Four days of intense talks in Beijing between North Korea, the US, China, Russia, Japan and South Korea on the future of the North Korean nuclear weapons program have failed. The Pyongyang regime wants immediate economic and food aid. Washington has demanded the dismantling of North Korean nuclear facilities. With the talk collapse came Pyongyang’s threat to conduct its first nuclear weapons test.
Though the Japanese and the Americans have considerably upped their offers of food aid and long-term oil supplies to replace power produced from nuclear stations, the North Koreans refuse to destroy their nascent nuclear arsenal. For Tokyo and Washington, this is alarming brinkmanship. It also disturbs the South Koreans. However, since all that divides them from their northern neighbors are their political systems and the heavily fortified border, they are perhaps in a better position to understand the thinking of Kim Jong Il.
From Pyongyang’s point of view, South Korea has effectively been a nuclear state since the end of the war, half a century ago, which divided the peninsula. The strong presence of the US military in the south, which included in its arsenal nuclear weapons, may have been seen as defensive by Seoul and Washington. It seemed very different to the North Koreans. Its foreign policy, along with that of China, its principal backer, was much informed by the revelations that Gen. MacArthur, American commander of the UN forces in Korea, was all for ending Chinese “volunteer” intervention in the conflict by dropping atomic bombs on China itself.
North Korea therefore has always felt under threat. The regime drove an already crackpot economic system into the ground to support a highly militarized police state. The nuclear plant at Yongbyon was designed to deter was a US nuclear attack from the south. It is no good Washington protesting that North Korean propaganda to the effect that it desires to take over Southeast Asia is waffle. To the Kim regime, America is a real threat. The day that Pyongyang relinquishes the nuclear weaponry that has cost it so dear, it believes it will be exposed to US attack, because it has never forgotten that George W. Bush early in his presidency included it in his “axis of evil”. It seems from the Beijing talks breakdown that it would rather let its population face another winter of starvation than abandon its nuclear program.
Great caution and statesmanship are now called for. China is the key. It is only with Chinese economic support that Pyongyang has staggered on. Not so long ago, the flow of oil through a key pipeline from China failed “for technical reasons”. Few doubt that it was actually a warning from Beijing that it holds a knife over a key North Korean artery. Thus far it has suited China to have Washington faced with a belligerent and unstable Pyongyang.
But an urgent and higher judgment is required here. North Koreans are starving and their unstable leaders have nuclear weaponry. Beijing must take the lead.
