The rescheduling of the North-South Korea summit to October allows time to consider how inter-Korean talks, Six-Party Talks and possible four-party peace talks can work in concert for stability and development on the Korean Peninsula. At this juncture, it is most important for South Korea, China, Japan, Russia and the US to realize that the five parties should not sacrifice trust among them for short-term gains with North Korea.
Last month, International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors confirmed the shutdown of North Korea's nuclear reactor at Yongbyon. Forward momentum in dealing with North Korea is welcome news, but the road ahead is marked with big promises that are difficult to achieve: denuclearization, economic development, a peace treaty and normalized diplomatic relations.
Pyongyang must be convinced that ending its nuclear programs and opening up to the international economy are strategic decisions in its own interests, not ploys to attack or cause the collapse of North Korea.
The Sept. 19, 2005, joint statement of the Six-Party Talks recognizes the need to build this trust, calling for disarmament actions matched in stages with economic and diplomatic rewards. The tragedy is that positive steps with North Korea have historically proved short-lived, while major engagement initiatives damaged trust among the five parties.
This was the case with the 1994 Framework Agreement negotiated between the US and North Korea. While the agreement postponed a nuclear crisis, Seoul came to believe it could not trust Washington to represent South Korean interests.
In 2002, the Japanese prime minister traveled to North Korea to make a breakthrough on diplomatic normalization. The effort backfired because of the issue of Japanese citizens abducted by North Korea decades ago. South Korea and China have since considered Japan's diplomacy counterproductive.
Most recently, South Korea has led efforts to build trust with North Korea through joint economic projects. While these initiatives have yet to soften North Korea's policies, US-South Korea and South Korea-Japan relations were strained by what Washington and Tokyo saw as Seoul's unconditional engagement of a nuclear and missile proliferator.
If concerned parties have learned from experience, they will not sacrifice trust among them for short-term advances with North Korea.
The US should not pursue military talks with North Korea outside the six-party framework as such talks would make South Korea and China anxious about being excluded from negotiations.
China should not look to patch up its relations with North Korea by giving aid and assurances to offset its hard line after Pyongyang's nuclear test in October. Doing so would damage Beijing's credibility for facilitating the Six-Party Talks.
Japan should not press the abduction issue at the expense of progress on denuclearization. Certainly, Pyongyang must account for missing Japanese citizens in order to gain the benefits of normalized relations with Tokyo. But five-party trust will be damaged if Japanese politicians are perceived to be using the abduction issue for domestic political consumption.
Finally, South Korea should be wary about spending too much on symbolic steps with North Korea. South Korean assistance to the North (other than emergency humanitarian aid) should be conditioned on concrete reciprocal actions by Pyongyang.
Otherwise, Seoul's efforts would appear to be more concerned with the upcoming South Korean presidential election than with improving security on the Korean Peninsula.
Leif-Eric Easley is a doctoral candidate at Harvard University.
On May 7, 1971, Henry Kissinger planned his first, ultra-secret mission to China and pondered whether it would be better to meet his Chinese interlocutors “in Pakistan where the Pakistanis would tape the meeting — or in China where the Chinese would do the taping.” After a flicker of thought, he decided to have the Chinese do all the tape recording, translating and transcribing. Fortuitously, historians have several thousand pages of verbatim texts of Dr. Kissinger’s negotiations with his Chinese counterparts. Paradoxically, behind the scenes, Chinese stenographers prepared verbatim English language typescripts faster than they could translate and type them
More than 30 years ago when I immigrated to the US, applied for citizenship and took the 100-question civics test, the one part of the naturalization process that left the deepest impression on me was one question on the N-400 form, which asked: “Have you ever been a member of, involved in or in any way associated with any communist or totalitarian party anywhere in the world?” Answering “yes” could lead to the rejection of your application. Some people might try their luck and lie, but if exposed, the consequences could be much worse — a person could be fined,
Taiwan aims to elevate its strategic position in supply chains by becoming an artificial intelligence (AI) hub for Nvidia Corp, providing everything from advanced chips and components to servers, in an attempt to edge out its closest rival in the region, South Korea. Taiwan’s importance in the AI ecosystem was clearly reflected in three major announcements Nvidia made during this year’s Computex trade show in Taipei. First, the US company’s number of partners in Taiwan would surge to 122 this year, from 34 last year, according to a slide shown during CEO Jensen Huang’s (黃仁勳) keynote speech on Monday last week.
On May 13, the Legislative Yuan passed an amendment to Article 6 of the Nuclear Reactor Facilities Regulation Act (核子反應器設施管制法) that would extend the life of nuclear reactors from 40 to 60 years, thereby providing a legal basis for the extension or reactivation of nuclear power plants. On May 20, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) legislators used their numerical advantage to pass the TPP caucus’ proposal for a public referendum that would determine whether the Ma-anshan Nuclear Power Plant should resume operations, provided it is deemed safe by the authorities. The Central Election Commission (CEC) has
RSS