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The week before last, a group of American diplomats and North Korea specialists met at a track-two dialogue in Singapore. The American delegation was led by former special State Department representative for North Korea Stephen Bosworth and included Leon Sigal, author of the classic study of the first nuclear crisis, Disarming Strangers, non-proliferation expert Joseph DeTrani, and Tony Namkung. The meetings were of particular interest because the North Korean delegation was headed by Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs and senior six-party talks representative Ri Yong-ho, foreign ministry deputy bureau chief Choe Son-hui, and UN deputy ambassador Jang Il-hun. The meeting follows a track-two gathering in London in September 2013, another in Mongolia in May of last year, as well as a wider Mongolian effort; Brookings has a useful take on the Ulaanbaatar initiative here.
I am a strong supporter of these efforts and I have participated in several. But US policy is stuck for both good and bad reasons. Among the good reasons are the Sony hack, on which evidence is accumulating—ironically because of leaked Snowden documents--that the NSA does in fact have smoking guns; more on that in a subsequent post.
In this article for the Nikkei Asian review, I walk through why initiative on the peninsula at this point in time needs to come from South Korea. But it is worth noting that the North Korean proposal reiterated at the Singapore meeting—a nuclear moratorium for a cessation of joint exercises—is doubly poisonous. First, it is a classic North Korean offer of nothing for something, and was rightly rejected by the U.S. Tony Namkung made the remarkable claim last week at Foreign Policy that “North Koreans have been remarkably forthcoming about their willingness to dismantle their nuclear program lock, stock and barrel,” but that issue boils down to both parties wanting "the other side to move first.” To say Namkung’s view is a minority one is an understatement.
But the linkage between exercises and diplomatic progress was also quietly extended to North-South relations by North Korean Ambassador to the UN in Geneva So Se Pyong. Let’s hope that was a trial balloon that pops. If the North decides to hold North-South relations hostage to the exercises, then President Park’s new initiatives will languish too. On Friday, North Korea rejected President Park’s appeal on North-South family reunions, arguing that the May 24 sanctions should be lifted first. Although I have made a principled argument about why those sanctions should be lifted, it is increasingly clear that North Korean initiatives have virtually no substantive content whatsoever and are excuses to do nothing. Is Pyongyang even more tied up than we are?
