[Cankor] Report #206

[cankor at cankor.ca]

Dear subscriber,

Welcome to issue #206 of the CanKor Report.

For articles not original to CanKor, direct links are available in the
Contents section, should you wish to consult the originals on the internet.
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The CanKor team

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CANADA-KOREA ELECTRONIC INFORMATION SERVICE

CanKor # 206

Friday, 20 May 2005

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Special Envoy Joseph DiTrani secretly visited the DPRK UN Mission in New 
York with assurances that the US recognizes the DPRK (under Kim Jong Il) 
as a sovereign state and has no intention to attack it. Presumably to 
counter excitement over the chance of bilateral talks, the US Embassy in 
Tokyo immediately released a statement saying the New York channel was 
used “to convey messages about US policy, not to negotiate.”

Frustration with the lack of progress in the regional standoff is 
polarizing the rest of the nations involved in the six-party talks. The 
US and Japan support a quarantine of the DPRK, whereas China and the ROK 
strongly object to such pressure tactics.

Following a ten-month suspension, the first inter-Korean working-level 
talks wrapped up on Thursday, without the hoped-for DPRK promise to 
return to the hexagonal table. However, a new date for the resumption of 
ministerial talks, and mutual promises to send high-level government 
delegations to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the North-South 
Summit is considered a modest victory.

August will see 3.8 million DPR Korean primary school children, elderly 
people and urban poor without UN food rations to supplement their meagre 
diets, as humanitarian supplies run out.

Twenty-five years ago, May 18, 1980, hundreds of RO Koreans took to the 
streets of Kwanju in a pro-democracy rally, following the assassination 
of US-backed president Park Chung Hee and the military coup which 
brought General Chun Doo-hwan to power. The sheer brutality of Chun’s 
paratroops as they fired indiscriminately into crowds, and later buried 
the evidence in mass graves, drew the outrage of ROK citizens, creating 
a mass movement of resistance and a siege of Kwanju which lasted over a 
week. When the smoke cleared, estimates of lives lost ranged from 500 to 
2,000. The Kwanju Massacre is seen in the ROK as pivotal in initiating 
democratic reforms, the questioning of US role in Korean affairs and the 
challenging of national hostility towards the DPRK.

CanKor OPINION presents excerpts from a paper by US Congressman James 
Leach (Chairman of the House Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific) 
delivered at a CSIS and Chosun Ilbo Conference on "Prospects for U.S. 
Policy toward the Korean Peninsula in the Second Bush Administration.” 
In it, Leach explains why the US-ROK alliance remains “profoundly” in US 
national interest and Washington can prudently agree with Seoul that 
there is no alternative preferable to a policy of “sunshine”.

Jack Pritchard, former DPRK negotiator for the Clinton and Bush 
presidencies and Michael O’Hanlon, both currently scholars at the 
Brookings Institution submit that there are ways to take the US 
administration’s strong views and use them to help construct a new 
strategy with much better prospects of success.

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Contents:

1. INTER-KOREAN VICE MINISTERIAL JOINT PRESS RELEASE

http://korea.net/News/Issues/issueDetailView.asp?board_no=6908&title=Joint%20Press%20Release:%20June%2015%20Inter-Korean%20Joint%20Declaration

2. US, DPRK MEET IN SECRET IN NEW YORK

http://english.chosun.com/w21data/html/news/200505/200505190016.html

3. US MISREADING CHINA'S STAND ON DPRK

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20050517/KOREA17/TPInternational/Asia

4. DPRK FOOD CRISIS WORSENS AS WFP STOCKS RUN OUT

http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/RWB.NSF/db900SID/VBOL-6CHE87?OpenDocument

5. KWANJU: LINGERING LEGACY OF KOREAN MASSACRE

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4557315.stm

OPINION

6. WHY THE US-ROK ALLIANCE REMAINS IN US NATIONAL INTEREST

http://www.house.gov/leach/JLKoreaCSISspeech.doc.rtf

7. PUSH DPRK TOWARD REAL REFORM

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/geted.pl5?eo20050518a1.htm

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1. INTER-KOREAN VICE MINISTERIAL JOINT PRESS RELEASE

Korean Information Service (Korea.net), 20 May 2005

(The following is an unofficial English translation of the joint press 
release)

The Inter-Korean Vice Ministerial (Working-level) Talks were held in 
Kaesong from May 16 through 19, 2005.

Marking the fifth anniversary of the June 15 Inter-Korean Joint 
Declaration, the South and North agreed, in accordance with the wishes 
of all Koreans and the basic spirit of the Joint Declaration, to improve 
inter-Korean relations in a proactive manner and cooperate for the peace 
on the Korean Peninsula, and agreed on the following points:

1. The South and North agreed to send government delegations led by 
minister-level officials to the National Unification Festival to be held 
in Pyongyang in commemoration of the fifth anniversary of the June 15 
Inter-Korean Joint Declaration and cooperate so that the event can be 
held in an atmosphere of reconciliation and cooperation, and to hold 
working-level consultations for this purpose.

2. The South and North will hold the 15th Inter-Korean Ministerial Talks 
in Seoul from June 21 through 24.

3. The South, from a humanitarian and compatriotic standpoint, will 
provide the North with 200,000 tons of fertilizers for the spring season 
beginning May 21.

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2. US, DPRK MEET IN SECRET IN NEW YORK

Chosun Ilbo, 19 May 2005

The U.S. has confirmed a report that its special envoy for North Korea 
Joseph DiTrani secretly visited Pyongyang’s UN delegation in New York 
with assurances that his government recognizes North Korea under Kim 
Jong-il as a sovereign state and has no intention to attack it. The U.S. 
Embassy in Tokyo released a statement immediately the report appeared in 
Japan’s Asahi Shimbun daily on Thursday confirming that working-level 
contacts took place between the U.S. and North Korea in New York on May 
13. The embassy said the channel was used to convey messages about U.S. 
policy, not to negotiate. It was the first time in six months officials 
for the two countries are confirmed to have talked.

The Asahi Shimbun said DiTrani and the State Department's Korea chief 
Jim Foster visited the North Korean UN delegation and spoke with 
Ambassador Pak Gil-yon and Deputy Ambassador Han Song-ryol. During the 
talks, DiTrani stressed that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had 
said several times North Korea was a sovereign state. DiTrani otherwise 
said nothing new, urging North Korea to return to six-party nuclear 
talks and abandon its nuclear weapons program and adding U.S. President 
George W. Bush had no intention of attacking or invading the reclusive 
country.

DiTrani told the diplomats his government was prepared to talk with 
North Korea so as to minimize Pyongyang's concerns about the security 
guarantees it has been demanding, but reiterated that bilateral talks 
would have to happen within the six-party framework. He added 
normalization of ties between the two countries was predicated on a 
resolution of American concerns such as missile exports, human rights 
and counterfeiting. The significance of the otherwise unremarkable 
exchange, according to the Asahi Shimbun, lay in the fact that it was 
the first time the U.S. has acknowledged the sovereignty of the Kim 
Jong-il regime to its face. It added this raised hopes that normal 
relations were possible between Washington and a country it has labeled 
an "outpost of tyranny."

The paper said hardliners in the U.S. administration were unhappy with 
the secret meeting, saying it could be seen as "bowing to threats". But 
others say an expression of sincerity from Washington could bind 
Pyongyang more closely into the network of nations involved in the 
six-party talks.

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3. US MISREADING CHINA'S STAND ON DPRK

The Globe and Mail, 17 May 2005

With North Korea on the brink of a possible nuclear test that would 
trigger a major international crisis, China is emerging as a key 
obstacle to Washington's strategy of applying pressure on the Pyongyang 
regime. Beijing has voiced its increasingly stubborn opposition as the 
United States tries to persuade it to take decisive action, including 
cutting off fuel and food deliveries, to force North Korea to return to 
the six-nation negotiating table.

Analysts say the U.S. administration is misreading the Chinese mood, 
failing to understand that Beijing is willing to accept a nuclear Korean 
peninsula and risk Washington's wrath over the conflict, rather than bow 
to U.S. pressure tactics against its ally. The crisis has escalated in 
recent days, with North Korea saying it has removed 8,000 fuel rods from 
its main nuclear reactor at Yongbyon, north of Pyongyang, allowing it to 
reprocess them into weapons-grade plutonium.

Intelligence reports in the United States have suggested that North 
Korea might be preparing for a nuclear test soon. If it were able to 
combine effective nuclear technology with its missile technology, that 
could allow its nuclear warheads to reach the West Coast of the United 
States.

There is mounting evidence, meanwhile, that the six-nation diplomatic 
talks on the crisis -- comprising North Korea, Japan, South Korea, the 
United States, China and Russia -- are basically dead. It has been 
almost a year since the last meeting, and Washington has unofficially 
set next month as the deadline for a resumption of the talks.

The United States, still unwilling to hold bilateral talks with North 
Korea, appears to be floundering in its search for a successful tactic 
to employ against the regime. Washington's stand on the issue has 
oscillated inexplicably from bitter insults to tentative diplomatic 
feelers. In April, President George W. Bush denounced North Korean 
dictator Kim Jong-il, as a "tyrant." Yet U.S. Secretary of State 
Condoleezza Rice seemed much more conciliatory when she recently 
described North Korea as a sovereign state. And a Japanese newspaper 
reported that a U.S. official telephoned a North Korean diplomat at the 
United Nations last week to revive bilateral contact.

A U.S. diplomat, who visited Beijing in April, reportedly asked China to 
cut off oil deliveries to North Korea, a tactic that seemed effective in 
bringing the regime to the bargaining table in 2003, when Chinese oil 
supplies were halted for three days. Last week, the Chinese Foreign 
Ministry made it clear it has no intention of suspending its shipments 
to North Korea. One Chinese official went further, blaming the United 
States and its "lack of co-operation" as the reason for the failure of 
the talks. On Sunday, U.S. National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley said 
the United States will take "action" if Pyongyang conducts a nuclear 
test, but he refused to give details.

Stephen Noerper, a former State Department analyst who is now a scholar 
specializing in East Asia, says the Bush administration has made a 
"spectacular lack of advancement" on the North Korea issue because of 
its refusal to hold formal talks with Pyongyang directly.

"If you don't show up for the game, there's no way you can mount any 
kind of victory. A tremendous opportunity has been lost.

North Korea has been shrewdly successful in driving a wedge between the 
United States and China on the nuclear issue, he said. "China is willing 
to accept a nuclear North Korea, as long as there is stability in the 
region and as long as it doesn't directly threaten China."

You Ji, a China scholar at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, 
Australia, says China is determined to preserve the North Korean regime 
as a way of maintaining its influence in the region, despite 
Washington's wishes.

"Just as the U.S. has used China to pressure North Korea, China may use 
North Korea against the Americans," he wrote in a recent analysis. 
"Pyongyang's presence helps Beijing maintain workable relations with 
Washington and through this, China extracts U.S. support for its Taiwan 
policy. For the time being, preserving North Korea as a buffer zone is 
worth the enormous economic aid Beijing pays to Kim Jong-il."

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4. DPRK FOOD CRISIS WORSENS AS WFP STOCKS RUN OUT

Agence France-Presse (AFP), 18 May 2005

Already severe food shortages in North Korea are escalating to crisis 
levels as UN World Food Programme supplies to the reclusive Stalinist 
state run out, a spokesman said Wednesday.

"The situation is very serious, we don't have enough food," Gerald 
Bourke, spokesman for the UN agency in Beijing, told AFP. "We are now 
scraping the bottom of the barrel."

Due to the lack of large donations since October, the WFP has been 
forced to halt various food supplies to large numbers of the 6.5 million 
beneficiaries in North Korea classed as most vulnerable, he said.

"The food crisis is already severe and precarious," Bourke said. "The 
situation could only get worse."

Because its stocks are exhausted, the WFP has stopped providing 
vegetable oil to 1.5 million old people, children, pregnant and nursing 
women since April. From this month, it is halting the distribution of 
pulses to 1.2 million children and women and in June it will suspend 
cereal supplies to 2.1 million primary school children, elderly people 
and poor urban households. Some 3.8 million core beneficiaries would be 
deprived of cereals as of August, with the supply only enough to support 
12,000 children in hospitals and orphanages, he said.

"Very unfortunately, these are the decisions we're having to make more 
and more in the last couple of years," he said. "It is a very difficult 
decision to make, if you have to decide between an elderly person in the 
city, or a hungry child in an orphanage," he said.

The hermetic regime has relied on foreign aid to feed its people for a 
decade and is slowly recovering from a famine that may have left up to 
two million dead in the mid-to-late 1990s. Bourke refused to say whether 
the current crisis was likely to lead to another famine.

North and South Korea are in the middle of extended talks over the 
North's nuclear program, at which experts say Pyongyang is likely to 
press for more aid. The vice-ministerial talks are the first high-level 
face-to-face dialogue in 10 months between the two sides of the divided 
peninsula. Seoul officials said the talks were bogged down after North 
Korea sidestepped a new proposal from South Korea to jump-start 
six-nation negotiations over Pyongyang's nuclear weapons ambitions.

*************************************************

5. KWANJU: LINGERING LEGACY OF KOREAN MASSACRE

by Becky Branford, BBC News, 18 May 2005

A quarter of a century on, Koreans are remembering one of the ugliest 
episodes in their history. In May 1980, hundreds of civilians were 
massacred by soldiers in the south-western city of Kwangju after rising 
up against military rule. Although it was brutally put down, the Kwangju 
Uprising is now seen by many as a pivotal moment in the South Korean 
struggle for democracy in the long period of dictatorship following the 
Korean war.

And some contend the uprising had important ramifications which are 
still being felt now, both inside Korea and beyond its borders. There is 
a sombre monument and museum dedicated to the massacre in Kwangju, and 
the anniversary of the beginning of the siege on 18 May is now a public 
holiday in Korea.

The protests in Kwangju in the spring of 1980 were not unusual. The 
country was being swept by a tide of demonstrations, mainly by students, 
in the wake of the assassination of the dictator Park Chung Hee and the 
military coup which brought General Chun Doo-hwan to power in his place.

It was the sheer, open brutality of the response of Korean paratroops 
which proved decisive. The paratroops charged crowds with batons and 
bayonets, stripped students and other citizens down to their underwear 
in the streets before beating them, and fired indiscriminately into 
crowds. This brutality drew outraged ordinary citizens into the 
struggle, creating a mass movement of resistance which forced the 
military to retreat from the city for five days, leaving the city in 
full control of the residents.

The military retook the city on 27 May, crushing the citizens' 
resistance in an overwhelming show of force. The final toll of those who 
lost their lives is still unknown, as it is believed the military dumped 
bodies in mass graves or lakes. Estimates today range from 500 to 2,000.

Hwang Sok-yong is one of Korea's best-known novelists, and was a leading 
young dissident who lived in Kwangju at the time of the uprising. The 
citizens of Kwangju took control of the city for five days He was away 
at the time the siege began, and then went into hiding while authorities 
rounded up thousands of people they suspected of dissident activities.

"Six months later, I went back to my home in Kwangju," Mr Hwang told the 
BBC News website, "and nobody was there. Everybody was in prison, or had 
died, or had run away. "My young friends, many of them died."

Many of those who escaped or survived say they still bear physical and 
psychological scars from the massacre, or feel guilty they lived when 
friends and family died. Around the country, military reprisals against 
perceived agitators followed in the immediate aftermath of the massacre.

But commentators are agreed that in the longer term the Kwangju massacre 
played a hugely important role in forcing Korean authorities finally to 
begin adopting democratic reforms in 1987.

"What started in 1980 ended in 1987," says Mr Hwang. "The Kwangju 
Uprising lit the fuse of the dynamite stick of democracy." The uprising, 
he explains, mobilised ordinary citizens to join a struggle which until 
then had been mostly confined to students and dissidents.

"It was the birth of citizenship. It was the beginning of a 
western-style civil society - and Korean modernity," he said.

All three Korean presidents selected in the country's fully democratic 
elections have been aligned with the pro-democracy movements of which 
Kwangju became emblematic. The election of Kim Dae-jung in 1998 seemed 
particularly symbolic. From a town in the same Cholla province as 
Kwangju, Mr Kim was arrested on charges of sedition in May 1980 - an 
additional spur to those who participated in the uprising.

The experience in Kwangju also firmly yoked Koreans' struggle for 
liberation from dictatorship with a conviction they must also distance 
themselves from US control, commentators say. Since the Korean war, tens 
of thousands of US troops have been stationed in the South and at the 
time of the Kwangju uprising, a US general retained ultimate operational 
control over combined US and South Korean forces.

Chun Doo-hwan was jailed and then pardoned for his role in the massacre 
"The US had been supporting Park Chung Hee since [he took power] in 
1961, and it did nothing as Chun Doo-hwan seized power," Bruce Cumings, 
professor of history at the University of Chicago and a prominent Korea 
expert, told the BBC News website.

"It was as plain as the nose on anyone's face that the US was supporting 
Park Chung Hee and then his protégé, and it was much more worried about 
stability and North Korea than it was about democracy in the South. 
Kwangju just poisoned relations with the US."

He says that while authorities in South Korea have gone to extensive 
lengths to document what happened in Kwangju, Washington has never 
conducted "a serious investigation" into the US role in the massacre. 
While Koreans were questioning the US role in Korean affairs, they were 
also challenging national hostility to North Korea, says Mr Hwang.

"It started people thinking about 'us and them'. Who are we? Who are 
they? The Korean special troops were part of the US military, people 
started thinking, but North Korea is part of us. Their attitude changed. 
It encouraged negotiation and co-operation with North Korea."

This softer approach would eventually result in Kim Dae-jung's "sunshine 
policy" of engagement with the North. Twenty-five years on, some Koreans 
express fear that Korean schoolchildren are beginning to forget the 
sacrifice of those who died in Kwangju. But it seems clear the 
uprising's cultural and political legacy remains strong.

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OPINION

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6. WHY THE US-ROK ALLIANCE REMAINS IN US NATIONAL INTEREST

Excerpts from paper by Representative James A. Leach (Chairman of the 
House Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific) for delivery to the CSIS and 
Chosun Ilbo Conference on "Prospects for U.S. Policy toward the Korean 
Peninsula in the Second Bush Administration,” May 17 2005

Likewise, the U.S. should recognize that while the six-party framework 
makes eminently good sense, there is nothing theological about 
negotiating methodology. Just as we have bilateral discussions within a 
six-party framework, we can have informal or formal bilateral 
discussions in other frameworks.

Whatever the framework, any reasonable prospect of success for a 
negotiating process will require the active support of other parties, at 
least two of whom (South Korea and Japan) are also robust democracies. 
America must thus be mindful that there are public sensibilities in the 
region and, despite the invectives of the North, restrain from 
rhetorical excesses which no matter how valid may provide unnecessary 
fodder for distraction, delay, or evasion by North Korea. Realistic 
diplomacy demands an emphasis be placed on issues, rather than name 
calling of leaders or countries.

On the geostrategic level, Washington can prudently agree with Seoul 
that there is no alternative preferable to a policy of “sunshine,” 
provided that we all recognize the dark shadows cast by the North Korean 
dictatorship over populations both within and beyond its borders. After 
all, the North Korean government funds itself through the sale of 
military hardware, counterfeit currency, addictive drugs and the 
continuous effort to blackmail various nation-states. It is not only a 
rogue state; it is a criminal one.

But while the North Korean regime may be criminal, it is not lunatic, as 
is sometimes claimed. To the contrary, from the vantage of his own 
perceived interests, Kim Jong Il is playing a poor hand remarkably well. 
His priorities may be perverse, but his brinkmanship bears some relation 
to those notional ends.

I make this observation to decouple the supposed dissonance between 
preserving peace and principled human rights advocacy sometimes asserted 
by friends overseas. Kim Jong Il is too intelligent and self-interested 
to provoke fundamental conflict simply because the international 
community begins speaking about the actual conditions facing the North 
Korean people. As such topics become a routine and unavoidable component 
of international dialogue with North Korea, the regime will surely find 
ways to work beyond its cultivated outrage, which in any event should 
not deter us from prudently speaking the truth.

Perhaps uniquely in the world today, the United States is committed to a 
strong, independent, reunified Korea. America has sacrificed blood and 
treasure in defense of freedom for the people of South Korea, and we 
understand that freedom necessarily implies independence of judgment.

But in wanting to assert psychological independence, Seoul would be wise 
not to casually eschew alliance structures in the 21st Century, 
especially when those structures have proven so critical to developing 
South Korea’s political and economic stability in the 20th Century. 
There may always be short-term political gain to any government’s 
distancing itself from another government in the name of self-reliance. 
But whether this is wise long-term policy or a thoughtful relational 
approach in general is open to question. Alliances, after all, involve 
the profound self-interest of societies and are designed to precede and 
supersede particular administrations. Indeed, strong alliances do not 
infringe national sovereignty; they presuppose strengthening it in the 
most elemental sense.

These cautions hold parallel lessons for the United States. One of the 
issues of the last several years that has caught Washington off-balance 
is the growth in critical South Korean attitudes toward the United 
States. We should have been more cognizant that real or perceived 
expectations of gratitude for past acts sometimes lead to social 
friction. Gratitude too frequently implies indebtedness and 
embarrassment and, as it turns out, seldom survives between generations 
with the same vitality. On the other hand, umbrages, whether real or 
perceived, often do. With respect to both Koreas, there is an historical 
concern for big-power chauvinism, whether from its neighbors China, 
Russia and Japan, or even from across the Pacific. Ironically, attitudes 
about American policy may be more generous today among the youth of 
former enemies, Japan and Vietnam, than among those of historical 
allies, South Korea and France.

In this context, it must be admitted that the emergence of differing 
national security priorities, generational change of political 
leadership in the South, contrasting attitudinal judgments toward North 
Korea as well as other countries in the region, and rapid shifts in 
America’s global defense posture have led some in both countries to 
question the future viability of our alliance. Indeed one self-styled 
foreign policy realist recently suggested that “the conclusion to be 
drawn is quite obvious. The congruence of strategic interest 
underpinning the US-ROK alliance has melted along with the Cold War.”

I emphatically reject this view. While tensions do exist, as long as 
leaders in the Blue House and the White House are able to balance the 
immediacies of the present with attention to long-term national 
interests issues of concern can and should remain eminently manageable.

Here it is perhaps worth restating why the US-ROK alliance remains 
profoundly in America’s national interest. In broad terms, of course, 
our two vibrant democracies remain tightly bound through a deep and 
long-standing security relationship, ongoing political and cultural 
affinities, extensive economic bonds, and extraordinary people-to-people 
ties, cemented in many instances by a common educational experience and 
led by the million-and-a-half strong Korean-American community here in 
the United States. It should be underscored that the United States is 
extraordinarily proud of its Korean population, which is the largest in 
the world outside of the Peninsula.

*************************************************

7. PUSH DPRK TOWARD REAL REFORM

by Michael O'Hanlon and Jack Pritchard, Japan Times, 18 May 2005

As Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill returns to Northeast 
Asia for talks with U.S. allies on North Korea's nuclear program, the 
future of negotiations to resolve this terrifying matter has never been 
bleaker. North Korea appears unwilling to return to the six-party 
process involving both Koreas, the United States, China, Japan, and 
Russia. The Bush administration has no particularly fresh ideas for 
wooing Pyongyang back, and in fact understandably rejects the very 
notion of trying to woo such a regime.

And now China is criticizing the U.S. approach to the talks as 
insufficiently flexible and diplomatic. North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, 
knowing that he can continue to trade and receive aid from both China 
and South Korea, and knowing that U.S. forces are tied down elsewhere 
with no good options for using force against his country in any event, 
is unlikely to feel much pressure to change his path.

This situation represents a major setback for American global interests. 
An economically destitute regime with a history of exporting virtually 
anything it can to make money now has up to eight nuclear weapons and is 
threatening to make more -- and we have no promising strategy for how to 
deal with it.

A few guidelines are incontrovertible for improving our prospects on the 
peninsula:

* U.S. President George W. Bush is right that North Korea cannot be 
rewarded for breaking three treaties and destabilizing Northeast Asia in 
its pursuit of nuclear weapons.

* Bush is wrong to think his current approach to the peninsula stands 
much chance of success. As long as China openly criticizes U.S. policy 
-- and South Korea does so as well -- prospects for a diplomatic 
breakthrough are next to nil.

* North Korea right now sees few incentives, positive or negative, to 
negotiate to give up its bombs.

* While a North Korean nuclear arsenal might not be the end of the 
world, it is extremely dangerous. The fact that we are beginning to get 
used to its existence does not make it acceptable.

Together, these observations require a new strategy. While the two of us 
support direct U.S.-North Korea negotiations to complement the six-party 
process, we agree with the Bush administration that such talks would not 
themselves amount to a new strategy. Smooth diplomacy can help in 
situations like this, but when dealing with a ruthless regime, one needs 
to get the strategic fundamentals right. We need U.S. leadership and a 
serious mix of carrots and sticks.

But how to offer carrots when we cannot reward North Korean provocations 
with appeasement? And how to muster sticks when we cannot credibly 
threaten force --except perhaps as a truly extreme last resort -- and 
when key countries are unwilling to consider economic sanctions? One key 
is to recognize that when you have a seemingly unsolvable problem, 
enlarge it.

The other important insight is to learn from the new U.S. approach to 
Iran policy, where teaming with our European allies is seemingly 
convincing them to be willing to threaten sanctions if talks fail 
provided that we show sincere willingness to offer Iran benefits if the 
talks succeed -- something that is noticeably missing in our approach to 
North Korea.

We need to try to push North Korea toward broad political, economic and 
military reform. That should be the core of our strategy, rather than 
endless debate about what type of diplomatic setting is appropriate for 
discussions or what type of language administration officials should and 
should not use when talking about the North Korean regime in public. It 
is impossible to pursue such a strategy without being fully engaged, and 
being seen as fully engaged.

To the extent that North Korea verifiably and meaningfully reforms, we 
should promise to help it with its efforts. To the extent it does not, 
we should have the agreement of Beijing and Seoul that tougher measures 
will ultimately be needed, and convince those countries to say so 
publicly. The premise behind Bush's "Bold Approach" of April 2002 -- 
demand more, but be willing to give more -- remains valid and would be 
supported by others in the region.

There is precedent, of course, for structural reform even within a 
communist autocracy. In fact, there are two successful precedents -- 
China and Vietnam. Admittedly, there are also failed precedents, at 
least from the perspective of the leaders trying to carry out those 
reforms. Kim therefore may not like the idea of accelerating the very 
gradual economic reforms in his country now under way, and combining 
them with other changes. Nor will his military immediately welcome the 
other changes, besides denuclearization, it must accept for economic 
reform to have a chance of success, beginning with deep cuts in the 
hugely oversized conventional forces.

That is why, in addition to offering major trade and aid benefits if Kim 
accepts this type of process, we also need to make credible the threat 
of sanctions if he does not. But any hope we have of getting China and 
South Korea to agree to such a strategy that forces North Korea to a 
stark choice over its future requires that we also show flexibility and 
a willingness to be helpful and generous if Pyongyang will play ball.

The Bush administration is executing a failing policy on North Korea at 
present. But there are ways to take the president's strong principled 
views on the subject and use them to help construct a new strategy with 
much better prospects of success. Unfortunately, the time for doing so 
may be drawing to a close.

Michael O'Hanlon and Jack Pritchard are scholars at the Brookings 
Institution. Pritchard negotiated for the United States in the Clinton 
and Bush presidencies.

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End CanKor # 206

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CanKor is an electronic information service for readers interested in 
the issues of peace and security on the Korean peninsula, published by 
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