Earlier in the week, Pyongyang agreed with Washington to halt nuclear tests, uranium enrichment and long-range missile test launches. The communist state also promised to allow the International Atomic Energy Agency to monitor a moratorium on uranium enrichment for the potential manufacture of nuclear weapons.
Some analysts welcomed the accord as a major breakthrough in negotiations between the United States and North Korea. The South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade appeared somewhat upbeat when it said the accord could form the basis for a wider agreement on North Korea’s nuclear disarmament. It may also have believed it could facilitate inter-Korean talks and exchanges.
But all the parties concerned are well advised to avoid reading too much into the accord. Instead they will do well to regard it as a “modest first step in the right direction,” as U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called it.
What the United States and other parties concerned need to do is read the fine points of the accord, over which North Korea must have haggled so hard when its negotiators met with their U.S. counterparts in Beijing last week. If future talks do not go its way, it will certainly cite some of them in walking out of the talks, as it has done so frequently when backtracking on previous deals.
A potential trap may be found in the wording that Pyongyang agreed to “allow the IAEA to monitor the moratorium on uranium enrichment while productive dialogue continues.” It could decide to kick the IAEA inspectors out of the country at anytime, claiming that the talks have turned unproductive.
The IAEA, whose inspectors were expelled from North Korea on April 16, 2009, one month before the nation conducted its second nuclear test, cannot be sanguine about the prospects of resuming checks soon. The United States is also cautious. U.S. officials were quoted as saying that they expect to have tough negotiations over the sequence of steps to be taken before the IAEA starts inspections again.
Food aid was what Washington used as its leverage in pressuring the communist state to suspend nuclear tests, uranium enrichment and long-range missile launches and accept IAEA inspections. North Korea, a country with a chronic shortage of food, has a greater need for food now than before. It needs to secure as much food as possible ahead of Kim Il-sung’s 100th birthday on April 15 ― one of the greatest holidays in North Korea.
The United States agreed to provide North Korea with 240,000 tons of food in exchange for Pyongyang’s commitment to the Beijing deal. Additional food aid, which Washington says could be agreed to based on continued need, will certainly play a crucial role in future denuclearization talks.
Against this backdrop, few expect the six-way talks on North Korea’s nuclear weapons program will reopen in the near future. A senior U.S. official was quoted saying that though the deal “unlocked” the impasse over the six-party talks, follow-through would require persistence and patience.
No wonder Washington maintains what appears to be strategic ambiguity about the prospects of additional food aid, which it apparently believes could be used as a valuable bargaining chip.
South Korea cannot be blamed if it felt ambivalent about the U.S.-North Korean deal. As a nation committed to the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula, it believes on one hand that it is necessary to reopen the six-way talks as soon as possible. On the other, it feels offended by North Korea’s continued hostility. Moreover, North Korea has recently turned down the South Korean proposal to hold Red Cross talks on the reunion of separated families.
But it would be a tactical mistake if President Lee Myung-bak’s administration begged for talks while dropping its demand that Pyongyang admit to and apologize for the torpedoing of a South Korean naval vessel in 2010 and also apologize for the shelling of a South Korean island in the West Sea in the same year.
After all, isn’t it North Korea that will eventually have to ask for food aid and other types of South Korean assistance? There is no need to rush to aid North Korea when it is keeping an overbearing posture.
