A negotiator's lot

The North Korea debate

Nov 10th 2005
From The Economist print edition

Can be a frustrating one—even in Washington, DC

AS HE arrived in Beijing this week for a new round of six-party talks, Christopher Hill, the Bush administration's chief negotiator on North Korea, said he wanted to see “quick progress” towards scrapping its bombs. The North had agreed in principle to dismantle them in talks two months ago. Now America, South Korea and Japan are jointly to propose a timetable for declaring, freezing and speedily dismantling its nuclear programmes, and a list of the goodies it could expect at each stage.

Dealing with North Korea is never easy. It helps that Mr Hill has had plenty of tyrant practice, in the Balkans. But politicking over his mission within the administration is also getting in his way.

Mr Hill had originally been given some negotiating leeway by Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state. In September, the previous round of talks almost collapsed over North Korea's demand for some new light-water reactors, which are a bit safer from a proliferation point of view, to make up for the regime giving up its older, more bomb-suited ones. Mr Hill won approval—helped by Chinese threats to blame America publicly for the talks' collapse—for four deal-making words to fudge the difference: provision of reactors could be discussed, the administration agreed, but only “at an appropriate time”.

Mr Hill has also had more freedom to meet bilaterally with his North Korean counterpart behind the six-party umbrella (Russia is its sixth spoke). He had hoped to accept a North Korean invitation to visit the country between negotiating sessions. But he was told by his bosses that he could not go without some concession from the regime—such as shutting down its plutonium-rich reactor.

North Korea is not prepared to do that. There are still faint hopes that China's president, Hu Jintao, might have extracted a behind-the-scenes promise last month from the North's Kim Jong Il to show a bit of flexibility at this week's talks. In public, however, North Korea insists that it wants to discuss building the new reactors now, with only a nuclear freeze in prospect, and disarmament to come later.

Everyone on the Bush team thinks that is a non-starter, since it replicates the failed 1994 deal with the Clinton administration that produced the latest stand-off. But the administration (and for that matter the State Department) is split on the overall strategy. One group wants to give Mr Hill some room—and at least to see if hard-nosed negotiation can produce a more lasting agreement. On the other side, Dick Cheney and the hawks think that North Korea will welsh on any deal it signs.

The hawks hope that the current squeeze on North Korea—disrupting its lucrative trade in narcotics, counterfeit dollars and missile technology—will bring a bad regime to a sticky end. But that seems unlikely to happen soon. South Korea, impatient at the slow pace of the talks, is offering ever more generous assistance to the North. And that, Mr Hill knows, can only weaken the regime's incentive to negotiate seriously. Meanwhile, North Korea carries on making plutonium: enough, so far, for between three and nine bombs, says the Institute for Science and International Security, a think-tank.

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