Big deal with North Korea
IT HAS BEEN a long time coming, but President Bush has finally begun to cut the deals with North Korea that were always required to eliminate the world's most dangerous weapons from the Korean peninsula.
In a six-nation agreement released Wednesday in Beijing, North Korea pledged to disable its nuclear facilities by the end of the year and to begin providing a detailed account of its nuclear programs. The North also "reaffirmed its commitment not to transfer nuclear materials, technology, or know-how." The key recompense for these actions will be improvement in relations between the United States and North Korea, "moving towards a full diplomatic relationship."
All along, the North said its ultimate objective was to end enmity from the United States. Now that the United States - in partnership with South Korea, Japan, China, and Russia - has agreed to end hostile relations with the North, that regime is agreeing to do things along the path to denuclearization that administration hard-liners predicted it would never do.
A key deal-making incentive for the North, affirmed in this week's joint statement, is an American commitment to remove North Korea from the US list of state sponsors of terrorism.
Japan had wanted to make that American gesture dependant on resolution of Japan's dispute with North Korea over Japanese nationals who were abducted by agents of the North in the 1970s and '80s.
Sidestepping the question of whether the serious humanitarian issue of the abducted Japanese should be tied to the American delisting of North Korea as a sponsor of terrorism, negotiators reached a "side understanding" that the North would be taken off the list at about the same time that Pyongyang disables its nuclear facilities. Happily, the new Japanese prime minister, Yasuo Fukuda, has indicated he is more inclined than his nationalistic predecessor, Shinzo Abe, to exercise greater flexibility on the abductee issue.
This week's state visit to the North by South Korea's President Roh Moo-hyun produced a mutual pledge to seek a peace treaty formally ending the 1950-53 Korean War. It also offered an opportunity to prepare the next stages in the North's denuclearization. Roh had a chance to learn what North Korean leader Kim Jong Il most wants in the coming stages of negotiation. This knowledge can help negotiators craft both incentives and disincentives that can be used to produce a complete accounting of the North's nuclear program and eventual dismantling of all of it.
His reception of Roh was Kim Jong Il's way of acknowledging that Bush has changed course and is ready to end enmity with the North. This change clears the way for North-South reconciliation. In the long run, this is the best way to begin the desperately needed domestic transformation of North Korea.
