Table of Contents
The Six-Party Talks achieved an important milestone in February 2007—an agreement which required North Korea to freeze its Yongbyon reactor in exchange for some initial energy assistance and discussions on more normalised relations with the United States. North Korea was also required to come clean on all of its nuclear facilities and research by providing a complete and unabridged list.[1] But this important step was to come later rather than right at the outset. This bargain represents an important shift in the US position. Washington had earlier insisted that North Korea really had to relinquish its entire nuclear program before any concessions were granted.
Experience might suggest that North Korea got what it wanted—particularly more time when the Bush Administration was in its lame duck season—and that it has no real intention of undertaking complete nuclear disarmament. If the pessimists (or perhaps the realists) are correct, the Bush Administration took a big risk. The maximum that might be expected from North Korea could consist of the freeze, disablement and possibly removal of North Korea’s facilities for producing additional weapons, but not necessarily the surrender of all elements of the existing arsenal. This suggests a de facto admission that the best that can be hoped for is the management of a reduced problem.
This risks slipping into the perspective that one simply has to learn to live with a minimally nuclear North Korea. Of the six parties, it is possible that China, Russia and South Korea are relatively comfortable with that prospect (and some in Washington may even be willing to do so as well). Perhaps disarmament is simply not a pragmatic option—as long as North Korea acts within reasonable bounds and is not an embarrassment for its neighbours, is some sort of nuclear capability tolerable? But this would still be quite a sacrifice for China. It means giving up on being the only North Asian state with nuclear weapons. Moreover, even a very small yet frozen North Korea nuclear arsenal would prove an all too easy basis on which Japan could justify its missile defence programs, and indeed perhaps take even more adventurous steps. These are not outcomes which China would want to see encouraged.
The Six-Party Talks process will continue to be challenging. Early steps were stalled by painstaking negotiations to release North Korean funds deposited into a Macau-based financial house. Lingering concerns about North Korea’s interest in uranium enrichment (as well as its traditional route of plutonium extraction) will haunt future developments. Any list that North Korea produces is unlikely to gain universal confidence. The process has been very demanding on the patience of its main participants. This includes China, which is not only the host of the talks but is also commonly viewed as the country with the greatest leverage over North Korea—a supposed advantage which also encourages unrealistic expectations about what Beijing may be able to get Pyongyang to do. It also includes the United States whose former envoy, Christopher Hill, showed the patience of Job.
North Korea may be willing to have the vast majority of its production capacities removed for the right price. But giving up all semblance of nuclear weapons status is a different prospect. It remains unlikely that the Six-Party Talks will result in the complete removal of all traces of North Korea’s nuclear weapons, but it is not clear that this is the benchmark against which the success of the Talks should be judged. When assessed against more modest objectives for the North Korean situation and wider objectives North Asia, the Six-Party Talks process offers some distinct advantages.
First, the Talks have provided a mechanism short of the use of force for dealing with North Korea. The response to North Korea’s nuclear test in late 2006 was not a military attack. It was sustained pressure (including the coercive power of an attack option left on the table and intensive encouragement from China) which led to a resumption of the Six-Party Talks in early 2007 and the February agreement mentioned at the start of this chapter. Like all multilateral processes involving exhaustive discussions which for years can go nowhere, the Six-Party Talks process has had plenty of critics. But few, if any, of its detractors have come up with a better approach to addressing North Korea’s nuclear weapons program. The Six-Party Talks is one of those processes (like the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) in the early 1990s) that would need to be invented if it was not already available. In other words, it is better to judge the efficacy of the Six-Party Talks against the uncertain and incomplete outcomes which non-existent or non-effective alternatives might provide rather than against some absolutist but fantastical goal of complete North Korean nuclear disarmament. In dealing with North Korea, as the author has argued elsewhere, the least ugly option is king.[2]
Second, through the Six-Party Talks process North Korea has been held in a loose but multilateral embrace of five significant regional powers. Differences certainly remain between them in their positions. Japan is the unhappiest. Its refusal to provide financial assistance to North Korea until Pyongyang addresses the outstanding abductee issue is rather like asking for a 30-minute start in the Olympic marathon: it simply will not happen. But Japan genuinely feels that a nuclear North Korea—its near neighbour under whose missile shadow it falls—is getting too good a deal.[3] This has opened up some tensions between Japan and the United States, which views North Korea as a proliferation risk on the other side of the Pacific Ocean. And China continues to see North Korea as a domestic instability risk across the border. There is no doubt that different motivations are in play here.
Yet, through the Six-Party Talks process, these three largest powers in East Asian security affairs—the United States, China and Japan—have been required to explore and negotiate the differences in their policies towards an urgent regional security issue. Their policy convergence is certainly incomplete. They do not always agree and the Six-Party Talks process may end up with a result that none of them are entirely satisfied with. But they have found enough common interests to remain part of the process despite the difficulty of dealing with North Korea. If the Six-Party Talks can be a modest way of encouraging great power cooperation in Asia, it will have been worth the effort. This means that even if the final impact of the Talks process on the North Korean nuclear weapons program is less than decisive, it may have done something even more important for Asia. What is special about the Six-Party Talks is not that it is focused on the North Korean nuclear situation per se. The Talks process is special because all of the major powers in East Asia are sitting around the table working on an important security issue.[4]
[1] See Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China, ‘Initial Actions for the Implementation of the Joint Statement’, 13 February 2007, available at <http://www.fmprc.gov.cn/eng/zxxx/t297463.htm>, accessed 17 June 2009.
[2] See Robert Ayson and Brendan Taylor, ‘Attacking North Korea: Why War Might be Preferred’, Comparative Strategy, vol. 23, no. 3, July–September 2004, pp. 263–79.
[3] For a more recent account, see Michael Green and James J. Przystup, ‘The Abductee Issue is a Test of America’s Strategic Credibility’, PacNet, no. 47, Pacific Forum-CSIS, Honolulu, 15 November 2007.
[4] For a much less positive assessment, see Mitchell Reiss, ‘A Nuclear-Armed North Korea: Accepting the ‘Unacceptable’?’, Survival, vol. 48, no. 4, Winter 2006–07, pp. 97–109.