A Korean Opportunity

The weekend breakthrough on talks with North Korea should be regarded as an opportunity rather than a U.S. victory. North Korea had insisted for 10 months on one-on-one talks with the United States. Now it has agreed to a U.S. plan for talks with China, Russia, Japan and South Korea also at the table.

There’s a catch. The North Korean announcement said the six-party talks would provide an opportunity for bilateral talks with the United States – something the Bush administration adamantly rejects.

Washington and Pyongyang are far apart, moreover, on what they hope the talks will accomplish. Washington wants North Korea to dismantle its nuclear weapons program as an opener to any further discussions. And it wants international inspection and monitoring as part of the deal. North Korea wants a U.S. nonaggression pledge plus energy, food and economic assistance.

Beyond that, North Korea, like Rodney Dangerfield, wants some respect. True enough, it violated a 1994 agreement with the Clinton administration not to develop nuclear weapons. But it believed that the United States violated the spirit of that pact by limiting its economic aid and giving a cold shoulder to Pyongyang’s hopes for movement toward normal economic and diplomatic relations.

Real progress toward peace on the Korean peninsula should involve not just nukes but conventional arms reduction as well. North Korea, in a little-noticed statement on June 9, explained its nuclear-weapons program as a means of reducing its overwhelming burden of maintaining its million-strong army that confronts South Korean and U.S. forces at the truce line of the still-unfinished Korean War of the 1950s.

Selig S. Harrison, an American journalist and scholar specializing in Korean affairs, says that since his first visit to Pyongyang 30 years ago North Korean leaders have consistently argued for mutual force reductions by both the South and the North. He recalls that then-President Kim Il Sung told him with intensity and animation – unlike his usual canned-propaganda-recording style, “We are serious about this… We are stifled by the burden of armaments.”

Mr. Harrison wrote last week in the (London) Financial Times that it was “unlikely that North Korea would dismantle its entire nuclear infrastructure under intrusive inspections unless there were a basic change in its overall security environment.” In a column for a South Korean newspaper, he urged that President Roh Moo Hyun respond to Pyongyang’s “hopeful signal” by offering to negotiate mutual reduction of conventional forces by both the North and South. That would mean reversing his own recent call for an expansion of the defense budget and displeasing the South’s generals and military contractors. But Mr. Harrison wrote that winding down conventional forces on both sides “would clearly serve the cause of South-North reconciliation and eventual reunification.”

A peaceful, demilitarized, nuclear-free Korean peninsula would be in the interests of the United States and all the other parties to the projected talks. That larger objective should be the goal, not just getting North Korea out of the nuclear weapons business.