Word: nuclear
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...everyone has been down this road so often before that few are willing to predict what happens after that. Suh Jae Jean, president of the influential Korea Institute for National Unification government think tank in Seoul, believes that this time the North will do a credible deal on its nuclear program. "But," he adds, "I know I'm about the only optimist left standing these days." In Washington and Seoul, not to mention Tokyo, Beijing and Moscow, somber realism, not giddy optimism, is the prevailing sentiment on North Korea diplomacy. When dealing with Pyongyang, that's about as good...
...None of last year's call for blood was there. And just in case anyone had missed the point, Pyongyang reiterated it on Jan. 11, saying the key to its return to the six-party nuclear talks - which it had declared "dead" last April - was better relations with the U.S., starting with a peace treaty that would formally end the Korean War, which concluded with a truce that has been in place since 1953. The price of such rapprochement, it demanded, was a lifting of international sanctions on North Korea...
...with the world's most opaque regime becomes trickier than usual. When, this past Spring, the North test-fired a long-range missile - in violation of U.N. resolutions and on the very same day President Barack Obama was giving a utopian speech in Prague about his vision for a nuclear-free world - even the President's engagement-oriented advisers on East Asia were furious. They happily went to the U.N. to press for even tighter sanctions against Pyongyang, got them, and then sat back and waited to see if the North's tone would change. (See rare pictures from inside...
...President to Kim Jong Il. In it, Obama offered the North a new era of relations with the U.S. if it first agreed to return to the six-party talks and agree (for the third time since 2005, and the fourth time since 1994) to dismantle its nuclear-weapons program...
...only on the same page, but on the same paragraph" when it comes to dealing with the North, as one adviser to President Lee Myung Bak put it recently. One senior diplomat adds that his "gut instinct" is that the North will in fact return relatively soon to the nuclear bargaining table. But even if that happens, Seoul concurs with Bosworth's assessment, on returning from Pyongyang last month, that the sequencing of reciprocal steps by the two sides is likely to prove nettlesome when talks resume...