By Lee Byong-chul
``It's a very big day because it's the first time North Korea is actually going to start disabling its nuclear program,'' said U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill in Tokyo on November 3, referring to the U.S. team that arrived in Pyongyang two days previously.
It was worth starting with reason for optimism at least, because previously there had been harsh demand from U.S. Congress to quickly disclose what happened between North Korea and Syria with regard to their alleged nuclear weapons program-related cooperation.
Hill, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's point-man, should hand in his homework to the administration and other six-party member states by the end of the year regarding Pyongyang's disabling of its nuclear facilities, including nuclear fuel production and reprocessing plants at Yongbyon in order to boost trust ahead of the U.S. removal of North Korea from its list of terrorism-sponsoring states.
Pyongyang's obligations have already been spelled out in the second phase of the complete and irreversible roadmap for denuclearization on the Korean Peninsula, which has been dormant for over a decade since the Agreed Framework deal in 1994.
North Korea's proactive measures are, without a doubt, meant as a breakthrough for establishing U.S.-North Korea diplomatic relations.
Yet times have become tougher for North Korea and the United States. The U.S. Congress departed on November 16 for a two-week break, leaving in the shadows the Bush administration's possible elimination of North Korea from its list of state sponsors of terrorism by the end of the year.
That said, Pyongyang's ever proactive measures toward its disablement could be unexpectedly stalled by Washington's rank bipartisanship and mindless obstructionism.
The United States rightly estimates that the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) has not sponsored any terrorist acts since the bombing of a Korean Airlines flight in 1987. In the February 13, 2007 Initial Actions Agreement, the U.S. agreed to ``begin the process of removing the designation of the DPRK as a state-sponsor of terrorism.''
State sponsors of terrorism are, according to some material released by the U.S. Department of State, restricted by four main sets of U.S. sanctions _ a ban on arms-related exports and sales; control over exports of dual-use items; prohibition of economic assistance; and the imposition of miscellaneous financial and other restrictions, including loans by the World Bank and other international financial institutions.
Some observers expect North Korea to be put on a ``not fully cooperating list'' instead of completely being removed from the terrorism list, since the Democrat-dominated Congress has no reason to give President Bush a winning credit at the moment.
Furthermore, we cannot rule out the possibility that North Korea will demand a timetable for talks with the U.S., in light of the wrong lesson the Communist country offered in the past: extremes sometimes can make agreements stick.
Pyongyang has made progress in carrying out its requirements, but Washington needs again to read its obligations with care. Moreover, U.S. leverage over North Korea should be particularly limited.
Hill, who obviously feels some ownership of the Korean denuclearization policy, is in the position to check on the successful progress of implementing this before his lame-duck boss leaves the White House.
If his nuclear deal drags on, Washington will be faced with the difficult decision of whether to stop negotiations with Pyongyang. It is thus no exaggeration to say that the United States may confront North Korea in the event of President Bush's wrong choice to disclose the classified bombing in Syria in collaboration with Israel.
The Bush administration's move toward realism should be typical of its tendency to find ideology behind every tree. At the same time, it is a fair guess that it does not have a one-track mind in terms of foreign policies expounded by Rice, even though there is still the possibility of backtracking on North Korea.
And it is important to remember that Seoul now has far more weight in discussions on inter-Korean affairs than it used to.
Although no one is closer to knowing what the Bush administration is likely to do concerning the unconfirmed nuclear collaboration between Pyongyang and Damascus, many analysts here in Seoul still remain worried over whether an inadvertent decision will tarnish the image of U.S. foreign policy in the long run, while pushing the nuclear issue in an unpredictable direction.
Foreign policy accountability in the Bush administration might collapse because of the implosion of long-awaited nuclear deals.
``We have a lot to do before December 31," said Hill after arriving in Beijing to meet with his North Korean counterpart Vice Foreign Minister Kim Kye-gwan. Nevertheless, the likelihood that the North Korea-Syria deal may seal Hill's fate before December 31 has not gone away.
Whether North Korea is likely to be eliminated from the list cannot be determined by Congress's complicated bipartisan political interests alone. But it is my judgment that Congress would find it difficult to endorse the Bush administration's would-be diplomatic achievements because Japan has strongly opposed removing North Korea from the list.
Japan should feel uneasy about the Bush administration that has suddenly turned passive on raising the issue of kidnapped Japanese, unlike the Clinton administration that favored bringing up the abductions in Washington-Pyongyang talks.
North Korea's elimination from the list could be delayed up to next year if Congress is considered ``broken'' for a long time and in no hurry to repair itself. That is, North Korea-U.S. negotiations might hit a snag because of the bloated partisanship of American politics, although the result would be hard for the North to swallow.
Yet the South Korean government considers the ongoing negotiations optimistic on the whole. ``North Korea now seems to understand the American mechanism of politics and finance where the administration has to consider the role of Congress so as to get cooperation and support from it,'' said a Seoul government official who is not authorized to speak on the record.
Focusing much of its diplomatic energy on the opaque North Korea in order to make it widely exposed to the global norms in one way or another, the liberal Roh Moo-hyun government does not hide its intention that strengthened inter-Korean cooperation can help galvanize a thaw in U.S.-North Korean ties.
As Kim Kye-gwan once pointed out: ``Are we then going back to where we started?''
Lee Byong-chul is senior fellow at the Institute for Peace and Coopertion (IPC), a non-partisan policy advisory body based in Seoul. He can be reached at bcleebc@gmail.com.