The announcement was but the latest in a string of recent North Korean moves to improve its standing ahead of critical six-party talks on the peninsula’s ongoing nuclear crisis. Already this year, Pyongyang has opened its nuclear facilities in Yongbyon to an unofficial U.S. delegation, signaling both a nuclear capability and a willingness to deal it away. It also has proposed a nuclear “freeze” and–to applause in Beijing and Seoul–telegraphed a willingness to engage in another round of intensive diplomacy. Says Paik Hak Soon, of the Sejong Institute in Seoul, “North Korea looks proactive and flexible, while the U.S. looks passive and reactive.”
Until recently, U.S. officials were confident that the North would be the odd man out in any negotiations. By restarting a covert A-bomb program in 2002 and subsequently subjecting the region to nuclear blackmail, went the logic, Pyongyang was handing Washington a ready-made coalition against itself. But the administration’s position may be weaker than it looks. U.S. intelligence on the North’s nuclear program is starting to show what one senior U.S. official calls “uncomfortable parallels” with Iraq. (“What do we actually know about the North’s program? Virtually nothing,” admits the official.) After picking up a whiff of plutonium reprocessing last summer, U.S. sensors have detected nothing since.
Even worse, deft North Korean diplomacy may be driving a wedge between America and its allies. “Some think, ‘We will get these four other countries in the room and they will all gang up on North Korea’,” says Joel Wit, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. “They are not just going to line up behind the United States.”
While Pyongyang continues to signal its interest in dealing with Washington, its recent overtures to the other parties may suggest a plan B. The more reasonable North Korea can appear in the eyes of its neighbors, the less important talks with the United States become. “The North Koreans want to deal with the United States because it can block the kind of economic assistance they need,” says Charles L. Pritchard, a former State Department envoy who was part of the U.S. delegation that returned from North Korea last week. “But they can make that a moot point by normalizing the situation with the others.”
Indeed, south of the DMZ, most observers believe the unreasonable power is the United States, not North Korea. In what must look from Washington’s vantage like an untimely coincidence, South Korean Foreign Minister Yoon Young Gwan resigned last week over charges that his ministry was too pro-American. Though primarily the result of a struggle between his ministry and the Blue House, Yoon’s sudden fall could move Seoul toward what President Roh Moo Hyun’s aides call “independent diplomacy”–a euphemism for opposition to the U.S. line on North Korea–as the next round of talks gets underway, probably next month.
In Japan, the North’s potential payoff for quick resolution of the abductees issue would be repaired relations. That process is expected to end with Tokyo’s offering billions in reparations for its decades of harsh colonial rule on the peninsula–funds that would be vital in helping the North avert the economic collapse hard-liners in Washington still forecast. And this is what some experts fear most: the North’s overtures may be preparing the groundwork for Chinese, South Korean and Japanese acceptance of the status quo. If Pyongyang ends the diplomatic dialogue out of frustration but promises a unilateral freeze of its weapons program, the other parties may now be willing to accept the North’s having a handful of bombs, especially given Washington’s tough stance. “The hard-liners believe we’ve got the North Koreans in this precarious position,” says Pritchard. “But we may just end up with a new de facto nuclear power for which there are no negotiations to walk it back.” Then the North Koreans won’t be the only ones to know what it’s like to be the odd man out.
