(EDITORIAL from the Korea Times on Feb. 8)

Chance for Return
Time Has Never Been on North Korea's Side

If Pyongyang comes back to the multilateral nuclear talks anytime soon, the
decision will likely be made within this week.
Today, Kim Jong-il is expected to meet with a senior Chinese Communist Party
official to hear about Beijing's conditions ??? a.k.a. economic aid ??? for the
North's return to the six-party conference. Also waiting in Kim's reception room
will be a special envoy of U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, to possibly
exchange views on the easing of international sanctions or humanitarian aid.
And the two Koreas will hold a meeting today to discuss the resumption of South
Korean tour programs to the North's Mt. Geumgang and Gaeseong. As a goodwill
gesture to the United States, Pyongyang has just released Robert Park, a
Korean-American who illegally entered its territory on a self-imposed human
rights mission six weeks ago.
Hopeful and gloomy outlooks are mixed for now. Provided these separate but
related moves reflect the readiness of North Korea, and concessions from its
dialogue partners, chances are high the six-nation talks will restart before
long. If Washington and Pyongyang are still wide apart on the two major
preconditions of lifting sanctions and discussing a peace regime, however, the
denuclearization talks will keep drifting along for quite a while.
Optimists cite underlying factors such as North Korea's plummeting economy
especially in the wake of its botched currency revaluation as well as the need
for President Obama to ``show something'' before the nuclear summit in April and
NPT meeting in May. Pessimists are worried that the deepening schism between
Washington and Beijing over Taiwan and Tibet might adversely affect China's
eagerness as the host of the six-way conference to resolve the 20-year-old
nuclear crisis.
Considering Beijing will eventually prefer a nuclear-armed North Korea to a
collapsed neighbor in the north and South Korea cannot give the North what it
ultimately wants, the denuclearization drama boils down again to the two leading
players ??? Washington and Pyongyang. Both have been showing a disappointing
performance by being engaged in a lose-lose game in this regard.
President Obama has been handling North Korea with a ``two-track'' strategy of
sanctions and dialogue based on the principle of never rewarding bad behavior. It
may have been good for ``managing'' a global troublemaker without aggravating the
crisis, but not good at all for defusing one of the two non-proliferation time
bombs safely and quickly.
In dealing with Pyongyang, the liberal U.S. administration seems to want to play
a different game from its conservative predecessor but does not want to risk
alienating or provoking the latter too much, as have been the cases in most other
domestic and foreign issues facing it, and, as far as this matter is concerned,
the conservatives are not only at home but abroad, namely in South Korea and
Japan.
Probably, North Korea was quite low on Obama's foreign policy priority list,
below not just Iraq and Afghanistan but Iran. True, at stake in Iran and the
Middle East is most of the world's oil reserves, while North Korea is mainly of
geopolitical strategic concern. For the same reason, however, the North Korean
issue is far easier to solve, and the U.S. leader can earn good diplomatic marks
handily. Mostly, it's up to what Washington decides.
The most wretched players of all is North Korea. If Kim Jong-il's slogan for a
``strong and great country'' means a nuclear-armed state that has to watch its
people starve to death almost every year without foreign aid, the rewards for
some atomic bombs are too tragic for its people. A country must be able to feed
its people first before seeking pride, let alone dignity. If even that slogan is
not for any anachronistic, futile socialist goal, but for the maintenance of its
hereditary leadership, the North Korean regime will prove one of the least
excusable failures in history.
(END)

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