Word: pyongyang
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...American journalists, and a barrage of hostile rhetoric, Kim Jong Il now has the U.S. right where he has wanted it all along - ready to sit across the bargaining table, one on one. The Obama administration said late last week it is willing to negotiate directly with Pyongyang, if only, in the words of State Department spokesman PJ Crowley, to get back to the six-party format invented during the George W. Bush administration...
...That's unlikely to happen. Pyongyang has said it has no interest in ever returning to the six-party negotiations in which the U.S. enlisted South Korea, Japan, China and Russia as its negotiating partners. Pyongyang has always wanted to deal directly with Washington, as it did in 1994 when it negotiated the so-called "Agreed Framework" with the Clinton administration - the first instance in which Pyongyang agreed to stop work on its nuclear program. Kim has always wanted to deal with the biggest dog on the block, both for reasons of international prestige (see the former pariah now sitting...
...does the U.S. talk to North Korea about, and in what order? Other than acceding to the direct talks - which the Administration had hinted upon taking office that it was amenable to - it has hit the same notes that the Bush administration did. Only after a verifiable disabling of Pyongyang's nuclear program - in return for economic and energy assistance, both part of the 1994 agreement - would it move on to discussions about "normalizing relations." Diplomatic sources in east Asia say the U.S., in concert with its allies, is now talking about exactly what to put on the table...
...highly enriched uranium as well. (Indeed, North Korean refugee groups in Seoul have recently been circulating reports - impossible to verify, of course - that the North plans a uranium bomb test this autumn.) The Administration will no doubt give negotiations the old college try, one on one, just like Pyongyang wants. But assuming the North is bribeable - and that's a huge assumption - its price for doing a deal now, as the east Asia diplomat acknowledges glumly, "will have gone...
...order to arrive at a deal. That's still likely to be the case - even if the diplomatic nuclear brief just got a bit more complicated - and Stephen Bosworth, Obama's special envoy to the North, was purposefully bland in reacting to the HEU announcement from Pyongyang. "Obviously, anything the North is doing in the area of nuclear development is of concern to us," he said after meetings in Beijing. Coincidentally - or not - the Deputy Foreign Minister of North Korea has just returned from his own meetings in Beijing. A leading North Korea watcher in Seoul, Cheong Seong Chang...