Word: diplomat
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...Bush Administration, but it took more than U.S. pressure alone to bring about. The past two years, despite continuous assistance from China, have been grim for the North economically, and not even Kim wants to see a rerun of the famines of the '90s. Says a senior East Asian diplomat: "The Chinese have been telling him over and over that he can afford to liberalize the economy a bit and still maintain control but that he had to dismantle the nuclear program to reap any benefits whatsoever." Step 1--shutting down Yongbyon--is complete, but diplomats involved in dealing with...
...exchange for severing their links to al-Qaeda. That's a manageable risk while U.S. forces are nearby; if they depart, it becomes tinder in a dry forest. The danger would be not just sectarian slaughter but outright anarchy as well. "Our immediate concern," says a senior Arab diplomat, "is that sending a signal of complete withdrawal could encourage some elements in every faction in every political group that they can now impose their own agenda. It would be not only Shi'ite versus Sunni ... but [war] inside each community itself. The worst case is a Somalia-ization of Iraq...
...that will require the kind of diplomatic effort that this Administration has been reluctant to pursue. The most obvious place to start is Iraq, where U.S. diplomacy will still be needed to bring about a sustainable accord between Sunnis and Shi'ites, should they ever tire of fighting. A State Department official says what is needed is a greater willingness to engage hard-line forces on both sides of the sectarian divide as well as the Iranians and Syrians, all of whom will have a say in Iraq's future. Resistance to this idea comes from the White House...
...accused the North of conducting a secret program to enrich uranium for bombs. The level of mistrust on both sides is deep and abiding. "It's never a straight line from point A to point B, no matter what [the agreement] the North has signed might say,'' acknowledges one diplomat involved in the six-party talks. "You obviously hope for the best, but you're always on your guard, and you just keep working it." Hill himself acknowledged the most obvious potential deal breaker is the alleged uranium-enrichment program. The U.S. claims Pyongyang admitted to such a program when...
...thanks to the sound of the Chris Hill's sweet voice," says Nicholas Eberstadt, a North Korea analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington. But if Kim does indeed shut down his reactor next month, that will, undeniably, represent progress. And as one foreign diplomat put it, considering that North Korea conducted its first nuclear-weapons test eight months ago, "a little progress beats the alternative, doesn...