High stakes, low hopes
The second round of six-party talks on the North Korean nuclear crisis has come and gone. Although no declaration or statement was released and there was no narrowing of the gap between North Korea and the United States, no one walked out, so the participants have deemed the talks a success. Having agreed to proceed with working-level meetings and to hold a third round no later than July even allows the governments to say they are making progress.
In reality, the bar has been set so low that only a government bent on self-destruction would have allowed the talks to collapse. All the participants want the negotiations to continue. No one wants a war on the Korean peninsula. The US cannot afford another foreign relations crisis in the run-up to the November elections. And North Korea no doubt feels time is on its side: a delay allows Pyongyang to continue efforts to develop nuclear weapons. If it does not have a bomb yet - and the head of the US Defence Intelligence Agency testified to Congress last week that the North has had a weapon for a decade or so - then continuing negotiations gives it time to build one.
It does not seem to matter that giving Pyongyang time clashes with the professed goal of the talks: a nuclear-free Korean peninsula. China, Japan, Russia, South Korea and the US have all made statements in support of that objective and last week they reportedly accepted the US demand for 'complete, verifiable and irreversible dismantlement' of North Korea's nuclear programme.
The problem at the heart of the North Korean nuclear crisis is the existence of a clandestine uranium enrichment programme. The US knows it exists, and until North Korea admits it, there can be no 'complete' dismantlement. America will not agree to any proposal that does not include this effort because that would merely repeat the mistakes of the Agreed Framework (which, given the Bush administration's criticism of that deal, would be the equivalent of political suicide).
Rather than concede failure, the delegates agreed that a willingness to keep talking is good enough - even if that permits North Korea to continue progress towards a nuclear capability. Plainly, there is no rush to a solution. Alexander Losyukov, Russia's representative to the talks, said that he does not expect a deal before the US election. The official North Korean line is even more pessimistic, with sources complaining it is 'difficult to expect any further talks would help find a solution to the issue'.
Increasing numbers of North Korean watchers now believe that the North is intent on acquiring a weapon. The reasons vary. Some note that no government has ever developed a nuclear weapons programme as a mere bargaining chip. Others argue that Pyongyang feels genuinely threatened by the US and has endeavoured for decades to procure the best defence it can. The country's worsening economic situation only ups the ante.
Those intentions clash with the declared goal of a nuclear-free peninsula. My guess is that other governments will turn a blind eye to a North Korean nuclear capability as long as Pyongyang does not do anything overt - like a test. When asked, analysts from those countries acknowledge as much. The more honest of them admit that the region has lived with ambiguity since the early 1990s; this is nothing new.
To be honest, the US could live with a 'grey' North Korea: a country with an undeclared, but suspected, nuclear weapon or two. The ability to build 10 or so annually is another matter. The North could then sell weapons without diminishing its own stockpile. Sceptics note that despite the regime's willingness to sell just about anything on the black market, it has not yet proliferated weapons of mass destruction - knowing that would cross a dangerous red line. But there is no reason to create more weapons - or even the capacity - if the idea is not lurking in the back of some entrepreneur's mind. It makes more sense to cut a deal and give up the programmes, safe in the knowledge that, for all the rhetoric, 100 per cent 'verifiable' dismantlement is an impossibility.
Despite my gloomy outlook, I cannot endorse the military option, either. One million lives and US$1 trillion: that is the working estimate of the cost of a conflict on the peninsula. Follow the logic in every possibility and you quickly discover there are no good choices when it comes to North Korea. No wonder that participants preferred to consider last week's talks a 'success' - no matter how flawed that assessment may be in reality.
Brad Glosserman is director of research at Pacific Forum CSIS, a Honolulu-based think-tank