AT North Korea’s request, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has removed its seals and cameras from the Yongbyon nuclear facility, where the Pyongyang regime has produced the plutonium for its nuclear weapons program. The North Koreans say they will resume plutonium production because Washington has failed to remove it from its list of countries deemed to sponsor terrorism.
The Bush administration has been slow to honor its part of the Chinese-brokered deal, because it claims it needs verification of North Korea’s abandonment of its nuclear ambitions. A wiser occupant of the White House might have hurried to provide the promised economic aid and taken the painless measure of de-listing North Korea from among Washington’s “terror states”. To have given Pyongyang no excuse to welch on the deal — as many political analysts widely expected it would seek to do — would have cost little. But wisdom has been in short supply in the Oval Office for the last eight years.
So now the partially dismantled Yongbyon facility is to be rebuilt and the standard Bush blustering has generated a further failure. Bush used part of his valedictory speech to UN Tuesday to call once more for tougher sanctions against both Iran and North Korea over the atomic weapons issue. But Washington’s power to intervene has been much diminished by its lack of political savvy. Moscow has withdrawn from talks on Iranian sanctions, saying bluntly that it does not believe that they are currently appropriate. Meanwhile, Beijing has made it quietly clear that it is not prepared to go for broke over its neighbor North Korea.
A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman said mildly that he hoped that the “salient points” at issue could be resolved by further talks. This demonstrated the depth of Chinese diplomatic patience, given that since 2003 they have been doggedly chairing the six-nation talks that also include South Korea, Russia and Japan along with the US, to persuade the North Koreans to cease their nuclear program.
Beijing, of course, is playing the long game. If it wanted to, it could bring Pyongyang to its economic knees by cutting off the supplies of food, oil and electricity on which its neighbor survives. Nor does it want a politically unstable nuclear power on its doorstep. A further consideration is that as and when the two halves of Korea finally reunite, it would be anxious to ensure that the new Korea would not be reborn with atomic weapons. The clear message from the Chinese is that the solution to Pyongyang’s nuclear threat will be a predominantly Chinese solution, taking into account, to a degree anyway, the interests of Japan and South Korea. The concerns of Moscow and Washington count for little. This is Beijing’s backyard and the Chinese will have been no more amused than Pyongyang by the recent US military maneuvers with the South Koreans, which were probably the real reason the paranoid North Koreans decided to resile from the disarmament-for-aid deal. They undoubtedly took the US involvement as a sign of bad faith.
