Obama-Hu Summit Gets South, North Korea Talking Again

First comes the crisis, then the talks. The routine is so familiar it’s hard to generate confidence in Seoul from dialogue with North Korea.

All that’s sure is that North Korea, right after U.S. President Barack Obama hosted China’s President Hu Jintao at the White House on January 19, requested a meeting of North and South Korean defense ministers, and South Korea at once accepted.

Wary of U.S. and Chinese pressure for dialogue, South Korean officials are busy putting the best spin on the whole notion of going back to the table. The last thing they want is to give the impression they’re about to accept North Korea’s demand for returning to full-scale six-party talks “without preconditions.” They’re sticking to their own demand – that North Korea apologize for the sinking of the South Korean navy corvette ‘Cheonan’ in March and the bombardment of a South Korean island in the Yellow Sea in November. All told, 50 people died in those attacks – two marines and two civilians on the island and 46 sailors on the navy vessel.

This time, said a senior official at the Blue House, the center of presidential power, the talks will be different from all those other talks that raised hopes but got nowhere. That’s an allusion, most strikingly, to the 1994 Geneva framework agreement under which North Korea did indeed shut down a five-megawatt reactor built to produce plutonium for warheads in exchange for the promise of twin light-water nuclear energy reactors. Under the deal, inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency rotated in and out of the Yongbyon nuclear complex, monitoring the reactor to make sure it stayed shut.

That deal flew apart in October 2002 when North Korea was revealed to have had an entirely separate program for building warheads with enriched uranium at their core. For years the North indignantly denied any idea of enriching uranium, but that strategy changed abruptly when American nuclear physicist Siegfried Hecker was invited to the Yongbyon complex in November to look at a brand new 20-megawatt reactor built for the uranium program.

The impression was that North Korea timed the revelation of the uranium reactor to precede the attack on Yeongpyeon Island – a one-two punch in which the North first showed it was building up its weapons of mass destruction and then demonstrated its prowess in hit-and-run warfare. Either way, South Korea appeared powerless to do much about the threat. This time, say South Korean officials, they’re not falling for promises or wishful thinking. No way, they say, will the South shower North Korea with food, fertilizer and other forms of aid as was done in the decade of left/liberal leadership before the inauguration of the conservative Lee Myung-bak as president three years ago.

“The situation is totally different from the past,” said one senior official. President Lee, criticized for a slow and weak response to the Yeonpyeong Island attack, got another chance to demonstrate his nerve as a leader two days after the Obama-Hu summit. After much hesitation, he ordered navy commandos on pirate patrol in the Arabian Sea in January to storm a freighter, owned and skippered by a South Korean company, that a band of Somali pirates had been holding for a week. Lee treated the rescue, in which eight pirates died, five were captured and all 21 crew members rescued, as a great victory for the South and a lesson for the North. Here was a chance to show he was willing to deploy military force, as he boasted on national television, against “any behavior that threatens the lives and safety of our people in the future.”

Nobody is going to forget that episode whenever or wherever South Korean negotiators meet their North Korean counterparts, whether in North-South talks or at six-party negotiations on North Korea’s nuclear program. “We have a natural sequence,” said an official at the Blue House. “First you have to admit what you did. Second you have to apologize, and third you have to promise not to commit such an offense again. And you do not “talk about humanitarian assistance” – at least “without mentioning anything” in return. Moreover, the official added, “North Korea clearly understands.”

Just how much that nation’s laeadership “understands,” though, is far from clear. The North Koreans proudly boasted of their attack on Yeonpyeong Island, saying the bombardment was provoked by South Korean marine exercises in North Korean waters. That was a reference to the disputed Northern Limit Line, drawn on maps of the Yellow Sea by the United Nations Command after the Korean War but challenged by North Korea. The North may argue the marines, conducting an artillery exercise from their base on Yeonpyeong Island, were violating their sacred waters, but the sinking of the Cheonan is another matter. As the evidence mounted that the Cheonan was sunk by a torpedo fired by a North Korean midget submarine, the North steadfastly denied complicity in much the same language with which it once denied anything to do with enriched uranium. No one expects the North to suddenly ‘fess up’ to that dastardly deed.

Diplomatic phrase-makers may manage to get around the apology issue with some artfully-worded expressions of general regret, without getting down to what specifically is regrettable, but then there’s the overriding question of the North’s growing nuclear program. South Korean officials are treating the mere mention of “concern” about North Korea’s uranium enrichment in the joint statement issued by Obama and Hu as a triumph. It’s difficult to imagine, however, that North Korea is about to give up its beloved nukes. South Korean officials call denuclearization “the most important pending security issue” every chance they get. North Korea, for its part, isn’t saying a thing about its nuclear program. Pyongyang’s Korean Central News Agency, in a much delayed report on the summit, said the two presidents had agreed on the need to ease North-South tensions but neglected to note they also agreed on “the goal of complete denuclearization of the Korean peninsula.”

As far as South Korean officials are concerned, that crucial omission confirmed what they already believed, that North Korea has no notion of giving up its nukes even if talks resume on its nuclear program. But times have changed, at least in the view of the Blue House. In the past, said one official, “North Korea provokes, tension arises, North Korea suggests we resume dialogue, South Korea accepts and gives aid.” That’s not going to happen again, he said. “That’s the pattern of the past.” This time, he promised, “North Korea must make more clear and specific remarks.” Meanwhile, he said ominously, the South will take “anticipated steps” to increase its strength – a warning that things “will be different from the past 20 to 30 years.”

If North and South Korea are on their way to talking again, the topics of their conversations remain uncertain. Willingness to discuss such “provocations” as the shelling of an island in the Yellow Sea in and the sinking of a South Korean navy corvette in nearby waters won’t suffice. The timing of the North Korean proposal may be the clearest dividend of the summit, and of Chinese pressure for easing tensions on the Korean peninsula, but there’s no getting around the failure of the North to say a thing about demands to live up to previous agreements on giving up its nukes.

South Korea, after the proposal for talks by Kim Young-chun, minister of the People’s Armed Forces, said the South at the talks would “ask North Korea to take responsible measures” for last year’s attacks. An official at the South’s unification ministry insisted the South would propose separate talks between high-ranking officials on denuclearization – that is, the basic inter-Korean talks that the South has long demanded as a prelude to six-party talks. The North Korean message, and the South Korean response, may not signify a breakthrough, but they did represent another step away from the atmosphere of confrontation and brinksmanship after the bombardment of Yeonpyeong Island.

Perhaps the most significant result of the summit, in the view of South Korean officials, is that Presidents Obama and Hu in their joint statement “expressed concern” about North Korea’s uranium enrichment program while calling for “early resumption of the six-party talks,” last held in Beijing in December 2008. “They recognized the problem of uranium enrichment,” said Han Sung-joo, a former foreign minister, “and China is clearly talking about North Korea violating the September 19 agreement” – that is, the statement agreed on at six-party talks in Beijing on September 19, 2005, under which the North would give up its nuclear program in exchange for massive economic aid.

That sound of “concern” about uranium enrichment is especially significant since North Korea in November first showed off its reactor for producing the uranium for nuclear warheads. The Geneva framework agreement of 1994, under which North Korea shut down a five-megawatt “experimental” reactor for producing plutonium, fell apart after revelation of the uranium program in 2002, but North Korea for years denied anything to do with enriching uranium. A senior official on President Lee’s staff said resolution of the uranium issue and a freeze on North Korea’s missile and nuclear programs “will be the litmus test to see if we can pursue any grand bargain.” Meanwhile, he warned, South Korea is placing “priority” on building up its defenses, and “there will be a clear response” if the North again attacks the South.

Han Sung-joo, who has served as South Korea’s ambassador to the United States, also credited Obama at the summit with having “persuaded China to accept the importance of having North-South dialogue in advance of six-party talks.” While North Korea has called for returning to six-party talks, including Russia and Japan as well as China, the United States and the two Koreas, “without preconditions,” the North has preferred to skip all-encompassing North-South talks that would necessarily cover the North’s nuclear program. The North’s view is that South Korea, as Washington’s “lackey,” is not eligible for bilateral talks on the nuclear issue.

Paik Hak-soon, a long-time analyst of North Korea at the Sejong Institute, an influential South Korean think tank, believes Obama and Hu in their meeting “confirmed the basic principles of how to lower tensions and deal with the nuclear issue.” The next step, he said, is to “create actions that follow these high-level exchanges” with US officials coming to Seoul and Chinese officials going to Pyongyang to bring about results. As for South Korean demands for an “apology” for past provocations and “action” on the North’s nuclear program, said Paik, “we have to have dialogue” and South Korea “will have to soften conditions.” South Korea, he said, can go on pressing its basic points in actual negotiations.

A senior South Korean official suggested, however, how pot-holed and rocky is the road to any North-South agreement. “North Korea most fears full-scale war and defeat,” he said. “The military effectiveness of South Korea is most important.” Only if North Korea “apologizes first,” he added, will we “talk about the nuclear issue.”

Gary Sorman, a French economist who has written extensively on China and North Korea, warned of the risks of trusting either China or North Korea to live up to any agreement whatsoever. “Nothing can be decided in North Korea without China,” said Sorman, who has also analyzed North Korean affairs at the French foreign ministry. “North Korea is completely manipulated by China.” As for whether the United States can get North Korea to stop its nuclear program, he said, “the answer is no.” The United States and other countries “have no practical way of stopping this nuclear program,” he said. “We don’t know how to stop this program” while China “has a strong interest in keeping North Korea in its divisive role.” All Obama “can get,” said Sorman, “is stopping these attacks – but only for a brief period.”