NORTH KOREA SAYS YES, BUT

North Korea’s offer to return to the negotiating table later this month could conceivably open the way for diplomatic progress toward a solution to the crisis over its nuclear weapons program. But it’s only a limited first step in reaching a compromise between adamant positions on both sides. The Bush administration has been demanding that North Korea dismantle its entire nuclear weapons program before any discussion of improved relations. North Korea has been demanding complete peaceful coexistence before it will consider dismantlement.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has been largely responsible for last week’s limited breakthrough. She has repeatedly expressed respect for North Korea’s sovereignty. And, while not retracting her description of North Korea as an “outpost of tyranny” and President Bush’s description of its leader, Kim Jong Il, as a “dictator,” she has begun calling him “Mr. Kim.” That apparently broke the ice.

But the bargaining situation has changed since the last round, more than a year ago, of the six-nation talks involving the United States, North and South Korea, China, Russia and Japan. North Korea said then that it would discuss complete nuclear disarmament as the final stage of a step-by-step process with mutual concessions at each step. When the United States rejected that proposal, North Korea toughened its stance to demand postponement of dismantlement talks until the United States extends diplomatic recognition, ends sanctions and the continuing state of war with North Korea and grants normal economic and diplomatic relations.

Hard-liners in the Bush administration strongly resist any such negotiating pattern. The New York Times has reported that they plan to accelerate a series of coercive actions – a crackdown on North Korean shipments of drugs, counterfeit currency and drugs – if the talks make no progress. They continue to look forward to a complete North Korean economic collapse. The Times quoted a senior administration official in Washington as saying, “We’ve made it clear they can’t just come back and lecture us, like the last sessions. Either they get on the path to disarmament, or we move to Plan B.”

One interim step is possible, says Selig S. Harrison, an American scholar who recently returned from his ninth visit to North Korea over the past 30 years and now is following the situation closely from his summer home at Islesford. He notes that North Korea offered at the last session of the talks to freeze its program of plutonium processing, one route toward the production of nuclear weapons, but the United States said it was not interested.

Another sticking point is the U.S. accusation, never yet backed by the publication of evidence, that North Korea has secretly started the production of weapons-grade plutonium, another route toward nuclear weapons. China and South Korea have both expressed skepticism about that charge.

If the new round of talks is to get anywhere, the Bush administration should rein in its hard-liners, suspend any further inflammatory language, drop its hopes of bringing about a North Korean economic collapse or “regime change,” and work toward normalized relations in which both Koreas can concentrate on their expressed objective of a nuclear-free Korean peninsula.