter if not end the US role in Iraq,
and he will have to return to the topic, however
reluctantly, when he goes to Hanoi next week for
the meeting of leaders of the Asia-Pacific
Economic Cooperation (APEC) group.
His
most important session there is likely to be a
summit with Chinese President Hu Jintao on
November 18, but Democrats are not all happy about
US reliance on China to help resolve the nuclear
issue. New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, who
has visited North Korea several times, warned
against "outsourcing our diplomacy to China" while
calling for intensified diplomacy between the US
and North Korea.
While hawks in the
Pentagon and National Security Council may still
want to get tough with North Korea, Democrats
clearly see negotiations as the only way to
resolve the nuclear standoff. Richardson and
numerous other Democratic biggies, including two
former presidents, Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter,
angered the Bush administration by calling for
bilateral talks between Washington and Pyongyang
until North Korea finally agreed to go for the
first six-party talks in a year.
Somewhat
reluctantly, Richardson conceded that it now
"makes sense" for the US and North Korea to do
their talking "through the six-party process" -
the setting in which the chief US negotiator,
Christopher Hill, saw his North Korean
counterpart, Kim Gye-gwan, on the sidelines of
last year's six-party talks in Beijing.
Tom Lantos, the likely new chairman of the
International Relations Committee of the US House
of Representatives, who will be an extremely
influential figure in marshaling congressional
support or opposition on Korea, was still more
emphatic. Lantos demanded what he called a
"respectful approach" - a clear reference to
Bush's famous denunciation of North Korea as part
of an "axis of evil" that also included Iran and
Iraq and his characterization of Kim Jong-il as "a
pygmy".
Lantos picked up on the theme of
negotiations, saying simply, "We engage in a
direct dialogue with everybody." While the US has
muted its tone in the past two or three years, the
Bush administration has firmly rejected demands
for direct talks as part of an effort to isolate
the US, leaving Washington to go it alone against
Pyongyang.
If the US and North Korea are
to resume their dialogue in the midst of six-party
talks, the Chinese will still have to play the
pivotal role. Bereft of much bargaining power as a
result of the debacle at the polls on Tuesday, the
US relies more than ever on China as an honest
broker in making certain that North Korea not only
comes to the table as promised, but is ready to
deal.
North Korea, however, has already
balked, saying that Japan should be excluded from
the talks and hinting at the huge sums the US and
others should be ready to spend to make good on
the promise in the 1994 Geneva Framework Agreement
of twin light-water reactors to help fulfill
energy needs.
North Korea may signal its
strategy - and just when it's willing to make good
on its promise to talk - at the APEC meeting. US
National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley warned
that a North Korean show of nastiness at that
meeting "would be very ill-advised", considering
it was "pretty clear that they have alienated the
international community" by their nuclear and
missile tests.
The statement appeared as a
warning against Kim Jong-il in his quest for
attention, not to try to punctuate the proceedings
with more tests. The degree of alienation,
however, varied from country to country. If China
refused to go along with US demands for real
firmness, as seemed likely, US options were
extremely limited.
Whatever Hadley and the
Washington neo-cons might say, one option they did
not have was that of going to Congress and asking
for real support. The response would only be to
engage in talks, in or out of the six-party
setting.
The US election has deprived the
Bush administration of much of its bargaining
power on North Korea, just as it did on Iraq, as
all participants in the six-party process are
aware, even if no one in the US administration or
the newly formed Congress wants to talk about it,
certainly not in those terms.
Journalist Donald Kirk has been
covering Korea - and the confrontation of forces
in Northeast Asia - for more than 30
years.
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