Diplomatic analysis is often a complex ― and uncertain ― game of guessing and decoding seemingly trivial words and gestures. And nowhere is this truer than in the stop-and-go process of denuclearizing North Korea, one of the most enigmatic regimes in the world.
The latest example is Pyongyang's announcement Tuesday that it had completed reprocessing 8,000 spent nuclear fuel rods for use in a bomb. It may not take experienced North Korea hands to guess what they were trying to say: ``The longer the United States drags its feet in holding bilateral talks, the larger our nuclear arsenals will be, so Washington had better hurry up.''
Most North Korean experts also note this is another way of Pyongyang upping the ante after it had finished preparations for a new round of dialogue. North Korea is very anxious to hold the talks and it's expected that Ambassador Stephen Bosworth will visit the North Korean capital probably late this month, sometime between President Obama's Asian swing and Thanksgiving.
In a ``reconnoitering contact'' last week between working-group officials ― Ri Gun, North Korean Foreign Ministry's director-general for the U.S., and Sung Kim, the State Department's special envoy to the six-party talks ― Pyongyang seemed to fail in getting what it wanted if Ri's glum face upon leaving the talks was any indicator.
According to the Washington D.C.-based Foreign Policy magazine, North Korea refused to return to the so-called Sept. 19, 2005 declaration, in which it committed, among other things, to ``abandoning all nuclear weapons and existing nuclear programs.'' It instead called for resuming talks based on the idea of ``denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula,'' the magazine said.
This means Pyongyang wants to secure as much as it can for its ultimate goals of diplomatic normalization and economic aid from Washington in the bilateral talks, and use the six-way forum as a stage to endorse it, an idea which the U.S. does not like very much in part because of the North's unreliable track record and because of difficulties in minimizing its financial burden once any agreements are made.
In dealing with two major nuclear rogue states, America's immediate focus of concern seems to be on Iran, in which the substantive U.S. economic interest of crude oil is at stake, while its interest in North Korea is of largely abstract and moral nature, namely global nonproliferation. In addition, Pyongyang has never been a pliable counterpart and Washington's two regional allies ― Seoul and Tokyo ― appear rather less than willing to seek a breakthrough anytime soon.
However, who should be most active in solving the nuclear crisis besides North Korea, for which nuclear weapons have become the only means of ensuring survival? The answer can be found by answering another question: Who stands to gain and lose the most from all this? South Korea.
This notwithstanding, President Lee Myung-bak reiterated Wednesday that inter-Korean cooperation can't help having limitations if the nuclear issue isn't solved, stressing his ``grand bargain'' proposal has won support of six-party talk participants.
A pressing question is: Has Lee ever set his own extent of such limitation and is he willing to even go that far or are these just excuses? It is this passivity that takes the vital security issue on the Korean Peninsula increasingly out of Korean people's hands.