Are six-party nuclear talks a trap?

BEIJING ― In Lewis Carroll's book, “Alice's Adventures in Wonderland,” Alice follows a white rabbit down a rabbit hole into a fantasy world. That’s the start of the adventure. But later, when the rabbit encounters Alice again, a problem occurs and Alice becomes trapped in the rabbit’s house.

Patrick Cronin

By Sunny Lee

BEIJING _ In Lewis Carroll's book, “Alice's Adventures in Wonderland,” Alice follows a white rabbit down a rabbit hole into a fantasy world. That’s the start of the adventure. But later, when the rabbit encounters Alice again, a problem occurs and Alice becomes trapped in the rabbit’s house.

The six-party talks, engineered in 2003 to persuade North Korea to give up nuclear weapons, has become both an adventure and a trap, depending on how one interprets the process so far, shaped by numerous ups and downs.

Nicholas Eberstadt of the conservative think tank, American Enterprise Institute recently penned an article on North Korea, giving it a telling title, "North Korea's Six-Party Trap."

Park Sung-soo of Myongji University is also a member of the trap camp. In his recent column, he challenged China, which plotted the six-party talks, asking “What Cause Will Six-Party Talks Serve?” China’s insistence that the talks will ease tension on the Korean Peninsula is “too weak” a logic to persuade the people who have a deep distrust of Pyongyang, he argued.

Then, there came Joel Wit, the former head of the U.S. State Department's section charged with implementing the 1994 Agreed Framework. Wit rebuts Eberstadt for his not yet mastering the art of communicating with the intractable North Koreans, and offers his advice in a piece, “How to Talk to a North Korean.”

All this debate happened amid former U.S. President Jimmy Carter’s failed mission to North Korea. The very fact that Carter couldn’t even touch on the nuclear issue while he was in Pyongyang because Kim Jong-il refused to see him, ironically speaks volumes about the cardinal importance of the nuclear issue, which is impregnated with multiple complexities.

China is working hard to resume the six-party talks. But Seoul is reluctant because it is also increasingly seeing the talks as a trap, rather than an adventure. At a fundamental level, Seoul policymakers don’t see the six-party talks as a viable platform that can persuade the North to renounce its nukes amid widespread pessimism that Pyongyang is not likely to give up its nukes, whatsoever.

Frankly, this pessimism is widespread not just in Seoul, but also in Washington, and even increasingly in China. “Resuming the six-party talks will be the start of another disaster,” said Shen Dingli, a security expert at Fudan University in Shanghai. “North Korea will disappoint everyone. The end game is clear: North Korea will not give up its nukes.”

Yet Shen sees the six-party talks as a diplomatic game we cannot give up, because the result of quitting the game would be worse. “With the talks you will have a dream that denuclearization is possible. When you dream, you don’t fight. The benefit of the talks is not to have a war during the talks,” said Shen.

“If I were Kim Jong-il, I would be crazy if I gave up my nuclear weapons,” said Patrick Cronin, senior director of the Asia-Pacific security program at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), a Washington-based think tank, founded by Kurt Campbell, the Obama administration's current chief diplomat for Asia.

“I think we should start with that as a reality,” Cronin said.

Importantly, Cronin doesn’t share the prevailing pessimism that Shen and many other pundits share on North Korea’s nuclear conundrum.
He believes the right mix of approaches is to force North Korea to change its cost-benefit analysis in nuclear negotiations, gradually goading it to ditch its nukes.

He sees the approach as “the only peaceful way-out” of the North’s nuclear wonderland story. He underscores the key here is “a gradual step-by-step, action-for-action, serious commitment” to reduce the threat.

But the problem with that gradual approach in the past, through the six-party talks’ engagement approach, was that it was so easy to undermine and so hard to sustain.

Cronin yet remains firm, pointing out that there is currently no other better alternative.

Taking out Kim Jong-il is not a solution

Cronin, the former strategy director at National Defense University excludes any military approach to North Korea. After the U.S. took out Osama bin Laden earlier this week, there is a great deal of enthusiasm among some North Korea pundits supporting a similar approach to North Korea by getting rid of its leader Kim Jong-il.

Cronin doesn’t see it as a viable strategy as the nuclear North Korea without a leader could produce potentially much worse security gaps on the Korean Peninsula.

Cronin said that the only sustainable approach to the North Korean nuclear issue is to combine pressure with the right incentives and apply it to North Korea in a gradual, consistent manner over the long term. The idea is that the gradual approach will reduce tension in the region that will allow North Korea’s economic improvement, which in turn opens a door for political reform that will also ease up North Korea’s paranoia regarding nukes as the most tangible deterrent against outside threats.

“I don’t think that’s a dream.”

Here, Cronin once again underscores that the approach should be a long-term commitment. “Don’t look for an overnight miracle.”
Whether the six-party talks are the start of an adventure or a trap, has yet to be seen because the North’s story has not ended. But Cronin calls for patience, reminding readers that it’s meant to be a long tale.

sunny.lee@koreatimes.co.kr