HOBBLED DIPLOMATS

Why did the latest round of talks about North Korea’s nuclear weapons program end in a deadlock? The explanation by the chief U.S. negotiator was at best only a partial answer.

Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill told reporters recently when the talks were suspended without agreement that the North Korean team “did not have the instructions that they needed to go forward and to agree to the proposals.” They refused to discuss other issues until the United States lifted financial sanctions imposed last September.

If the North Korean negotiators had their hands tied, so did the U.S. team. The Americans were clearly bound by Bush administration orders against giving ground on the sanctions.

Some background can help in understanding the impasse. The United States imposed the curbs four days before a diplomatic breakthrough on Sept. 19, 2005, in which North Korea agreed to abandon its nuclear weapons program in exchange for economic aid and security guarantees.

The U.S. Treasury Department’s action froze North Korean accounts at Banco Delta Asia, a bank in Macau that Washington said was involved in dollar counterfeiting and money laundering by Pyongyang. Critics maintain that the action in effect asked all banks in the world not to handle any transactions involving North Korea and amounted to an effort to cripple the nation’s economy.

The Boston Globe reported that South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun appeared to sympathize with the North Koreans’ position. He asked why the U.S. Treasury would have moved just days before the Beijing negotiations had struck a deal that could lead to normalized relations. The Globe quoted Mr. Roh as saying in a speech: “If one wants to look at it in a bad light, one may say it was all coordinated between the two [the U.S. State and Treasury Departments].”

Selig S. Harrison, director of the Asia Program at the Center for International Policy in Washington, on a recent visit to North Korea, quoted foreign businessmen and foreign embassies as saying that legitimate imports of industrial equipment for light industries making consumer goods have been blocked.

Treasury Undersecretary Stuart Levy is on record as warning financial institutions around the world to “think carefully about the risks of doing any North Korea-related business.”

The U.S. negotiators can’t say so, but their problem is that influential high officials in the Bush administration see no benefit in further talks and prefer to isolate and squeeze North Korea in hopes that its economy and government will collapse.